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Our empirical analysis builds upon the hypothesis that unions are detrimental to a firm's efficiency. Using a rich survey of German manufacturers, we investigate firm-level determinants on the probability of collective wage bargaining with particular focus on the impact of a firm's engagement in foreign markets. An interesting and very robust finding is that exporters are less likely to engage in union wage bargaining. This finding is in line with a pessimistic perception of unions. The negative effect of collective bargaining can be offset by efficiency gains for larger exporters, who can benefit from operation cost saving effects. Size does matter as larger firms export and may find bargaining with a single entity representing the workforce more convenient than bargaining with each worker individually. We are using firm level information on IT investment as instrument for the export dummy and successfully test for the validity of this instrument.

Corporate leverage responds differently to employees’ rights in bankruptcy depending on whether it is driven by strategic concerns in wage bargaining or by credit constraints. Using novel data on employees’ rights in bankruptcy, we estimate their impact on leverage, exploiting time-series, cross-country, and firm-level variation in the data. For financially unconstrained firms, results accord with the strategic debt model: leverage increases more in response to rises in corporate property values or profitability if employees have strong seniority in liquidation and weak rights in restructuring. Instead, in financially constrained firms leverage responds less to these shocks if employees have stronger seniority.

In this paper we study the allocative (in)efficiency of employment protection in relation to firing costs, in a general equilibrium model with labor market frictions. The optimal firing costs depend on the level of unemployment benefits and the degree of centralized wage bargaining, two features of the labor market that induce downward wage rigidity and trigger inefficient employment separations. When restrictions on firing employees with permanent contracts are inefficiently high, the introduction of temporary contracts improves welfare but does not fully restore efficiency. A quantitative analysis for the Italian economy shows that the firing costs before the recent labor market reforms were 30% higher than the optimal level, implying a consumption loss of almost 2% in the steady state. The introduction of fixed-term jobs in the early 2000’s closed one fourth of the gap between inefficient and efficient allocation, although it led to higher unemployment rates and turnover.

This study examines the existence of the offshoring threat on wage rate using plant-level data. To do so, we construct a simple version of the traditional collective wage-bargaining model to consider the offshoring threat. Based on theoretical predictions of the threat effect, we examine evidence of the offshoring threat using plant-level data from South Korea and the endogenous switching regression model. The estimated results in our empirical study strongly suggest that the offshoring threat may exist.

To provide micro-founded real wage rigidities, the literature on the unemployment volatility puzzle has considered alternating offers on one side, and asymmetric information on the other. Separately, however, these two frameworks deliver a limited amount of wage stickiness and thus require questionable calibrations to raise unemployment fluctuations. In this paper, we argue that the alternating offers model with one-sided asymmetric information, which combines the two frameworks, gives a more satisfactory answer to the puzzle. The results are improved along two dimensions. First, we show that this model is capable to generate large unemployment movements for a realistic calibration. Secondly, the model produces a right degree of real wage pro-cyclicality for such a calibration and therefore delivers a micro-founded explanation to real wage rigidities.

Wage negotiation plays a central role in the dynamics of search and matching models. We explore the theoretical wage predictions of the canonical search and matching model of Diamond (1982) in laboratory bargaining experiments. Overall, wages in the experiment are less responsive to changes in the market conditions than theory predicts. Wages respond to changes in unemployment insurance in the correct direction, yet the size of the response is about half of what theory predicts. On the other hand, contrary to theory, wages are unresponsive to changes in the level of unemployment. We also find that wages of new matches are more sensitive than wages of on-going matches, and that the duration of unemployment influences wages in certain settings.

This paper examines how trade unions shape the volatility of wages over the business cycle. I present a dynamic stochastic model of the labor market that integrates two main features: search frictions and trade unions. Because of search frictions, each job match yields an economic surplus that is shared between the worker and the firm. Therefore, I can decompose the volatility of wages into two components: the volatility of the match surplus and the volatility of the worker share of the surplus. Starting from the unions' objective function, I show that under collective wage bargaining, the worker share is endogenous and counter-cyclical. Consequently, when the economy is hit by a shock, the dynamics of the worker share partially counteract the dynamics of the match surplus, and this mechanism delivers endogenous wage rigidity. The model thus offers new insights into two business cycle features: the union wage premium fluctuates counter-cyclically, and employment is more cyclical but less persistent when wages are collectively bargained.

