دانلود مقاله ISI انگلیسی شماره 28166
ترجمه فارسی عنوان مقاله

چانه زنی حقوق و دستمزد و گردش مالی هزینه با نیروی کار ناهمگون و اطلاعات نامتقارن

عنوان انگلیسی
Wage bargaining and turnover costs with heterogeneous labor and asymmetric information
کد مقاله سال انتشار تعداد صفحات مقاله انگلیسی
28166 2000 22 صفحه PDF
منبع

Publisher : Elsevier - Science Direct (الزویر - ساینس دایرکت)

Journal : Labour Economics, Volume 7, Issue 1, January 2000, Pages 95–116

ترجمه کلمات کلیدی
چانه زنی حقوق و دستمزد - هزینه گردش مالی - نیروی کار ناهمگن -
کلمات کلیدی انگلیسی
Wage bargaining, Turnover costs, Heterogeneous labor,
پیش نمایش مقاله
پیش نمایش مقاله  چانه زنی حقوق و دستمزد و گردش مالی هزینه با نیروی کار ناهمگون و اطلاعات نامتقارن

چکیده انگلیسی

We study a model of individual wage bargaining between heterogeneous workers and firms, with instantaneous matching, free firm entry, workers' individual productivities are discovered by firms only after being hired, and it is expensive for firms to hire and fire workers. We show that inefficiencies due to bargaining and externalities in the matching process lead firms to employ too few worker types. Employment among employed worker types is also inefficiently low when workers have high bargaining power, but may be too high when workers' bargaining power is low. The government can correct these inefficiencies by reducing or increasing firms' hiring and firing costs. This implies that the costs of firing tenured workers `almost always' should be reduced. We argue that the model gives a good description of recent labor market phenomena in advanced economies.

مقدمه انگلیسی

The purpose of this paper is to study the properties of a labor market where heterogeneos workers bargain individually with their employers over the wage. We extend the standard bargaining/matching model (e.g., Pissarides, 1985, Pissarides, 1987 and Pissarides, 1990; Mortensen and Pissarides, 1994 and Mortensen and Pissarides, 1998) in two new directions. First, workers are no longer identical but instead have different but given productivities, known to each worker but not to the firm at the time the worker is hired. With heterogeneous labor, the issue of firing then becomes relevant even when there are no (idiosyncratic or general) shocks, since firms may wish to replace their initially hired workers with other, more productive, ones. Secondly, we assume that there are both hiring costs (paid for by the firm and corresponding to recruiting costs in Pissarides), and costs of firing already engaged workers. Hiring costs do not directly affect firms' firing decisions; firing costs, however, do. We will assume that firms observe individual workers' productivities only after the time at which they are hired, which implies that any hiring costs must then already be sunk. Firms then wish to retain those workers who have the highest productivities, and may wish to fire those workers whose productivities fall below some minimum level. We then find it relevant to distinguish between three categories of firing costs: (a) the cost to the firm of immediately getting rid of a worker that is just hired, but the firm does not wish to keep; (b) a pure cost paid by the firm (which consequently `vanishes' from the firm–worker relationship) upon the separation of a `tenured' (or initially wanted) worker from the firm; and (c) a redundancy payment from the firm to a tenured worker upon separation. Since firms are identical, all choose the same cutoff level for productivity, z1, beyond which workers are retained. A simplification relative to the standard matching model is that our process of matching workers and firms involves no frictions, and that active jobs suffer no vacancies. In addition to simplifying the analysis considerably, such an approach also has the attractive feature that a standard competitive solution now arises when workers' relative bargaining strength goes to zero, making it possible to investigate the issue of market efficiency in this important special case. The paper integrates a modified version of the Pissarides–Mortensen matching/bargaining theory for the labor market, with recent literature on turnover costs. It makes a first step in the direction of endogenizing simultaneously worker hiring standards and overall employment when workers have unobservable productivity differences. Several of our results are novel; in particular, those describing how firms' hiring and firing decisions imply externalities in the market for matching of heterogeneous workers, and how firms' minimum hiring standards and overall employment depend on workers' bargaining strength and on the costs of firing workers immediately or later. We also point out in Section 5, how the model may help us to understand and interpret important and recently observed labor market phenomena in advanced economies. In particular, the model yields a coherent theory of observed differences in wages and in hiring and unemployment rates for workers at different productivity levels, and predicts how these variables will change when hiring and firing costs change. By deriving the optimal solution (given the informational constraints imposed) we are also able to discuss possible room for government policies that affect firms' costs of hiring and firing, and indicate whether, and in case how, recent labor market developments in advanced economies may deviate from an approximate (constrained) social optimum. We present the basic model in 2 and 3. In Section 4, we derive the solution chosen by a social planner subject to the same technological and cost conditions as market agents, and compare this to the market solutions. Conclusions and interpretations are offered in the Section 5, where we also point out some potential directions for future research.

