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Record W2890993177 · doi:10.3982/ecta8963

The Economics of Labor Coercion

2011· article· en· W2890993177 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueEconometrica · 2011
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCulture, Economy, and Development Studies
Canadian institutionsCanadian Institute for Public Safety Research and TreatmentCanadian Institute for Advanced Research
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCoercion (linguistics)EconomicsScarcityGeneral equilibrium theoryComplementarity (molecular biology)Labour economicsMicroeconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The majority of labor transactions throughout much of history and a significant fraction of such transactions in many developing countries today are “coercive,” in the sense that force or the threat of force plays a central role in convincing workers to accept employment or its terms. We propose a tractable principal–agent model of coercion, based on the idea that coercive activities by employers, or “guns,” affect the participation constraint of workers. We show that coercion and effort are complements, so that coercion increases effort, but coercion always reduces utilitarian social welfare. Better outside options for workers reduce coercion because of the complementarity between coercion and effort: workers with a better outside option exert lower effort in equilibrium and thus are coerced less. Greater demand for labor increases coercion because it increases equilibrium effort. We investigate the interaction between outside options, market prices, and other economic variables by embedding the (coercive) principal–agent relationship in a general equilibrium setup, and studying when and how labor scarcity encourages coercion. General (market) equilibrium interactions working through the price of output lead to a positive relationship between labor scarcity and coercion along the lines of ideas suggested by Domar, while interactions those working through the outside option lead to a negative relationship similar to ideas advanced in neo-Malthusian historical analyses of the decline of feudalism. In net, a decline in available labor increases coercion in general equilibrium if and only if its direct (partial equilibrium) effect is to increase the price of output by more than it increases outside options. Our model also suggests that markets in slaves make slaves worse off, conditional on enslavement, and that coercion is more viable in industries that do not require relationship-specific investment by workers.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.844
Threshold uncertainty score0.437

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.076
GPT teacher head0.263
Teacher spread0.187 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it