Spousal insurance raises a worker's outside option, allowing workers to bargain a higher wage. To study this mechanism I propose a random search model with ex-ante heterogeneity in ability, endogenous marriage, endogenous labor supply of spouses and wages determined by Nash Bargaining. Using the model, I derive an empirical specification to test the mechanism and the sources of endogeneity to be addressed. I use a combination of an instrument derived from theory and one instrument based on policy variation to confirm the predictions of the model. A 1 percentage point increase in the share of married women working increases the wage of married individuals by 2.51-3.51%.

Pay gaps for women and minorities have persisted after accounting for observable differences. Why? If employers can access applicants’ salary histories while bargaining over wages, they can take advantage of past inequities, perpetuating inequality. Recently, a dozen US states have banned employer access to salary histories. We analyze the effects of these salary history bans (SHBs) on employer wage posting and pay in a difference-in-differences design. Following SHBs, employers posted wages more often and increased pay for job changers, particularly for women (6.2%) and non-whites (5.9%). Bargaining behavior appears to account for much of the persistence of residual wage gaps.

Gender pay gaps persist worldwide despite political emphasis to close them. The literature found various drivers of the gaps but remained vastly silent about the role of cyclical dynamics. Using quarterly US data over the period 1979–2019, we study the effects of cyclical dynamics on the gender pay gap based on a structural vector auto-regression model with zero and sign restrictions. The results suggest that technology shocks lead to lower levels of the gender pay gap in the medium run, while higher wage bargaining power reduces the gap in the short run. However, these reductions of the gap come at the cost of increased unemployment. As a policy implication, these results imply a trade-off between lower gender pay gaps and higher unemployment.

This paper presents an alternative implementation of firm-level collective wage bargaining, where bargaining proceeds as a finite sequence of sessions between a firm and a union of variable size. We investigate the impact of such a 'gradual' union on the wage-employment contract in an economy with concave production. In a static framework, the resulting equilibrium is equivalent to the efficient bargaining outcome. In a dynamic framework with search frictions, we demonstrate that gradual collective wage bargaining coincides with all-or-nothing bargaining when bargaining takes place in fictitious time before production.

This paper constructs an on-the-job search model with work hour mismatches. In this model, there are two types of jobs that differ in output per hour, and workers are also heterogeneous with respect to preferences for the working hours. This heterogeneity may generate mismatch between worker's preference and job's type. Because worker's preference is changed by exogenous shocks, workers can eliminate mismatch by two ways: (i) moving to a suitable job by a job-to-job transition and (ii) waiting to change their preference. Those ways are consistent with empirical findings (e.g., Euwal, 2001; Johnson, 2010; Reynolds and Aletraris, 2006). The model shows that job-to-job transitions are less frequent than its efficient level, and hiring subsidies can lead to socially efficient allocation of workers.

We model the interactions of financial frictions and real frictions, using a DSGE model calibrated for the US economy, with households, banks, firms and wage bargaining. The model features labour and investment frictions, in the form of convex costs, and financial frictions, in the form of credit constraints and the risk of banks diverting their funds. In addition, there are price frictions and habits in consumption. We examine technology, monetary policy, and credit shocks. We look at the response to these shocks of real aggregate variables, financial market variables, and labour market variables. We find that the interactions of real frictions and financial frictions have important implications for the effects of financial shocks on the macroeconomy.

In many labor markets, e.g., for lawyers, consultants, MBA students, and professional sport players, workers get offered and sign long-term contracts even though waiting could reveal significant information about their capabilities. This phenomenon is called unraveling. We examine the link between wage bargaining and unraveling. Two firms, an incumbent and an entrant, compete to hire a worker of unknown talent. Informational frictions prevent the incumbent from always observing the entrant’s arrival, inducing unraveling in all equilibria. We analyze the extent of unraveling, surplus shares, the average talent of employed workers, and the distribution of wages within and across firms.

