It is well-known that, in static models, minimum wages generate positive worker rents and, consequently, inefficiently low effort. We show that this result does not necessarily extend to a dynamic context. The reason is that, in repeated employment relationships, firms may exploit workers’ future rents to induce excessively high effort.

This paper examines the importance of competition in the growth and development of firms. We make use of the large-scale natural experiment of the shift from an economic system without competition to a market economy to shed light on the factors that influence innovation by firms and their subsequent growth. Using a dataset from a survey of nearly 4,000 firms in 24 transition countries, we find...

This paper shows that an importing country can have an incentive to impose a tari to extract rents earned by foreign exporters even in a perfectly competitive setting. To demonstrate this, I develop a new model of international trade that incorporates xed costs of exporting and rm heterogeneity within a perfectly competitive framework. In this setting, despite the fact that there are no pre-exi...

Trade unions tend to reduce the dispersion of wages among their members. Skilled workers may therefore have an incentive to separate from an encompassing union and organize into a separate craft union. This paper examines a theoretical model to gain insight into the structure of trade unions at a firm. We show that imperfect competition in the product market may drive skilled and unskilled work...

We study the relationship between participation in free trade agreements (FTAs) and the sustainability of democracy. Our model shows that FTAs can critically reduce the incentive of authoritarian groups to seek power by destroying protectionist rents, thus making democracies last longer. This gives governments in unstable democracies an extra motive to form FTAs. Hence, greater democratic insta...