نتیجه گیری انگلیسی

We have studied a model of the labor market where there is instantaneous matching and subsequent individual wage bargaining between each worker and firm, workers have productivity differences that cannot be immediately observed by firms, and it is costly for firms to hire and fire workers. There are two, interacting, aspects of the model which make it novel and rich in structure and, despite many simplifying assumptions, highly relevant for explaining recent labor market phenomena in advanced economies. The first is the assumption of individual wage bargaining in conjunction with heterogeneous labor. Labor heterogeneity is a pervasive phenomenon and arguably the major cause of labor market failure in advanced economies. Moreover, one may argue that individualized wage bargaining is more realistic and relevant, the more workers differ individually. In particular, centralized wage bargaining or firm wage posting are less stable institutional arrangements when workers' productivities vary greatly than when they do not.13 The second point is that when workers are heterogeneous, individual workers' productivities in many cases cannot be observed by firms before, but only after, the worker has been hired. We show that this may imply serious externalities in the hiring process when there are hiring and firing costs. The reason is that when a firm fires a `bad' worker, or hires a `good' one, it contaminates the pool of the unemployed and increases the hiring (and subsequent firing) cost of other hiring firms. These externalities imply that a planner facing the same informational constraints will choose to employ some `unproductive' workers, and possibly all worker types (even those who produce no output). We demostrate that firms, in ignoring the externalities just described, `almost always' employ `too few' worker types, i.e., immediately shed `too many' of their initially hired workers to the pool of the unemployed. The rate of employment among `desirable' workers may be `too high' when workers have very low bargaining power, but is `too low' when workers' bargaining power high.Overall employment may then be either too low or too high when workers' bargaining power is low, but it is always too low when workers have high bargaining power. In all cases, the composition of the employed labor force is inefficient: firms are too selective, and the average quality of employed workers is too high. The government may correct these inefficiencies by taxing or subsidizing firms' hiring and/or firing costs. In cases where firms select too high hiring standards, the government should implement measures that make firms `less choosy' about what workers to keep after having been screened for productivity. Such measures include making it more costly for firms to immediately shed workers, and making it less costly to fire intially retained workers at a later stage when they become redundant. An overall optimal solution will then generally also require that the government either tax or subsidize firms' hiring. The greater workers' bargaining power is, the more likely it is that such costs should be subsidized. On the positive side, our model predicts the unemployment rate to be much higher, and the turnover rate to be lower and thus average unemployment spells longer, for low-skilled as compared to high-skilled workers.Higher unemployment among the unskilled is found in basically all advanced economies, as reported by Nickell and Bell, 1995 and Nickell and Bell, 1996and Jackman et al. (1997), even in the US where the labor market is thought to be much more flexible than in Europe. Average spells of unemployment are also longer for the unskilled in all countries, but this tendency is stronger in Europe than in the US. Our model gives a reasonable description of such phenomena, and thus possibly a relevant (but of course much simplified) starting point for understanding the factors behind them. In such a context we demonstrate the important role that turnover costs play, both in affecting the unemployment rates of different worker groups and in creating allocative inefficiencies in the labor market. In particular, we demonstrate the potentially very adverse effects of high dissipative firing costs for `established' workers when such costs are paid by firms. Higher firing costs increase the skill-specific level of unemployment, and in addition raise firms' minimum hiring standards to inoptimally high levels. One may argue that such costs are much higher in Europe than in the US (in particular because the legal obstacles to terminating `tenured' workers are much greater in Europe), and that an obvious policy issue should be to bring these costs down. Final redundancy payments are in our model shown to have fewer such negative effects, and should thus perhaps not be discouraged in the same degree. Another result is that one may visualize cases where getting rid of workers who have no tenure, and thus no established legal rights, should be made more costly to firms. We namely show that high termination costs add to firms' total labor costs, making firms require inoptimally high productivity levels of workers to be retained. This effect will be counteracted by higher costs of immediately shedding newly hired workers. In focusing on the effects of turnover costs and labor heterogeneity, we have deliberately played down or disregarded a number of potentially important features. In our model all actual firings among desirable (`tenured') workers are fully exogenous, and the economy studied is stationary, firms facing constant demand conditions and productivities over time. Our analysis is thus quite distinct from other recent contributions where worker turnover and turnover costs are central, such as Bertola, 1990 and Lazear, 1990, and Bentolila and Bertola (1990), dealing with turnover costs in a more partial-equilibrium (but not necessarily stationary) setting, and Bertola and Caballero (1994), Mortensen and Pissarides (1994)and Saint-Paul (1995)who consider bargaining models with turnover and turnover costs but where labor is assumed to be homogeneous. In particular, our conclusion that increased dissipative firing costs are always harmful to employment contrasts sharply with that of Bentolila and Bertola, who study a model where firms' productivities change over time and where the main effect of firing costs is to make firms more choosy about later firings. Extensions of our framework, which are possible avenues for future research, may be to incorporate changing business conditions or productivites over time (as, e.g., in Bentolila–Bertola and Mortensen–Pissarides), on-the-job search (as in (Pissarides, 1994)), stochastic match values (as in Bertola–Caballero), and the possibility of rehiring laid-off workers. Incorporating such alternative assumptions could also further serve to integrate the theories of contracts and matching when labor is heterogeneous, and clarify their relationships when there are positive turnover costs. In our model, we have also made the special assumptions that firms have no prior information about individual workers at the time they are hired; and that all productivity differences are purely general. In a related paper (Strand, 1998) I have explored the case where firms have information on whether or not a given worker was last dismissed immediately, or fired because his job was shut down. I find that many of the qualitative conclusions derived here remain to hold, in particular, I still find that employment is always suboptimal when workers' bargaining strength is not `too low'. Other assumptions, with respect to firms' information about individual workers' productivities, or with respect to the distribution of workers' productivities between a general and a firm-specific component, should be explored in future work.