Reading List

Weekly reading guide for People, Power, and Pay

Reading Guide

Weekly Readings

People, Power, and Pay: The Economics of the Workplace

This page lists readings from the course guide without republishing copyrighted PDFs. Readings marked as Canvas/library should be accessed through Johns Hopkins systems.

Week 0

Research Methods and Writing a Paper

Methods

• Guides to empirical microeconomics research, graduate-school practices in economics, article writing, and literature reviews.
• Romem, literature review slides for Barry Eichengreen's course.

Week 1

Foundations: Organizations, Contracts, and Transactions

Required

• Required Milgrom and Roberts, Economics, Organization and Management, Chapters 1-2. Canvas/library.

Optional

• Shih on Toyota business practices and culture.
• BBC documentary, "Bubble Trouble in Japan".

Weeks 2-3

Information: Contracts, Norms, and Power

Week 2

• Required Microeconomics: Competition, Conflict, and Coordination, Chapter 10 sections 10.1-10.7.
• Required Macaulay, "Non-Contractual Relations in Business." Canvas/library.
• Optional Baker and Hubbard on monitoring technologies and asset ownership in trucking.
• O'Connor, "When your boss is an algorithm".

Week 3

• Required Microeconomics, Chapter 10 sections 10.8-10.15.
• Required Lazear and Shaw on personnel economics and job matches.
• Required Bowles and Gintis on power in economic interactions.
• Recommended Zoë Cullen, "Is Pay Transparency Good?", on how different forms of pay transparency affect bargaining, wage inequality, mobility, and productivity.
• Recommended Caldwell, Haegele, and Heining, "Bargaining and Inequality in the Labor Market," on individual wage bargaining and within-firm inequality.
• Optional Brown, Falk, and Fehr on relational contracts; Tadelis and Williamson on transaction cost economics.
• Cameron on conflict and customer-management in gig work.

Weeks 4-5

Work, Wages, and Unemployment

Week 4

• Required Microeconomics, Chapter 11 sections 11.1-11.8.
• Required Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Chapter 1.
• Recommended Harju, Jäger, and Schoefer, "Voice at Work," on worker representation, information sharing, productivity, and separations.
• Optional Hyman, Temp, Chapter 1; Wartzman, The End of Loyalty, Chapter 1; March and Simon on organizations; Atkin et al. on organizational barriers to technology adoption.
• Boushey, "There are significant costs to replacing employees".
• Dube, "Credit Bidenomics for Rising US Wages".

Week 5

• Monday, September 28 Bowles and Halliday, Microeconomics, Chapter 11 sections 11.9-11.15. We will discuss monopsony and introduce the whole-economy model.
• Wednesday, September 30 Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Chapters 2-3, followed by Camerer and Weber, sections 1-3.
• Recommended Caldwell, Dube, and Naidu, "Monopsony Makes It Big," introduction (pp. 3-9) and Section 4.3 on efficiency wages, labor discipline, and effort (pp. 43-52). The full article is forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Literature.
• Recommended David Card, "Who Set Your Wage?", a concise introduction to modern monopsonistic wage setting.
• Recommended Dube, Naidu, and Reich, "Power and Dignity in the Low-Wage Labor Market," on job amenities, workplace dignity, and employer power at Walmart.
• Optional Kelley et al. on monitoring taxi drivers in Kenya.
• Marinescu on labor market power and wages.

Weeks 6-8

Teams, Management, and Behavioral Economics

Week 6

• Required Microeconomics, Chapter 16 sections 16.1-16.3 and 16.10.
• Required Alchian and Demsetz on production, information costs, and economic organization.
• Required Camerer and Weber on coordination; Bandiera et al. on team incentives.
• Optional Hamilton, Nickerson, and Owan on teams.
• Rosenfeld, "You're not paid based on your performance".

Week 7

• Required Microeconomics, Chapter 15 section 15.12.
• Required Syverson on productivity; Bloom et al. on management practices.
• Optional Gibbons and Henderson on relational contracts; Fehr et al. on authority; Bolton and Dewatripont on authority; Coase's Nobel lecture.
• Cassidy, "Ronald Coase and the misuse of economics".