In this paper, we focus on the real dimension of the price dynamics in Japan between 1980 and 2000. We use a panel industry dataset to analyze the impact of institutional and structural factors on the heterogeneous price dynamics of 10 manufacturing sectors. Although the evolution of unit labor costs seems to be the driving force, our structural analysis underlines the importance of the increasingly competitive environment, as captured by rising import penetration. Along with the decline of bargaining power of the workforce, this is at the origin of the deflationary pressures that characterized the Japanese economy during the Lost Decade., Special Issue "26th Symposium of Money, Banking and Finance" Guest Editors :Sébastien Galanti and Grégory Levieuge, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This paper extends the Diamond (1980) model with labor unions to study optimal income taxation and to analyze whether unions can be desirable for income redistribution. Unions bargain with firms over wages in each sector and firms unilaterally determine employment. Unions raise the efficiency costs of income redistribution, because unemployment benefits and income taxes raise wage demands and thereby generate involuntary unemployment. Optimal unemployment benefits and optimal income taxes are lower in unionized labor markets. We show that unions are socially desirable only if they represent (low-income) workers whose participation is subsidized on a net basis. By creating implicit taxes on work, unions alleviate the labor-market distortions caused by income taxation. Numerical simulations demonstrate that optimal taxes and transfers are much less redistributive in unionized labor markets than in competitive labor markets.

We present a sharp test for the efficiency of job separations. First, we document a dramatic increase in the separation rate - 11.2ppt (28%) over five years - in response to a quasi-experimental extension of UI benefit duration for older workers. Second, after the abolition of the policy, the "job survivors" in the formerly treated group exhibit exactly the same separation behavior as the control group. Juxtaposed, these facts reject the "Coasean" prediction of efficient separations, whereby the UI extensions should have extracted marginal (low-surplus) jobs and thereby rendered the remaining (high-surplus) jobs more resilient after its abolition. Third, we show that a formal model of predicted efficient separations implies a piece-wise linear function of the actual control group separations beyond the missing mass of marginal matches. A structural estimation reveals point estimates of the share of efficient separations below 4%, with confidence intervals rejecting shares above 13%. Fourth, to characterize the marginal jobs in the data, we extend complier analysis to difference-in-difference settings such as ours. The UI-indiced separators stemmed from declining firms, blue-collar jobs, with a high share of sick older workers, and firms more likely to have works councils - while their wages were similar to program survivors. The evidence is consistent with a "non-Coasean" framework building on wage frictions preventing efficient bargaining, and with formal or informal institutional constraints on selective separations.

We examine how multinational firms strategically source production to mitigate the consequences of wage bargaining with workers. When wage bargaining pressure differs across countries, firms allocate production of goods with high markups toward countries with relatively competitive labor markets, limiting the rents available to workers with strong bargaining power. We use product-level data from the universe of automotive production facilities in North America at a monthly frequency between 1988 and 2009 to structurally estimate variable price elasticities of demand for different vehicles. From the theory we derive an empirical strategy that allows us to distinguish the impact of wage bargaining pressure from other sourcing motives. We find robust evidence that multinational firms strategically source their products across countries in response to differences in wage bargaining pressure.

This paper studies the effects of product market integration on wage bargaining institutions. By considering an international Cournot–Nash oligopoly with unionised home firms and non-unionised foreign firms producing substitute goods, the paper shows that the relative size of the home and foreign markets matters for the effects of a bilateral reduction in trade barriers. If the home market size is relatively larger than the foreign market size, a reduction in trade barriers, by lowering the sharable surplus for home firms and unions in the global market, gives unions incentives to choose more decentralised wage bargaining institutions. This industry-level mechanism, however, works in the opposite direction when the foreign market size is sufficiently large, including the “reciprocal dumping” symmetric market size model. In this case, cutting trade barriers raises the global sharable surplus and encourages domestic wage-setters to choose more centralised institutions.

In this paper, we present a spatial equilibrium model where search frictions hinder the immediate reallocation of workers both within and across local labour markets. Because of the frictions, firms and workers find themselves in bilateral monopoly positions when determining wages. Although workers are not at each instant perfectly mobile across cities, in the baseline model we assume that workers flows are sufficient to equate expected utility across markets. We use the model to explore the joint determination of wages, unemployment, house prices and city size (or migration). A key role of the model is to clarify conditions under which this type of spatial equilibrium setup can be estimated. We then use U.S. data over the period 1970-2007 to explore the fit of model and it quantitative properties of the model. Our main goal is to highlight forces that influence spatial equilibria at 10 year intervals.

Bargaining sequences, though vital to the real-world business strategies, are often treated as exogenously given. We examine bargaining sequences in the setting where a downstream firm makes a merger decision with an upstream partner and faces a negotiation with a union. When the downstream firm's power in the wage bargaining is weak, separation results and the input price bargaining proceeds prior to the wage bargaining. When the downstream firm's power in both negotiations is relatively equal, firms opt for separation and both negotiations keep on simultaneously. When the downstream firm's power in the wage negotiation is strong, the firms merge.

