A Theory of the Firm with Non‐binding Employment Contracts

This paper examines an employment relation in which individual workers enjoy some bargaining power vis‐a‐vis the firm although they are not unionized. The main elements of the situations studied here are that the employment contracts are non‐binding across periods of production and that the firm has opportunities to replace workers. The paper analyzes a dynamic model in which the processes of contracting and recontracting between the firm and its workers are intertwined with the dynamic evolution of the firm's workforce. The analysis of the model is somewhat complicated because the employment level is a nondegenerate state variable that evolves over time and is affected by past decisions. The main analytical results characterize certain important equilibria: the profit maximizing and stationary equilibria. The unique stationary equilibrium is markedly inefficient: it exhibits inefficient over‐employment and the steady state wages coincide with the workers' reservation wage. It confirms earlier results derived by Stole and Zwiebel (1996a, b) in the context of a static model and shows that they are very robust even when the firm has nearly frictionless hiring opportunities. In contrast, in the profit maximizing equilibrium the outcome is nearly efficient and the wage exhibits a mark‐up over the reservation wage.     

基于讨价还价的私募基金机制比较研究

作为私募基金的主要形式，有限合伙制具有比公司制更高的激励作用，原因可能是两者在契约设计上的不同。本文引入讨价还价模型对公司制与有限合伙制进行分析，求解了两种机制下的均衡契约。研究发现，股东(或有限合伙人)和经理(或普通合伙人)之间的博弈等价于包含外部选择的讨价还价博弈，当经理保留收益不断提高，有限合伙制将逐步取代公司制。进一步地，有限合伙制将给出更高的分成比例，进而实现更高的激励，更有效地利用人力资本。     

AMBIVALENT INVESTMENT AND THE HOLD‐UP PROBLEM

In this paper we add to the foundations of incomplete contracting literature. We study the hold‐up problem with ambivalent investment, where investment benefits the investing party if ex post the right decision is undertaken but harms the investing party if the wrong decision is made. In this context, we show that the power of contracts to provide investment incentives depends on three factors: the commitment value of contracts, the amount of quasirents that the investing party can expect in the case of out‐of‐contract renegotiation, and the degree of ambivalence of investment. First, contracts provide first‐best investment incentives when parties can commit to a contract regardless of the type of investment. Second, with sufficiently ambivalent investment, if parties cannot commit not to renegotiate a contract and if the investing party's bargaining power is intermediate, contracts cannot improve investment incentives above those provided by no contract. In contrast, a simple buyer or seller option contract is optimal when the investing party's bargaining power is extreme. (JEL: D23, K12, L22)     

Franchise Contracting: The Effects of The Entrepreneur's Timing Option and Debt Financing

We solve a sequential‐moves game that involves three players: the franchisor, the entrepreneur, and the banks. The franchisor chooses the contract terms (a one‐time franchise fee and a royalty rate for on‐going payments). The entrepreneur dynamically decides when to sign this contract, open a store, and apply for debt financing to cover the initial investment. In response to the entrepreneur's application, banks competitively determine loan rates. We find that the franchisor should use royalty cash flows and not the franchise fee to extract value from the entrepreneur. This is a new explanation of empirical evidence that franchise contracts favor royalties over franchise fees. To account for the possibility of the entrepreneur's bankruptcy and bankruptcy costs, the franchisor should decrease the royalty rate. However, despite a lower rate, the threshold for the entrepreneur to open the store is higher in the model with financing than in the model without financing. This threshold is much higher than it would have been for the integrated system, which in turn is higher than the static break‐even‐NPV threshold. If a franchisor ignores financing considerations, she will suffer from having to wait longer for the store opening and from a higher bankruptcy probability. We predict that the franchisor is the main beneficiary of the entrepreneur's greater initial wealth and that the franchisor will benefit more if she assumes a greater share of the store's operating costs.     

Shutdown contests in multi-plant firms

When multi-plant firms face a declining demand, they typically have to close one or more locations. In that case, the firm can organize a shutdown contest among the plants to generate extra incentives. Within a two-plant model, I discuss the impact of plant size, workers’ outside options and bargaining power on the profitability of such contest. Whereas the influence of plant size is ambiguous, the firm prefers a shutdown contest to an immediate closure of the less productive location if the more productive plant’s bargaining power is large relative to that of the less productive one. In that case, the more productive workforce spends much effort and has a high probability to survive. If the multi-plant firm is an international corporation, auctioning off the decision right which plant to close can be profitable for the firm, since each country is interested in protecting its domestic plant. From the firm’s perspective, such bidding dominates a shutdown contest if national costs from plant closure are sufficiently large relative to extra profits generated by the contest.     

