Professional Documents
Culture Documents
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
QUARTERLY JOURNAL
OF ECONOMICS
Vol. C 1985 Supplement
I. INTRODUCTION
*This is a revised version of Akerlof and Yellen [1983]. The authors woul
like to thank Andrew Abel, Alan Blinder, Richard Gilbert, Hajime Miyazaki,
John Quigley, James Tobin, and James Wilcox for helpful conversations. The
research for this paper was supported by National Science Foundation Grant No.
SES 81-19150 administered by the Institute for Business and Economic Research
of the University of California, Berkeley.
? 1985 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Published byJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc.
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 100, Supplement, 1985
Near-Rational Behavior
It has now been seen that in a wide class of models, the effe
of wage and price stickiness on agents' objective functions is sec-
ond-order in terms of the magnitude of a shock starting from a
long-run equilibrium in which all agents maximize. Nevertheless,
such wage and price stickiness commonly has a first-order effect
on equilibrium values of real variables following the shock. Al-
2. See, for example, Akerlof [1982]; Bowles [1981, 1983]; Calvo [1979]; Foster
and Wan [1984]; Malcomson [1981]; Miyazaki [1984]; Salop [1979]; Schlicht [1978];
Shapiro and Stiglitz [1984]; Stoft [1982a, 1982b]; Weiss [1980]; and Weisskopf,
Bowles, and Gordon [1983].
The Model
(2) PX= M.
Long-Run Equilibrium
The real wage X is chosen at the optimizing level w*, where the
elasticity of effort with respect to the real wage is unity. (This is
a standard result in such models [Solow, 1979] and represents the
condition that the firm chooses the real wage that minimizes the
unit cost of a labor efficiency unit.)
With this choice of real wage o*, the demand for labor is
(7) No = k-Ve(oM.
(8) pn = po
(9) Wm = <*
ing that the derivative of the difference between [Jm and -In with
respect to E vanishes for E = 0.
The derivative of lm - Jun with respect to E can be grouped
into four separate terms, each one corresponding to one set of
curly brackets in (15):
d(flIn - flfl) _
d dAl = { (1- l) (pm(E)
The first term in curly brackets in (15) is zero because of the first-
order condition for pm as the maximand of the profit function Jm.
The second term in curly brackets vanishes for E equal to zero,
since h(W) = 1, and since a* has been chosen to maximize profits.
(This causes w*e'(w*)[e(w*)]-l to equal unity.) Thus, the first two
terms in curly brackets in (15) are zero for E equal zero because
of the optimizing choice of the respective variables, p and W. The
third and fourth terms in curly brackets cancel for, Eequal to zero,
because pm(O) = po and h(O) = 1. These terms reflect the common
effect of E on Hm and f[n. Since all four terms in curly brackets
either vanish or cancel for E equal zero, it follows that
6d(m - fln)
(16) d ~ = 0.
This is a key result of this paper. It says that the loss to the
nonmaximizers over their maximum possible profits in this model
is second order with respect to e. It also follows trivially that this
loss in percentage terms is equal to zero for E equal zero and has
a derivative of zero.
Employment
d (NINo)_ 1
(17) d = - (1 - (1 - )0) + 13(1- 1)0.
de a
Two comments are in order about (17). First, since 0 is less than
one, an increase in the money supply causes an increase in em-
ployment. Also, since 0 = 1 for 13 = 0, the elasticity of employ-
ment with respect to changes in the money supply vanishes as
the fraction of nonmaximizers approaches zero. Such a result should
be expected, since as 1 approaches zero, the model approaches
one of monetary neutrality.
