Worker-firm relational contracts in the time of shutdowns: experimental evidence
通过实验研究随机停工对工人-企业间非正式关系契约的影响，发现即使频繁停工，市场效率仍可维持，但工人需同时应对多个雇主，导致工人间不平等加剧。
Exogeneous disruptions in labor demand have become more frequent in recent times. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in millions of workers being repeatedly laid off and rehired according to local public health conditions. This may be bad news for market efficiency. Typical employment relations-which resemble non-enforceable (implicit) contracts-rely on reciprocity (Brown et al. in Econometrica 72:747-780, 2004), and hence could be harmed when workers' efforts no longer guarantee reemployment in the next period. In this paper we extend the BFF paradigm to include a per-period probability (0%, 10%, 50%) of publicly observable "shutdown", where a specific firm cannot contract with any workers for several periods. A Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium exists in which these shutdowns destabilize relationships, but do not harm efficiency. Our experiment shows that, remarkably, market efficiency can be maintained even with very frequent stochastic shutdowns. However, the dynamic of relational contracts changes from one where a worker finds stable employment to one where she juggles multiple employers, laying the burden of maintaining productivity upon workers and worsening worker-side inequality. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at (10.1007/s10683-020-09697-1).