In this thesis, I study the effects of spillovers in all-pay auctions and the effects ofregulating wages and hours on the labor market. In the first chapter, I study a model of asymmetric all-pay auctions with spillovers. In this model, players compete for a prize, and the sunk effort players exert during the conflict can affect the value of the winner’s reward. The link between participants’ efforts and rewards yields novel effects – in particular, players with higher costs and lower values than their opponent sometimes extract larger payoffs. In the second chapter, I study the problem of a labor market regulator who knows that workers prefer to work fewer hours at their current wage, but lacks specific knowledge of production and labor disutility. We show that moderate regulation (such as a small minimum wage) is counterproductive in that it results in hours that exceed the efficient quantity. We find that a combination of the minimum wage, overtime pay, and a cap on hours is optimal in a novel robust regulatory setting where the regulator has neither a prior nor exogenous bounds on model parameters.

Creator

• Thomas, Matthew W

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-ys8v-a649

Subject

• Economics

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_1013829
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16767

Date created

• 2023-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright