The Impossibility of a Perfectly Competitive Labor Market

Using the institutional theory of transaction cost, I demonstrate that the assumptions of the competitive labor market model are internally contradictory and lead to the conclusion that on purely theoretical grounds a perfectly competitive labor market is a logical impossibility. By extension, the familiar diagram of wage determination by supply and demand is also a logical impossibility and the neoclassical labor demand curve is not a well-defined construct. The reason is that the perfectly competitive market model presumes zero transaction cost and with zero transaction cost all labor is hired as independent contractors, implying multi-person firms, the employment relationship, and labor market disappear. With positive transaction cost, on the other hand, employment contracts are incomplete and the labor supply curve to the firm is upward sloping, again causing the labor demand curve to be ill-defined. As a result, theory suggests that wage rates are always and everywhere an amalgam of an administered and bargained price. Working Paper 06-0

Are Worker-Managed Firms More Likely to Fail Than Conventional Enterprises? Evidence from Uruguay

Various theories suggest that worker-managed firms (WMFs) are prone to failure in competitive environments. Using a long panel of Uruguayan firms, the author presents new evidence on firm survival by comparing WMFs with conventional firms. After excluding microenterprises and controlling for differences in the effective tax burden faced by the two types of firms, the hazard of dissolution is 29% lower for WMFs than for conventional firms. This result is robust to alternative estimation strategies based on semiparametric and parametric frailty duration models that take into account unobserved firm-level heterogeneity and impose a range of distributional assumptions about the shape of the baseline hazard. The higher survival rates of worker-managed firms seem to be associated with their greater employment stability. This evidence suggests that the marginal presence of WMFs in actual market economies cannot be explained by the fact that these firms are less likely to survive than conventional firms. © by Cornell University