This study provides novel evidence on the impact of labor market institutions on current account dynamics. Our results suggest that a high degree of coordination of wage bargaining has a positive effect on the current account balance over the long run. This result is not driven entirely by wage moderation induced by centralized wage setting. We also provide robust evidence that a high degree of coordination of wage bargaining is associated with a slower current account adjustment toward its long-run equilibrium. This result seems theoretically plausible; the aggregate shocks in the exporting sector are largely driven by idiosyncratic shocks and the presence of idiosyncratic shocks increases the importance of labor market flexibility. Overall, our analysis of the impact of labor market institutions on current account dynamics complements the existing empirical current account literature focused on macroeconomic and financial measures. peerReviewed

An updated version can be found here: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3698071. We re-examine the impact of environmental taxation on health and output, in the presence of labor market frictions. Our main findings are that matching process and wage bargaining introduce new channels of transmission of environmental taxation on the economy such that assuming perfect labor market leads to over-estimate the positive impact of environmental taxation on health. We also demonstrate that rising abatement expenditures as a way of tightening the environmental policy would be better for health than increasing environmental tax in the presence of market labor imperfections.

Corporate leverage responds differently to employees' rights in bankruptcy depending on whether it is driven by strategic concerns in wage bargaining or by credit constraints. Using novel data on employees' rights in bankruptcy, we estimate their impact on leverage, exploiting time-series, cross-country and firm-level variation in the data. For financially unconstrained firms, results accord with the strategic debt model: leverage increases more in response to rises in corporate property values or profitability if employees have strong seniority in liquidation and weak rights in restructuring. Instead, in financially constrained firms leverage responds less to these shocks if employees have stronger seniority.

This paper explores how worker-employer gender interactions affect wage negotiations in a contract labor setting. More specifically, we ask whether male and female job seekers competing for contracts in an online labor market adjust their bargaining strategies and reservation prices depending on the inferred gender of the employer. We design a randomized-block experiment in which we invite a random sample of male/female freelancers to apply for a job contract which is otherwise identical except for the gender of the employer and the bargaining setting. We find a “male employer effect” whereby job seekers (regardless of gender) bid 22% lower to our male employer. We attribute this finding to stereotypes regarding women’s ability and willingness to negotiate on price. We discuss implications for observed gender gaps in wages, career paths and entrepreneurial activity.

We study the joint behavior of hours and wages over the business cycle in a unique panel of 13 European countries, and document significant history dependence in wages. Workers who experience favorable market conditions during their tenure on the job have higher wages, and work fewer labor hours. Unobserved differences in productivity, such as varying job quality, or match-specific productivity are not likely to explain this variation. The results instead point to the importance of contractual arrangements in wage determination. In economies with decentralized bargaining practices, such arrangements resemble self-enforcing insurance contracts with one-sided commitment (by the employer). On the other hand, in countries with strong unions and centralized wage bargaining, wage behavior is better approximated by full-commitment insurance contracts. The co-movement of hours and wages further confirms a contractual framework with variable worker hours. Despite the strong prevalence of contracts in Europe, however, the elasticity of labor supply is considerably smaller compared to the U.S. labor market.

In this note, I extend the work of Echenique (2012) to show that a model of many-to-many matching with contracts may be embedded into a model of many-to-many matching with wage bargaining whenever (1) all agentsʼ preferences are substitutable and (2) the matching with contracts model is unitary , in the sense that every contractual relationship between a given firm–worker pair is specified in a single contract. Conversely, I show that unitarity is essentially necessary for the embedding result.

50 páginas, 5 figuras, 3 tablas.-- El pdf del artículo es el documento de trabajo., We introduce search unemployment into Melitz's trade model. Firms' monopoly power on product markets leads to strategic wage bargaining. Solving for the symmetric equilibrium we show that the selection effect of trade influences labor market outcomes. Trade liberalization lowers unemployment and raises real wages as long as it improves average productivity. We show that this condition is likely to be met by a reduction in variable trade costs or by entry of new trading countries. Calibrating the model shows that the long-run impact of trade openness on the rate of unemployment is negative and quantitatively significant.

