Michael Waldman

A Theory of Wage and Promotion Dynamics Inside Firms

We show that a framework that integrates job assignment, human-capital acquisition, and learning captures several empirical findings concerning wage and promotion dynamics inside firms, including the following. First, real-wage decreases are not rare but demotions are. Second, wage increases are serially correlated. Third, promotions are associated with large wage increases. Fourth, wage increases at promotion are small relative to the difference between average wages across levels of the job ladder. Fifth, workers who receive large wage increases early in their stay at one level of the job ladder are promoted quickly to the next.

Job Assignments, Signalling, and Efficiency

This article analyzes a model in which information about a workers ability is only directly revealed to the firm employing the worker; other firms, however, use the workers job assignment as a signal of ability. Three results recur throughout the analysis. First, wage rates tend to be more closely associated with jobs than with ability levels. Second, there is frequently an inefficient assignment of workers to jobs (i.e., even when a firm has complete information about a workers output). Third, the severity of this inefficiency tends to be negatively correlated with the level of firm-specific human capital in the economy.

The Strategic Use of Tying to Preserve and Create Market Power in Evolving Industries

This article investigates how the tying of complementary products can be used to preserve and create monopoly positions. We first show how a monopolist of a product in the current period can use tying to preserve its monopoly in the future. We then show how a monopolist in one market can employ tying to extend its monopoly into a newly emerging market. Our analysis explains how a dominant firm can use tying to remain dominant in an industry undergoing rapid technological change. The analysis focuses on entry costs and network externalities. We also relate our analysis to the Microsoft case.

The Rotten-Kid Theorem Meets the Samaritan's Dilemma

Becker derives the Rotten-Kid theorem -- that a child will not behave in a manner which lowers the parents income more than it raises the childs -- in a one period setting. Not captured in Beckers analysis is that the family environment can exhibit what others refer to as the Samaritans Dilemma. That is, children may consume too much in early periods because by doing so they can increase the income transfers they receive in later periods. In this paper we formally consider the Samaritans Dilemma and its relation to the Rotten-Kid Theorem in a two period version of Beckers model.

Up-or-Out Contracts: A Signaling Perspective

A firm will typically gather information concerning its own workers that is not available to other potential employers, while other firms will attempt to reduce this information asymmetry by observing the actions of the initial employer. I argue that this process can be important in environments characterized by up-or-out contracts in that the retention decision can serve as a signal of productivity. The article investigates this argument in an environment where up-or-out contracts are employed because they provide workers with an incentive to accumulate general human capital and where learning takes place in a diffuse fashion.

The Effects of Increased Copyright Protection: An Analytic Approach

Previous authors who have considered partially nonexcludable goods have claimed that an increase in copyright protection will have the following two effects on social welfare. First, it will decrease the social welfare loss due to underproduction. Second, it will increase the social welfare loss due to underutilization. In this paper we investigate these claims in a formal setting by analyzing a model in which consumers vary only in terms of their costs of obtaining a reproduction. Our analysis provides partial support to the first claim of these previous authors while giving little or no support to the second claim.

Task-Specific Human Capital

Since Gary Becker’s (1964) seminal work, the theoretical and empirical literature on human capital has focused almost exclusively on general-purpose and firm-specific human capital. In this paper we discuss the implications of a third type of human capital, which we call task-specific, and which we believe is potentially as commonplace and as important as the two classic types. By task-specific human capital we mean that some of the human capital an individual acquires on the job is specific to the tasks being performed, as opposed to being specific to the firm. In other words, task-specific human capital is the simple but plausible idea that much of the human capital accumulated on the job is due to task-specific learning by doing. The idea of task-specific human capital is closely related to occupationand industryspecific human capital. In each case, human capital is specific to the nature of the work, not specific to the firm. Hence, when capital is accumulated, multiple firms value the capital, so most (or even all) of the value of the capital will be reflected in the worker’s wage. The main difference between the idea of task-specific human capital and occupationand industryspecific human capital is in how the idea is applied. We argue that task-specific human capital has much wider applicability than suggested (so far) by the occupationand industry-specific human-capital literatures; the specific issues we address are cohort effects, job design, and promotions. Another argument in the literature closely related to ours is the classic argument of Adam Smith (1776) in the Wealth of Nations concerning returns to specialization. Smith’s argument was that, due to learning-by-doing at the level of the task, productivity can be enhanced by having each job entail fewer tasks. We believe that Smith was correct in focusing on learningby-doing at the level of the task as an important idea for thinking about organizations. The goal of our paper is to describe some of the other implications of this idea for the design and operation of organizations.

Planned Obsolescence and the R&D Decision

By investing in RD i.e., the R&D choice that maximizes current profitability does not maximize overall profitability. The result is that if output is sold rather than rented, then in its R&D decision the monopolist has an incentive to practice a type of planned obsolescence that lowers its own profitability.

The Signaling Role of Promotions: Further Theory and Empirical Evidence

An extensive theoretical literature investigates the role of promotions as a signal of worker ability. We extend the theory by focusing on how the signaling role of promotion varies with education and then investigate the resulting predictions using a longitudinal data set that contains detailed information concerning the internal-labor-market history of a medium-sized firm in the financial services industry. Our results support signaling being important for understanding the differences between promotion practices concerning bachelor’s and master’s degree holders, while the evidence concerning the importance of signaling for high school graduates and PhDs is mixed.

Durable Goods Pricing When Quality Matters

This article considers a durable goods monopolists choice of price and durability in a setting where durability choice controls the speed with which quality deteriorates. This article derives three main results: the price at which old units trade on the secondhand market limits what the firm can charge for new units; because of this linkage between the prices for new and old units, the firm chooses a durability level that is below the socially optimal level; and the incentive to reduce durability can be sufficiently severe that the monopolist eliminates the market for secondhand goods. Copyright 1996 by University of Chicago Press.