Deferred compensation as an incentive[edit]

"When agents remain with an employer for a long period of time, there is no necessary reason why the employer should pay the worker his expected marginal product in all periods; instead, workers could be paid better in some periods than in others. One aspect of this that has attracted both theoretical and empirical interest has been 'deferred compensation,' where workers are overpaid when old, at the cost of being underpaid when young. From this perspective, part of the reason why older workers are better paid than younger workers is not that they are more productive, but simply that they have accumulated enough tenure to garner these contractual returns."^[4]