Existing work on wage bargaining predicts more aggressive wage setting under monetary union. This is exemplified by Cukierman and Lippi (2001) who postulate that wages are set having area-wide prices in mind. The insight of aggressive wage behaviour has not been confirmed by the EMU experience, which has been characterised by wage moderation. The present paper investigates the possibility of wage restraint using a monetary union model which, realistically, assumes that trade unions set wages with national prices in mind. Drawing on plausible ranges for all parameter values (and macroeconomic shocks), our simulations show that a monetary union elicits real wages that are broadly comparable to those obtained under monetary autonomy. The confidence bounds around these results are rather wide, in particular including scenarios of wage restraint.

In this paper we study optimal congestion pricing in a wage bargaining model. We first show that, compared to a competitive labour market environment, wage bargaining may lead to substantially different optimal transport taxes. Second, bargaining implies that exogenous increases in congestion levels and in transport taxes raise negotiated wages and reduce employment levels; the strength of these effects depends on the union's attitude towards transport issues. Third, we show that the optimal uniform transport tax positively depends on the impact of congestion on negotiated wages, and negatively on the wage effects of the congestion tax itself. Using a standard specification for union preferences, the optimal transport tax exceeds the marginal external congestion cost to the extent that transport flows include demand by people who have no employment. Finally, if taxes can be differentiated according to trip purpose, the tax structure implies shifting the tax burden away from the employed.

The Rubinstein alternating-offers game shows that the threat point in Nash wage bargaining models should be the inside, instead of the outside, option. We provide a new way to implement inside options by explicitly modeling a utilitarian union’s strike payoff. The solution to the dynamic bargaining system resulting from the endogeneity of the inside option can serve as a basis for richer, though still easily applicable, models of wage bargaining that are more in accordance with their game-theoretical underpinnings. The dynamics of the model also provide a theoretical justification for temporarily delayed labor market responses to policy changes.

In this paper we evaluate the incidence of the tax structure on the labor market. To do so we go beyond the traditional examination of the “level” effect of the fiscal wedge and consider a “composition” effect defined as a payroll tax bias (PTB): the proportion of payroll taxes paid by employees with respect to the one paid by firms. We develop a right-to-manage model encompassing different wage bargaining systems and the incidence of different types of taxes. Controlling for demand-side and supply-side determinants of unemployment, we show that the PTB plays a significant role in explaining unemployment in the continental European countries, but not in the Nordic nor in the Anglo-Saxon ones. We also show that there is no relationship between the incidence of the PTB and unemployment persistence, even though there is a positive relationship between unemployment persistence and the level of the fiscal wedge.

All else equal, higher wages translate into higher inflation. More rigid wages imply a weaker response of inflation to shocks. This view of the wage channel is deeply entrenched in central banks’ views and models of their economies. In this paper, we present a model with equilibrium unemployment which has three distinctive properties. First, using a search and matching model with right-to-manage wage bargaining, a proper wage channel obtains. Second, accounting for fixed costs associated with maintaining an existing job greatly magnifies profit fluctuations for any given degree of wage fluctuations, which allows the model to reproduce the fluctuations of unemployment over the business cycle. And third, the model implies a reasonable elasticity of steady state unemployment with respect to changes in benefits. The calibration of the model implies low profits, but does not require a small gap between the value of working and the value of unemployment for the worker. JEL Classification: E31,E32,E24,J64

We study the design of monetary policy in an estimated model with sticky prices, search and matching frictions, and staggered nominal wage bargaining. We find that the estimated natural rate of unemployment is consistent with the NBER description of the U.S. business cycle, and that the inflation/unemployment trade-off facing monetary policymakers is quantitatively important. We also show that parameter uncertainty has a limited effect on the performance or design of monetary policy, while natural rate uncertainty has more sizeable effects. Nevertheless, policy rules that respond to the output or unemployment gaps are more efficient than rules responding to output or unemployment growth rates, also in the presence of uncertainty about the natural rates.

A recent literature has merged the New Keynesian and the search and matching frameworks, which has allowed the former to analyze the joint dynamics of unemployment and inflation. This paper analyzes optimal monetary policy in this kind of hybrid framework. I show that zero inflation is optimal when all wages are Nash bargained in every period and the economy's steady state is efficient. In the more realistic case in which nominal wage bargaining is staggered, a case against price stability arises: in response to real shocks, the central bank should use price inflation so as to avoid excessive unemployment volatility and excessive dispersion in hiring rates. For a plausible calibration, the welfare loss under the zero inflation policy is about three times as large as under the optimal policy.

