Staffing agencies and in-house bargaining
研究了生产型企业通过人事中介租用工人如何影响其与内部工人的议价能力，发现企业可策略性利用租用工人削弱内部工人议价地位，从而影响工资和就业。
Nowadays, many producing firms do not hire workers, but rent them from “staffing agencies”, whose main activity is to find, employ, and rent out workers to producing firms. That way, producing firms do not bear the direct costs of search and instead rent workers in a competitive market. We employ standard search-and-matching theory to analyze this phenomenon, with producing firms that have decreasing returns to scale. We find that the mere presence of staffing agencies has an important impact on the bargaining between the firms and their hired, “in-house” workers: firms can strategically use rented workers to weaken the bargaining position of in-house workers, tilting bargaining in their own favor. This has first-order effects on wages and employment. If rented and in-house workers are identical in production and in search markets, the unique equilibrium is one where producing firms only use rented workers. If renting workers involve additional costs, the equilibrium features an interior solution where each firm procures workers from two sources.