A trade union whose purpose is to raise wages above the competitive level may foster economic growth if it succeeds in shifting income away from the owners of capital to the workers and if the workers' marginal propensity to save exceeds that of capitalists. We make this point in an overlapping...

This Paper develops a model in which the interaction between product market imperfections, transportation costs, unions and workers immobility across regions creates a tendency for agglomeration of firms when transportation costs are low. The model fits quite well the European experience. It is...

This Paper surveys the economic literature on the impact of trade unions on innovation. There are many theoretical routes through which unions may have an effect on innovation, for example through their effects on relative factor prices, profitability and their attitudes towards the introduction...

We introduce labour market imperfections (i.e. unions and the existence of a wage floor) in a finance-constrained monetary economy with heterogenous agents and increasing returns to scale due to labour and capital productive externalities. We find that indeterminacy emerges for empirically...

Most treatments of the Great Depression have focused on its onset and its aftermath. In contrast, we take a unified view of the interwar period. We look at the slide into and the emergence from the 1920-21 recession and the roaring 1920s boom, as well as the slide into the Great Depression after...

This paper proposes a conceptual framework to investigate the effects of central bank independence, of the degree of centralization of wage bargaining and of the interaction between those institutional variables, on real wages, unemployment and inflation. The labour market is characterized by...

We examine how a merger affects wages of unionized labour and, in turn, the profitability of a merger under Cournot competition in differentiated products. If unions are plant-specific, we find that a merger is more profitable than in a corresponding model with exogenous wages. In contrast to...

In this paper we construct a simple model of the effects of immigration on the labour market outcomes of natives. In this model, skilled and unskilled labour are substitutes, immigrants are complementary to the former, and wages are determined by bargaining. We are able to prove that,...

Multinational enterprises are able to improve their disagreement profits by setting up foreign production facilities, with adverse consequences for negotiated wages and union utilities. In this paper, we take a new angle at this issue and analyze whether unions can improve their situation by...