Supply Chain Contracting Under Competition: Bilateral Bargaining vs. Stackelberg

We analyze contracting behaviors in a two‐tier supply chain system consisting of competing manufacturers and competing retailers. We contrast the contracting outcome of a Stackelberg game, in which the manufacturers offer take‐it‐or‐leave‐it contracts to the retailers, with that of a bargaining game, in which the firms bilaterally negotiate contract terms via a process of alternating offers. The manufacturers in the Stackelberg game possess a Stackelberg‐leader advantage in that the retailers are not entitled to make counteroffers. Our analysis suggests that whether this advantage would benefit the manufacturers depends on the contractual form. With simple contracts such as wholesale‐price contracts, which generally do not allow one party to fully extract the trade surplus, the Stackelberg game replicates the boundary case of the bargaining game with the manufacturers possessing all the bargaining power. In contrast, with sophisticated contracts such as two‐part tariffs, which enable full surplus extraction, the two games lead to distinct outcomes. We further show that the game structure being Stackelberg or bargaining critically affects firms' preferences over contract types and thus their equilibrium contract choices. These observations suggest that the Stackelberg game may not be a sufficient device to predict contracting behaviors in reality where bargaining is commonly observed.     

基于战略风险投资的融资契约设计及融资决策

初创企业融资过程中, 融资的对象以及合同的设计会对初创企业的经营状态以及社会福利水平产生重要影响.本文将融资的对象分为仅仅追求货币收益的风险投资家和同时追求货币收益及战略目标的战略投资者, 并基于此在阶段性融资背景下考察了单个投资者、多个独立投资者以及辛迪加组织这三类融资方式中融资对象的选择和融资契约的设计, 最后以社会福利水平最优为首要目标、企业预期收益最大为次要目标为企业家提供最优的融资决策.通过分析表明一个最优的融资决策应当包含最优的融资方式和最优的融资对象.关于融资方式, 辛迪加组织提供融资可行时, 企业家应寻求辛迪加组织融资且这种融资方式总是社会有效率的;辛迪加组织提供融资不可行时, 企业家应寻求多个独立的投资者融资, 但这种融资方式无法实现最优的社会福利水平.关于融资对象, 企业家应选择努力水平与一阶最优努力水平最为接近的投资者.     

Bargaining Power and Wage Determination: The Role of Outside Options

ABSTRACT: The paper analyses the wage bargaining process between an entrepreneur and his workforce when delays in agreement intrinsically reduce the amount of returns to be shared It is shown that the outside options of the workforce and the entrepreneur can be a systematic determinant of their bargaining power in contrast to what the Rubinstein (1982) model predicts The basic model is extended to analyse: (i) bargaining under multiple unionism; (ii) the- possible relationship between bargaining and efficiency wages; and (iii) under investment in workforce training.     

ON‐THE‐JOB SEARCH AND MORAL HAZARD

We analyze the interaction between intertemporal incentive contracts and search frictions associated with on‐the‐job search. In our model, agency problems call for wage contracts with deferred compensation. At the same time workers do on‐the‐job search. Deferred compensation improves workers' incentives to exert effort but distorts their on‐the‐job search decisions. We show that deferred compensation is less attractive when the value to the worker–firm pair of on‐the‐job search is high. Moreover, the interplay between search frictions and wage contracts creates feedback effects. If firms in equilibrium use contracts with deferred compensation, fewer firms with vacancies enter the on‐the‐job search market, and this in turn reduces the distortions created by deferred compensation. These feedback effects between the incentive contracts used and the activity level in the search markets can lead to multiple equilibria: a low‐turnover equilibrium where firms use deferred compensation, and a high‐turnover equilibrium where they do not. Furthermore, the model predicts that firms are more likely to use deferred compensation when search frictions are high and when the gains from on‐the‐job search are small.     