Earlier literature on tax competition and policy coordination typically assumes that the labor market is competitive; a description less suitable for Europe, where trade unions have had a strong position in the labor market for a long time. This paper concerns factor income taxation and public good provision in small open economies characterized by capital mobility and imperfect competition in the labor market. We assume that each national government collects public revenues via taxes on labor, capital and profit income, and that the revenues are spent on a public consumption good and a public input good, where the latter enters the economic system in terms of an `externality production factor'. The overall purposes are to characterize the tax and expenditure policies, if decided upon at the national level, and analyze the welfare effects of policy coordination with respect to taxes and public expenditures. Among the results, we show that tax coordination contributes to higher welfare if it reduces the net interest rate and the wage rate, and that the relative overprovision of the public input good derived by Keen and Marchand (1997) in the context of a competitive economy may no longer hold, if the labor market is non-competitive., Working papers series, ISSN 2628-1724, 2006, Heft 23

This paper examines empirically how industry-level wage floors are set in French industry-level wage agreements and how the national minimum wage (NMW) interacts with industry-level wage bargaining. For this, we use a unique dataset containing about 48,000 occupation-specific wage floors, in more than 340 French industries over the period 2006-2014. We find that the NMW has a significant impact on the seasonality and on the timing of the wage bargaining process. Inflation, past sectoral wage increases and real NMW increases are the main drivers of wage floor adjustments; elasticities of wage floors with respect to these macro variables are 0.6, 0.3 and 0.25 respectively. Wage floor elasticities to inflation and to the NMW both decrease along the wage floor distribution but are still positive for all levels of wage floors.

Why do some countries run persistent current account surpluses? Why do others run deficits, often over decades, leading to enduring global financial imbalances? Such persistent imbalances are the root cause of many financial crises and a major source of international economic conflict. We propose that differences in wage-bargaining institutions explain a large share of imbalances through their effect on the trade balance. In countries with coordinated wage bargaining, wage growth can be restrained to ensure competitiveness, leading to long-term trade surpluses. We estimate the contribution of these institutions to trade balances in OECD member countries since 1977 and find ample support for our hypothesis. Although the introduction of the euro has clearly exacerbated the problem, no substantial difference otherwise exists between fixed and floating exchange rates. In other words, internal adjustment in surplus countries trumps external adjustment by deficit countries.

The literature on the determinants of the rate of current account reversion has been limited to examining the role of exchange rate regimes. We propose that the degree of coordination of wage bargaining affects the speed of current account adjustment. Our point estimates are economically and statistically significant, suggesting that fragmented firm-level wage bargaining facilitates external adjustment. We also find a strong negative interaction between the effects of coordination of wage bargaining and exchange rate stability on the rate of current account reversion.

This study proposes a non-cooperative coalitional bargaining game model to analyse wage negotiations between one employer and two workers. Here, randomly selected workers choose whether to negotiate their wage contracts together or separately, considering wage contract externalities. We show that if the two workers are sufficiently complementary or if externalities are more positive, there exists a grand-coalition SSPE of the bargaining game for any discount factor. However, if the two workers are sufficiently substitutable, there is no grand-coalition SSPE for any discount factor. In addition, we provide a sufficient condition for an SSPE to exist, in which each worker selects separate negotiations with the employer.

We assemble a new, quarterly panel dataset of U.S. firms that links firms' investment and financing decisions to their employment and wages. We find that wages and leverage are strongly negatively related, both cross-sectionally and within firms, while the negative link between employment and leverage is smaller and less robust. We interpret these facts in a model that integrates a theory of costly debt and equity financing with rich firm-level dynamics, including labor and capital adjustment frictions and wage setting. Estimation of the model's parameters shows that the model can reconcile several moments relating to debt, wages, employment, and investment. We find that both financing frictions and labor bargaining are important for inducing a negative relation between debt and leverage, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our counterfactuals show that raising financing costs reduces employment and wages, in line with recent reduced-form evidence.

We present an applied general equilibrium (AGE) modelling approach to analyse employment and unemployment effects of labour tax cuts in an economy where wages are determined through firm–union bargaining at the sectoral level. In such a labour market regime, simulations for Germany show that labour tax policies can make only a small contribution to alleviating the problem of persistent unemployment.

The Nash solution has been systematically applied to solve most wage bargaining models. We show that this solution should not be used in a bilateral monopoly model in which wage bargaining takes place under uncertainty over the future state of nature due to the nonfulfillment of the—often neglected—concavity axiom.

