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AS.197.327 · Fall 2026 · Johns Hopkins University
People,
Power, and Pay
The Economics of the Workplace
A course on work, organizations, incentives, authority, inequality, and the incomplete contracts that shape life inside firms and labor markets.
About the course
Work is not just a transaction. It is a social relationship built from contracts, norms, monitoring, cooperation, conflict, trust, authority, and bargaining power. This course studies the economics of that relationship.
We draw on microeconomics, organizational economics, personnel economics, behavioral economics, sociology, and management research to understand how workplaces distribute rents, motivate effort, organize production, and shape inequality.
"Not everything in the contract is contractual."
Emile Durkheim, a useful warning for economists studying workCore Questions
Why are employment contracts hard to specify, verify, and enforce? What happens when effort, quality, and cooperation cannot be perfectly observed?
How do laws, norms, labor markets, unemployment, and bargaining power affect the distribution of surplus between workers and employers?
What roles do wages, autonomy, monitoring, meaning, identity, trust, reciprocity, and workplace norms play in motivating effort?
Why do management practices, productivity, and organizational forms vary so much across firms, even within the same industry?
How should we understand monopsony, noncompetes, worker mobility, unions, inequality, and remote work?
Students develop a project from a fact about the world, connect it to economic theory, and build a careful argument.
How does AI change tasks, decision authority, monitoring, trust, productivity, and the distribution of power inside organizations?