In the shadow of the Gulag: Worker discipline under Stalin

The Gulag had incentive effects on Soviet labour akin to unemployment in the West. * Stalin's use of imprisonment for terror and so-called shirking is documented. * An efficiency wage model shows how the threat of prison raises investible surplus. * It helps explain use of monitors, promises of a better future and harsh punishment. * But random incarceration, used for political purposes, raises the efficiency wage. An 'efficiency wage' model developed for Western economies is reinterpreted in the context of Stalin's Russia, with imprisonment - not unemployment - acting as a 'worker discipline... Mehr ...