The literature on wage bargaining has focused on four bargaining structures: decentralized and simultaneous, decentralized and sequential, centralized and simultaneous and centralized and sequential. The literature analyzes the bargaining structure preferred by both firms and unions, but does not consider the politically preferred bargaining structure. This paper shows how the politically preferred bargaining structure depends on the share of foreign ownership of firms.

This paper studies labor demand and supply interactions between two sectors, one (nonunion) sector with worker–firm bargaining, and one (union) sector with a common wage for all workers, and how the two sectors evolve over time in response to exogenous productivity shocks. Workers' productivities differ and cannot be observed by firms prior to hiring. With identical non-wage costs in the two sectors, equilibria exist with both sectors present. With great upper-tail productivity dispersion there exist two equilibria, one with only union firms and the other with only nonunion firms. When union firms have lower (monitoring and bargaining) costs, both types of firms may coexist and union firms attract all low-productivity workers. A greater union share then improves efficiency and leads to less nonunion-sector wage dispersion. The model helps in understanding recent international wage and employment patterns, such as why some countries have strong and stable unions and small and stable wage dispersions, while other countries have weak and vanishing unions and increasing wage dispersions.

We develop a model of wage bargaining with private information in a duopoly. We investigate how product differentiation and market competition (Bertrand vs. Cournot competition) affect wages and strikes. If bargaining takes place at the industry-level, then both the wage outcome and the strike activity do not depend on the degree of product differentiation whatever the type of market competition. However, if bargaining takes place at the firm-level, then wages and strikes are increasing with the degree of product differentiation, and the strike activity is smaller under Bertrand than under Cournot competition.

From a detailed study of the yearly wage bargaining rounds in Norway and Sweden, we construct time series of five complementary coordination indices. Econometrics is used to evaluate the importance of the coordination indicators for our understanding of the changes in the rates of unemployment in the two countries. The results reveal considerable similarity between the two countries in terms of the estimated effects of macroeconomic variables on unemployment. However, there are also numerically important effects of the wage coordination indices. There is support for the view that it is important to differentiate the indices, since their effects vary.

I analyse the importance of national migration policy and labour market institutions for immigrants’ labour market integration. Results indicate that the sending country structure of immigrants to a country, its ethnic diversity and its wage bargaining institutions as well as product market regulation are the most important national institutions impacting immigrants’ labour market integration. Variables related to the generosity of the welfare state and tax progressivity are, by contrast, only important in selecting migrants with high employment probabilities and migration policy variables remain unimportant altogether. Countries with more centralized wage bargaining, stricter product market regulation and countries with a higher union density, have worse labour market outcomes for their immigrants relative to natives even after controlling for compositional effects. Immigrants with better chances for labour market integration on account of observable characteristics self-select to countries with more centralised wage bargaining and higher minimum wages but a lower coverage rate by collective agreements. Liberal product market regulation, less centralised wage bargaining and ensuring inclusive trade unions thus assist the integration of immigrants in host countries’ labour markets most strongly.

We propose a new VAR identification scheme that enables us to disentangle labor supply shocks from wage bargaining shocks. Identification is achieved by imposing robust signrestrictions that are derived from a New Keynesian model with endogenous labor force participation. According to our analysis on US data over the period 1985-2014, labor supply shocks and wage bargaining shocks are important drivers of output and unemployment both in the short run and in the long run. These results suggest that identification strategies used in estimated New Keynesian models to disentangle labor market shocks may be misguided. We also analyze the behavior of the labor force participation rate through the lenses of our model. We find that labor supply shocks are the main drivers of the participation rate and account for about half of its decline in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

The paper revisits the problem of wage bargaining between a firm and multiple workers. We show that the Subgame Perfect Equilibrium of the extensive-form game proposed by Stole and Zwiebel (1996a) does not imply a profile of wages and profits that coincides with the Shapley values as claimed in their classic paper. We propose an alternative extensive-form bargaining game, the Rolodex Game, that follows a simple and realistic protocol and that, under some mild restrictions, admits a unique Subgame Perfect Equilibrium generating a profile of wages and profits that are equal to the Shapley values. The vast applied literature that refers to the Stole and Zwiebel game to give a game-theoretic foundation to the use of the Shapley values as the outcome of the bargain between a firm and multiple workers should instead refer to the Rolodex game.