On the Trade-off between Efficiency in Job Assignment and Turnover: The Role of Breakup Fees
研究雇佣合同中的分手费如何缓解因市场信号导致的晋升不足问题，同时分析其对员工流动效率的影响，发现当晋升前后预期生产率差异较小时分手费最优。
We highlight a novel trade-off with the use of breakup fees in employment contracts. Under asymmetric learning about workers’ productivity, the market takes job assignments (or “promotions”) as a signal of quality and bids up the wages of a promoted worker, leading to inefficiently few promotions (Waldman, M. 1984. “Job Assignments, Signalling, and Efficiency” 15 RAND Journal of Economics 255–67). Breakup fees can mitigate such inefficiencies by shielding the firm from labor-market competition, but they reduce turnover efficiency when there are firm-specific matching gains. We show that it is optimal to use breakup fees if and only if the difference between the worker’s expected productivity in the pre- and post-promotion jobs is small. Also, the relationship between the optimality of breakup fees and the importance of firm-specific human capital is more nuanced than what the extant literature may suggest.