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Ekkehart Schlicht

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and IZA@LISER, Luxembourg

Many arguments and observations encountered in labor market research are quite important politically and deserve being appreciated and evaluated outside academic circles. As academics like myself often write in a way that is difficult to read by non-academics, I appreciate very much that IZA World of Labor provides some professional editing to overcome this difficulty. In addition, the articles are freely accessible by anyone. I see this as an important contribution to the dissemination of important knowledge

World of Labour role

Author

Current position

Professor of Economics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany

Research interest

Labour economics, institutional economics, and methods

Website

http://bit.ly/Schlicht_IZApage

Past positions

Professor of Economics, Technical University Darmstadt, 1980–1993; Professor of Economics, University of Bielefeld, 1976–1980; Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1985–1986

Qualifications

Doctorate in Economics, University of Regensburg, 1971

Selected publications

  • Isolation and Aggregation in Economics. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1985.On Custom in the Economy. Oxford: Clarendon Press,1998.

  • “A neoclassical theory of wealth distribution.” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 189:1/2 (1975): 78–96.

  • “Labour turnover, wage structure, and natural unemployment.” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 134:2 (1978): 337–364.

  • “Wage dispersion, over-qualification, and Reder competition.” Economics 1 (2007): 1–31.

Article(s)

  • Efficiency wages: Variants and implications

    Wages affect productivity and non-wage costs; this carries important labor market and policy implications

    Ekkehart Schlicht, July 2016
    Higher wages increase labor costs but also improve the productivity of the labor force in several ways. If firms take this into account and set their wages accordingly, the resulting wages could fail to adjust demand and supply but may induce phenomena like over-education, discrimination, regional wage differentials, and a tendency for larger firms to pay higher wages. All these phenomena are quantitatively important and well-established empirically. Efficiency wage theory provides an integrated theoretical explanation rather than a sundry list of reasons, and offers an efficiency argument for progressive income taxation.
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