Costly Employment Contract Renegotiation and the Labor Mobility of Young Men
建立了一个工作匹配模型，研究雇佣后重新谈判成本如何影响年轻男性的离职与解雇，发现工资在决定劳动力流动中起关键作用，并提供了实证证据。
The distinction of quits and permanent layoffs remains a contentious issue in the labor economics literature. Basically, there appear two contrasting views of such turnover. While both interpretations of turnover are derived from job-matching models that assume wealth-maximizing behavior of workers and firms, each involves different assumptions about the feasibility of individual labor contract negotiations following hire. On the one hand, application of the Coase theorem to employment contracts implies that turnover will occur only when the value of the worker's product in some alternative employment exceeds current job productivity. Since the actual division of the job match rent is assumed costlessly renegotiable, only the presence of a truly more productive job assignment would prevent the renegotiation of the current rent-sharing contract to the mutual benefit of both worker and firm. The likelihood of a job change is thus directly related to the level of total match productivity irregardless of whether the worker, in response to some later survey question, characterizes the separation as a quit or permanent layoff. According to this formulation of worker and firm attachments, quits and permanent layoffs are, at least in any sense relevant to actual resource allocation, indistinguishable. An implication of this model is of course that mobility enhances productivity (see Gary Becker, Elisabeth Landes, and Robert Michael, 1977). Counter to this view stand models of job matching that suggest that the presence of transactions costs in the form of costly contract renegotiations preclude any easy application of the Coase theorem to employment contracts. Most forcefully advocated by Masanori Hashimoto (1981), these models of job matching imply that quits and permanent layoffs are different. The difference results from the fact that, with costly contract renegotiation, mobility is to a large extent determined by the actual rent-sharing agreement formulated at the beginning of employment. According to this view then, the total value of the match does not exclusively determine job change, and thus not all mobility is productivity augmenting. This paper offers a model of job matching with costly post-hire negotiations in some aspects similar to that of Hashimoto, but with particular relevance to the population of young workers only beginning their labor force participation. While Hashimoto's discussion concentrates on longer-term firmspecific training decisions, the current model focuses on the period immediately following hire when worker productivity is to a large extent governed by endowed capabilities rather than determined by learning on the job. The theoretical focus on inexperienced workers as well as the corresponding youthful composition of the empirical sample are motivated to control for unobserved factors such as firm-specific human capital stocks as much as possible. In further contrast to Hashimoto's emphasis, the model yields empirical implications concerning the role of wages in the determination of mobility that contrast to the implications of an otherwise similar zero negotiations cost model of job matching. Derivation of the empirical implications concerning the relationship of wages to quits and layoffs represents the primary contribution of this paper. Finally, empirical results are presented that, at least for a sample of very young men over a short period of time, *Department of Economics, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77004. I thank Finis Welch, Dan Mitchell, and the referee for comments on an earlier version of this paper.