Wage Bargaining with On‐the‐Job Search: Theory and Evidence

Most applications of Nash bargaining over wages ignore between‐employer competition for labor services and attribute all of the workers' rent to their bargaining power. In this paper, we write and estimate an equilibrium model with strategic wage bargaining and on‐the‐job search and use it to take another look at the determinants of wages in France. There are three essential determinants of wages in our model: productivity, competition between employers resulting from on‐the‐job search, and the workers' bargaining power. We find that between‐firm competition matters a lot in the determination of wages, because it is quantitatively more important than wage bargaining à la Nash in raising wages above the workers' “reservation wages,” defined as out‐of‐work income. In particular, we detect no significant bargaining power for intermediate‐ and low‐skilled workers, and a modestly positive bargaining power for high‐skilled workers.     

基于可协商的可转换债券和企业资本结构

本文将债务协商机制引入利用普通股和可转换债券融资的上市企业,在一个动态模型框架下分析其对债券投资者行为和企业资本结构的影响。首先分别对采取破产清算和债务协商下,利用可转换债券和普通股融资的企业建模;然后利用风险中性定价方法给出企业证券价值的显示解;最后通过数值结果分析债务协商机制的影响并给出经济解释。数值分析表明：相比企业破产清算,协商可以提高企业价值、股权价值。当股东的谈判能力在一定的范围时,协商可以提高债券价值、降低企业杠杆率,增加社会福利。股东谈判能力越强,可转债投资者的转换时机越早。本文的研究丰富了可转换债券的融资理论,为可转换债券融资企业的去杠杆提供了一定的理论指导。     

Optimal Contracts when Enforcement is a Decision Variable

This paper analyzes choice‐theoretic costly enforcement in an intertemporal contracting model with a differentially informed investor and entrepreneur. An intertemporal contract is modeled as a mechanism in which there is limited commitment to payment and enforcement decisions. The goal of the analysis is to characterize the effect of choice‐theoretic costly enforcement on the structure of optimal contracts. The paper shows that simple debt is the optimal contract when commitment is limited and costly enforcement is a decision variable (Theorem 1). In contrast, stochastic contracts are optimal when agents can commit to the ex‐ante optimal decisions (Theorem 2). The paper also shows that the costly state verification model can be viewed as a reduced form of an enforcement model in which agents choose payments and strategies as part of a perfect Bayesian Nash equilibrium.     

Problems of Growth in a High Technology Firm: Moving between Conscious and Unconscious Accounts of Organizational Processes

This paper explores an infrequently discussed methodological divide within qualitative research; that between conscious and unconscious accounts of organizational processes. The paper makes use of an empirical case study of problems encountered in the growth of a high-technology company. The conscious accounts of growth treat members of the firm as knowledgeable agents whose understandings are then drawn upon to generate an account of growth in terms of interrelated processes of power, meaning and legitimacy. These conscious accounts are then complemented through an exploration of unconscious dynamics in the personality of the entrepreneur, the work group and the `family' structure of the firm. It is argued that the key shift in moving between conscious and unconscious interpretation, involves the bracketing of the reality claims implicit in conscious rationalizations, and a re-listening to research material as a largely unconscious projection of individuals' `inner worlds'. With unconscious interpretations, the character of language, its emotional content and in particular the sources of individual and group anxiety all realize a central importance. Despite the established divide in the literature between these two forms of interpretation, it is argued that the case suggests the value and necessity of their integration, particularly for the understanding of creativity.     

Temporary Contracts,Employment Protection,and Collective Bargaining

This paper examines the effect of employment protection in a matching model with endogenous job destruction, collective bargaining, and two types of employment contracts. Using this framework, we show that (i) the impact on job creation and job destruction caused by reducing the firing costs associated with temporary jobs depends on the labour unions' bargaining strength and the gap in firing costs between contracts; (ii) reducing the firing costs associated with permanent jobs unambiguously decreases equilibrium unemployment if labour unions have strong bargaining power; and (iii) the impact caused by the firing costs differs between collective and individual bargaining.     

Breach Penalties in Labour Contracts: Advance Notice and Severance Pay

This paper analyses the determining factors of advance notice and severance pay provisions that appear in collective bargaining agreements. The theoretical model constructed is a simple bargaining model in which advance notice and severance pay play the role of breach penalties that the firm must pay for breaking the employment relationship. The hypotheses are tested on data gathered from collective bargaining agreements from different industries that were signed between 1970 and 1989.     

