Firm-Specific Human Capital as a Shared Investment
形式化分析了企业与员工共享企业专用人力资本投资的决策过程，揭示了投资是否共享取决于评估员工生产力的成本，并澄清了相关文献中的混淆。
The standard analysis of firm-specific human capital argues that the cost of and the return to the investment will be shared by the worker and the employer. By sharing the investment, the parties reduce the likelihood of either party unilaterally terminating the employment relationship and imposing on the other party a loss in his return. This argument, originally advanced by Gary Becker (pp. 10-15), has become accepted almost as a theorem.' The sharing decision is particularly important in determining the shape of the wage profile and the behavior of labor turnover in the labor market. The exact decision process involved in determining the sharing arrangement, however, appears to have received little attention in the literature.2 In this paper, a formal statement of the sharing model is presented. The model allows a systematic analysis of the incentive to share the investment in firm-specific human capital. My analysis reveals that whether or not the investment is shared depends on the existence in the post-investment years of costs of evaluating and agreeing on the worker's productivities in the firm and elsewhere. This paper and two others (my 1979 article and my article with Ben Yu) demonstrate the usefulness of the sharing model. My 1979 article develops and tests the hypothesis that the ubiquitous bonus payments in Japan can be understood as payments for the returns to firm-specific human capital. The paper with Yu extends the analysis of firm-specific human capital by considering the incentives for introducing wage flexibility in employment contracts. Various dismissal and quitting rules are also compared in that paper. In this paper, I use the model in its simplest form to offer a formalization of Becker's hypothesis concerning the sharing of the gains and costs of specific training. In so doing, I demonstrate that the Becker hypothesis can be viewed as a direct application of the Coase Theorem. Implications of the model for the experience-earnings profile are also discussed. This paper also clears up some confusion in the literature about the validity of the sharing hypothesis (see fn. 1).