Law and Economics Workshop: Suresh Naidu

LAW & ECONOMICS WORKSHOP

presents

Suresh Naidu

Columbia University
School of International and Public Affairs

Coercive Contract Enforcement:  Law and the Labor Market in
19^th Century Industrial Britain  (Non-Technical Excerpt) 

Tuesday, September 30, 2014
4:10 - 5:45
Solarium (room FA2) - Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park

British Master and Servant law made employee contract breach a criminal offense until 1875. We develop a contracting model generating equilibrium contract breach and prosecutions, then exploit exogenous changes in output prices to examine the effects of labor demand shocks on prosecutions. Positive shocks in the textile, iron, and coal industries increased prosecutions. Following the abolition of criminal sanctions, wages differentially rose in counties that had experienced more prosecutions, and wages responded more to labor demand shocks. Coercive contract enforcement was applied in industrial Britain; restricted mobility allowed workers to commit to risk-sharing contracts with lower, but less volatile, wages.

Suresh Naidu teaches economics, political economy and development. He previously served as a Harvard Academy Junior Scholar at Harvard University, and as an instructor in economics and political economy at the University of California-Berkeley.  He holds a BMath from University of Waterloo, an MA in economics from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a PhD in economics from the University of California-Berkeley

For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.