Applications of contract theory to career analysis in an internal market.

Summary This thesis explores from a theoretical and empirical point of view the contributions of the logic of information accumulation to career analysis. We adopt the hypothesis, common to several models of contract theory, that employees' competences are only imperfectly known by both employers and employees at the time of recruitment, the information necessary for the evaluation of these competences being collected progressively as the employees' performance is observed. The thesis highlights the implications of this representation of the work relationship on the dynamics of wages and the trade-offs that may arise from the progressive nature of the discovery of competences when deciding on a promotion. It proposes an empirical confrontation of the harris and holmstrom model based on the central hypothesis of the thesis, using a sample of 1508 executives in a large French public company.