Bubbles and Self‐Enforcing Debt

We characterize equilibria with endogenous debt constraints for a general equilibrium economy with limited commitment in which the only consequence of default is losing the ability to borrow in future periods. First, we show that equilibrium debt limits must satisfy a simple condition that allows agents to exactly roll over existing debt period by period. Second, we provide an equivalence result, whereby the resulting set of equilibrium allocations with self‐enforcing private debt is equivalent to the allocations that are sustained with unbacked public debt or rational bubbles. In contrast to the classic result by Bulow and Rogoff (1989a), positive levels of debt are sustainable in our environment because the interest rate is sufficiently low to provide repayment incentives.     

CEO successor compensation: outside versus inside successions

We propose that outside CEO candidates will have greater bargaining power than insiders. As a result, outside CEO successors will likely receive greater total compensation than inside CEO successors. Outside successors, meantime, pose more risk to the hiring firm than inside successors due to higher information asymmetry. As a result, outside successor compensation packages are tilted towards more performance-related pay-at-risk, while inside successor packages have a higher percentage in salary. In addition, outside successors may want to utilize the structure of their compensation at their previous firm in their new contracts. Using a sample of 99 firms with outside successors who were not CEO in their prior firms, matched by industry and size to firms that hired inside candidates, we find evidence supporting these hypotheses.     

Power Structure and Profitability in Assembly Supply Chains

This paper studies the impact of supply chain power structure on firms' profitability in an assembly system with one assembler and two suppliers. Two power regimes are investigated—in a Single Power Regime, a more powerful firm acts as the Stackelberg leader to decide the wholesale price but not the quantity whereas in a Dual Power Regime, both the price and quantity decisions are granted to the more powerful firm. Tallying the power positions of the three firms, for each power regime we study three power structures and investigate the system's as well as the firms' preference of power. We find that when the assembler is the most powerful firm among the three, the system‐wide profit is the highest and so is the assembler's profit. The more interesting finding is that, if the assembler is not the most powerful player in the system, more power does not necessarily guarantee her a higher profit. Similarly, a supplier's profit can also decrease with the power he has. These results contrast with the conclusion for serial systems, where a firm always prefers more power. We also find that when both suppliers are more (less) powerful than the assembler, it can be beneficial (indifferent) for everyone if the two suppliers merge into a mega supplier to make decisions jointly. When the assembler is more powerful than one supplier and less so than the other, it is always better for the system to have the two suppliers merge, and for each individual firm, merging is preferred if the firm becomes the more powerful party after merging.     

A Contingent Claims Model of Corporate Pension Obligations*

This study develops a contingent claims model for valuing the implicit market value of the pension claim associated with defined benefit pension plans. In this model, the firm issues pension, debt, and equity claims. These claims have joint access to two underlying portfolios: corporate and pension. The changes in the market values of these two portfolios are assumed to follow a joint lognormal diffusion process. By imposing terminal boundary conditions implied by Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) rules and the pension insurance provisions of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) on the partial differential equation, a solution for the pension value is obtained. This quasi-market measure of the value of the pension claim may be represented by a portfolio consisting of four components: (1) a risk-free discount bond with face value equal to promised pension benefits; (2) a short put on pension assets with exercise price equal to pension benefits; (3) a long call on 30 percent of corporate assets with exercise price equal to the face value of secured corporate debt; and (4) a short call on 30 percent of corporate assets with a stochastic exercise price which depends on the terminal value of the pension fund. A numerical example using 1992 and 1993 financial statement data from six major U.S. corporations is provided. This example illustrates the usefulness of the model's prediction and the potential effect of theoretical pension values on corporate debt-equity ratios.     

A Dynamic Reinterpretation of Nash Bargaining With Endogenous Threats

This paper concerns the two‐stage game introduced in Nash (1953). It formalizes a suggestion made (but not pursued) by Nash regarding equilibrium selection in that game, and hence offers an arguably more solid foundation for the “Nash bargaining with endogenous threats” solution. Analogous reasoning is then applied to an infinite horizon game to provide equilibrium selection in two‐person repeated games with contracts. In this setting, issues about enforcement of threats are much less problematic than in Nash's static setting. The analysis can be extended to stochastic games with contracts.