Simulations
III. CONCLUSION
TABLE I
ax= 0.25
= 1.5 0.084 0.023 0.011 0.309 0.088 0.043
T = 3.0 0.220 0.059 0.028 0.808 0.226 0.107
= 5.0 0.298 0.079 0.036 1.090 0.303 0.142
T = 20.0 0.408 0.107 0.049 1.496 0.410 0.189
= 100.0 0.443 0.116 0.052 1.623 0.442 0.203
x = 0.5
= 1.5 0.088 0.024 0.012 0.330 0.092 0.045
= 3.0 0.295 0.080 0.038 1.109 0.306 0.146
= 5.0 0.459 0.122 0.057 1.726 0.471 0.222
= 20.0 0.768 0.201 0.091 2.892 0.774 0.356
= 100.0 0.888 0.231 0.104 3.343 0.889 0.405
a = 0.75
a= 1.5 0.046 0.012 0.006 0.175 0.045 0.021
T = 3.0 0.207 0.054 0.025 0.796 0.209 0.097
T = 5.0 0.397 0.103 0.048 1.533 0.402 0.186
T = 20.0 0.974 0.251 0.114 3.769 0.979 0.447
T = 100.0 1.304 0.334 0.151 5.046 1.304 0.591
REFERENCES
Akerlof, George A., "Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange," this Journal,
XCVII (Nov. 1982), 543-69.
, and Janet Yellen, "The Macroeconomic Consequences of Near-Rational R
of-Thumb Behavior," mimeo, September 1983.
Bowles, Samuel, "Competitive Wage Determination and Involuntary Unemploy-
ment: A Conflict Model," mimeo, University of Massachusetts, May 1981.
,"The Production Process in a Competitive Economy: Walrasian, Neo-Hobbes-
ian and Marxian Models," mimeo, University of Massachusetts, May 1983.
Calvo, Guillermo, "Quasi-Walrasian Theories of Unemployment," American Eco-
nomic Review Proceedings, LXIX (May 1979), 102-07.
Foster, James E., and Henry Y. Wan, Jr., "'Involuntary' Unemployment as a
Principal-Agent Equilibrium," AmericanEconomicReview, LXXIV (June 1984).
Malcomson, James, "Unemployment and the Efficiency Wage Hypothesis," Eco-
nomic Journal, XCI (Dec. 1981), 848-66.
Miyazaki, Hajime, "Work Norms and Involuntary Unemployment," this Journal,
XCIV (May 1984), 297-312.
Nordhaus, William D., "The Falling Share of Profits," Brookings Papers on Eco-
nomic Activity, 1 (1974), 169-208.
and Wynne A. H. Godley, "Pricing in the Trade Cycle," Economic Journal,
LXXXII (Sept. 1972), 853-82.
Okun, Arthur M., Prices and Quantities: A Macroeconomic Analysis (Washington,
D. C.: The Brookings Institution, 1981).
Salop, Steven, "A Model of the Natural Rate of Unemployment," American Eco-
nomic Review, LXIX (March 1979), 117-25.
Sargent, Thomas J., "Rational Expectations, the Real Rate of Interest and the
Natural Rate of Unemployment," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2
(1973), 429-80.
Schlicht, Ekkehart, "Labor Turnover, Wage Structure and Natural Unemploy-
ment," Zeitschrift fur die Gesamte Staatswissenschaft, CXXXIV (June 1978),
337-46.
Shapiro, Carl, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, "Equilibrium Unemployment as a Worker
Discipline Device," American Economic Review, LXXIV (June 1984).
Solow, Robert M., "Another Possible Source of Wage Stickiness," Journal of Macro-
economics, I (Winter 1979), 79-82.
Stoft, Steven, "Cheat-Threat Theory," Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of
California, Berkeley, 1982a.
, "Cheat-Threat Theory: An Explanation of Involuntary Unemployment," mi-
meo, Boston University, May 1982b.
Varian, Hal, Microeconomic Analysis (New York: Norton, 1978).
Weiss, Andrew, "Job Queues and Layoffs in Labor Markets with Flexible Wages,"
Journal of Political Economy, LXXXVIII (June 1980), 526-38.
Weisskopf, Thomas, Samuel Bowles, and David Gordon, "Hearts and Minds: A
Social Model of Aggregate Productivity Growth in the U. S., 1948-1979,"
Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2 (1983), 381-441.
Yellen, Janet L., "Efficiency Wage Models of Unemployment," AmericanEconomic
Review Proceedings, LXXIV (May 1984), 200-05.