By Aditya V. Kuvalekar, Elliot Lipnowski
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics | May 2020
Kuvalekar, A., Lipnowski, E. (2020). Job Insecurity. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 12(2)
Microeconomics, May 2020
We examine the relationship between job security and productivity in a fixed wage worker-firm relationship facing match quality uncertainty. The worker's action affects both learning and current productivity. The firm, seeing worker behavior and outcomes, makes a firing decision. As bad news accrues, the firm cannot commit to retain the worker. This creates perverse incentives: the worker strategically slows learning, harming productivity. We fully characterize the unique equilibrium in our continuous-time game. Consistent with some evidence in organizational psychology, the relationship between job insecurity and productivity is U-shaped: a worker is least productive when his job is moderately secure.
Aditya Kuvalekar is a microeconomist whose primary research area is information economics. His research examines how changes in information environments shape individual and collective behavior, with applications ranging from protests and voting to interactions within organizations. A second strand of his work focuses on market design, including problems of land acquisition from groups and school choice when students have non-standard preferences. His research has been published in leading economics journals, including The American Economic Review, The RAND Journal of Economics, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, and Journal of Economic Theory.
