Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Overview
- 2 Labour demand and efficient contract models
- 3 Turnover costs, firm-specific training and unemployment
- 4 Employment and bargaining
- 5 Choice of compensation, unemployment insurance and policy issues
- 6 Team-related human capital and bargaining
- 7 Coalitional versus neoclassical firms
- 8 Future developments
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Future developments
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Overview
- 2 Labour demand and efficient contract models
- 3 Turnover costs, firm-specific training and unemployment
- 4 Employment and bargaining
- 5 Choice of compensation, unemployment insurance and policy issues
- 6 Team-related human capital and bargaining
- 7 Coalitional versus neoclassical firms
- 8 Future developments
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The foregoing developments have been undertaken against the background of three distinctive theoretical frameworks. Two of these – labour demand and firm–union bargaining models – are partial equilibrium microeconomic representations of the labour market while the third involves macroeconomic modelling. In part, and especially with respect to labour demand and macroeconomics, this three-pronged attack on problems related to human capital, employment and bargaining simply reflects the ways in which the subject of firm-level human capital has developed. More importantly, however, it represents the fact that no single approach has a significant comparative advantage over the others.
Labour demand is clearly the most restrictive of the three theoretical constructs and yet, because of its inherent structural simplicity, it has arguably been the most important vehicle for providing insights into relationships between human capital and employment. Invaluable contributions to policy debate have stemmed from labour demand models that incorporate a central role for human capital investment. Prominent among these are: (a) the work sharing versus layoffs trade-off and possible government interventions to influence these variables; (b) relationships among workers, hours and inventory adjustments over the business cycle; (c) the employment effects of various types of fiscal interventions, such as decisions to change payroll taxes or to provide workforce training subsidies.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Human Capital, Employment and Bargaining , pp. 184 - 187Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995