Week 8

• Required Review preferences, beliefs, constraints, and experiments in Microeconomics.
• Required Camerer and Malmendier on behavioral economics of organizations; Camerer and Weber section 4; Jaeger et al. on outside options and beliefs.
• Recommended Benson, Li, and Shue, "'Potential' and the Gender Promotion Gap," on subjective evaluation, promotion, performance, and managerial decision-making.
• Optional Akerlof and Kranton on identity economics; Baron and Kreps on employment.
• Loewenstein, "Economics Behaving Badly".

Weeks 9-12

Assessment, Motivation, Control, and AI

Week 9

Oral Midterm

• No new reading. Prepare by reviewing the concepts, evidence, and mechanisms from Weeks 1-8.

Week 10

Motivation and Incentives

• Required Cassar and Meier, "Nonmonetary Incentives and the Implications of Work as a Source of Meaning".
• Optional Horvath on monitoring and accountability in nonprofit work.
• The Economist, "How not to motivate your employees".

Week 11

Control, Trust, and Workplace Norms

• Required Gneezy et al. on workplace norms; Burdin, Halliday, and Landini on control, reciprocity, and trust.
• Recommended Friebel, Heinz, Hoffman, Kretschmer, and Zubanov, "Is This Really Kneaded? Identifying and Eliminating Potentially Harmful Forms of Workplace Control," on monitoring, trust, sales, and manager retention.
• Recommended Cai, Luo, and Wang, "Money or Monitoring: Evidence on Improving Worker Effort," on the different effects of compensation and monitoring on performance and quits.
• Optional Schmelz on institutions and autonomy.
• Burdin, "Why using technology to spy on home-working employees may be a bad idea".

Week 12

AI and the Organization of Work

• Required Charles I. Jones, "A.I. and Our Economic Future".
• Provisional companion Athey, Bryan, and Gans, "The Allocation of Decision Authority to Human and Artificial Intelligence". This is the leading candidate for the final organizational-economics reading.
• Recommended Brynjolfsson, Li, and Raymond, "Generative AI at Work," on productivity, learning, worker heterogeneity, and the experience of work in customer support.
• Recommended Dell'Acqua et al., "The Cybernetic Teammate," on how generative AI changes teamwork and the boundaries between areas of expertise.
• Recommended Dillon, Jaffe, Immorlica, and Stanton, "Shifting Work Patterns with Generative AI," on time use and task composition across 66 firms.
• Optional Chatterji, Rock, and Talamàs, "Transformative AI and Firms", on firm structure, knowledge, and competition.

Student-Selected Optional Modules

Monopsony, Unions, Cooperatives, Remote Work, and AI

Option

Modern Monopsony and Noncompete Agreements

Naidu et al. on antitrust and labor markets; Starr on noncompetes; Ashenfelter et al. on monopsony; Bassier et al.; Johnson et al.; and public writing from the New York Times, Econofact, The Economist, and NPR.

• Recommended Cowgill, Freiberg, and Starr, "Clause and Effect: Theory and Field Experimental Evidence on Noncompete Clauses," on mobility, earnings, trade-secret leakage, and worker inattention to contract terms.

Option

The Whole Economy, Unions, and Inequality

Chapter 15 sections 15.1-15.11; Farber et al. on unions and inequality; Naidu on the future of the US labor movement.

• Recommended if this module is selected Dodini, Stansbury, and Willén, "Who Pays for Unions?", on how unionization affects wages, employment, prices, profits, productivity, and labor markdowns under different market structures.

Option

Worker-Owned Cooperatives

Chapter 15 sections 15.13-15.14; Craig and Pencavel; Burdin; and public writing on Mondragon and cooperative firms.

Option

Working from Home

Bloom et al. on hybrid work; Emanuel and Harrington on remote work, power, and mentorship; additional work by Brynjolfsson et al. and Hansen et al.