Statistics, Geography, and Information (INEGI) for the use of the data. INEGI is in no way responsible for the incorrect manipulation of the data or erroneous conclusions drawn from it.

We develop a model demonstrating conditions under which firms will invest in the general training of their workers, and show that firms ’ incentives to invest in general training are increasing in task complexity. Workers ’ heterogeneous observable innate ability affects the variety of tasks that can be performed within a firm. This gives monopsony power to firms with ‘better ’ workforces. As a result such firms are willing to expend resources to provide workers with general training. Since the degree of monopsony power is increasing with task complexity, firms whose workforces undertake more sophisticated tasks are more willing to finance general training. We conclude that training will take place in better-than-average firms while bad firms will have underperforming but overpaid workers that are not likely to be trained by their current employer. Keywords: Firm-financed general training, hierarchical assignment models, monopsony.

Recent research in labour economics (e.g. the work of Card and Krueger, 1995, on the impact of minimum wages) has led to renewed interest in the appropriate model to use when thinking about the labour market. But, the standard textbook models of both perfect competition and monopsony are both implausible, though for different reasons. The competitive model because it assumes the wage elasticity of the supply of labour to the individual firm is infinite and the monopsony model because it assumes that an employer cannot do anything to raise employment other than raise the wage. This paper presents a more general but very simple model in which the employer can also raise employment by increasing expenditure on recruitment. Using this, it is shown how that division between perfect competition and monopsony is not the issue of whether the wage elasticity in labour supply is infinite or finite (as it is usually presented) but whether there are diseconomies of scale in recruitment. Using a unique British data set containing information on both labour turnover costs and the number of recruits, we present estimates that do suggest that there is an increasing marginal cost of recruitment.

This paper relates a series of current development in the literature of economics and psychology as they relate to decision making by households and business firms. The first part of the paper reviews recent literature dealing with happiness and subjective wellbeing. In the second part of the paper recent developments in management science that make use of intuition and mental focus are related to firm profitability and improved economic efficiency. Both of these recent developments can provide critical insights into improving the “bottom line ” performance of policy makers, managers and society as a whole at both the macroeconomic and microeconomic levels. These ideas are then used to design to and develop a series of policy suggestions that refocus attention on the concept of subjective well being or happiness as opposed to economic utility maximization as well as the role of intuition and the concept of “flow ” in the decision making process. of top managers. We can summarize these ideas succinctly by focusing on two sets of variables relating to decision making and decision outcome in a two by two matrix summarized in the Table

We draw on evidence from an internal attitude survey in a national, unionized trucking firm to investigate the factors that influence employees ’ wage-fairness perceptions and the effect of such perceptions on employee performance. We find a robust association between the rate of unemployment in the local labor market and wage-fairness perceptions of employees in the firm, which we argue reflects a causal relationship. The gap between an individual employee’s current wage and her predicted wage in the outside labor market has a similar, but less robust, effect. We also find modest support for the proposition that increases in wage-fairness perceptions generate improvements in employee performance, as measured by the rate of disciplinary dismissals.

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In this paper we combine the efficiency wage and union-firm bargaining approaches to wage determination to produce a unified model that encapsulates both. We find that combining efficiency wages and union-firm bargaining leads to higher wages, confirming an original insight of Summers. We also find that increases in bargaining power and monopoly power on the goods market have a stronger impact on wages when there are efficiency wage effects.

Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be