issue. That aspect of the issue was the implications of the lifetime contract on the ability of employees to influence their hours of work. Kahn and Lang (1992, pp. 661 678) limited their study to relatively large, unionized firms in which implicit lifetime contracts could be assumed to exist. The authors posited that, at given times, wages and the value of marginal product under such conditions would diverge. Further, as a consequence of such divergence, firms would attempt to curtail employee work hours when the value of marginal product was lower than wages, and would attempt to increase employee work hours when the value of marginal product was higher than wages.
Shulamit Kahn and Lang (1992, pp. 661 678) tested their hypothesis through the application of both the agency model and the firm specific capital model. They found that neither model adequately explained their findings. Essentially, the authors found that approximately 50 percent of workers claim to face hours of work constraints (Kahn and Lang, 1992, pp. 661 678). Further, the authors found that by a ratio approximating ten to one, workers claimed that they would like to work more hours than permitted, as opposed to being pressured to work more hours than desired (Kahn and Lang, 1992, pp. 661 678).
Shulamit Kahn and Lang (1992, pp. 661 678) adequately demonstrated that workers do face constraints on the choice of work hours. The authors did not, however, demonstrate that the reason for such constraints was associated with a divergence between wages and the value of marginal product (Kahn and Kevin Lang, 1992, pp. 661 678). In fact, their findings indicated that, in the views of employees, most employers attempt to curtail hours of work, regardless of the value of marginal product.
One weakness of the article was that the research population and sample consisted only of unionized firms. This weakness was acknowledge by the authors (Kahn and Lang, 1992, p...