In a two-country reciprocal dumping model, with one country unionized, we analyze how wage setting and firm location are influenced by trade liberalization. We show that trade liberalization can induce FDI, which is at odds with conventional theoretical wisdom and cannot happen in a...

We examine how a downstream merger affects input prices and, in turn, the profitability of a such a merger under Cournot competition with differentiated products. Input suppliers can be interpreted as ordinary upstream firms, or trade unions organising workers. If the input suppliers are...

We analyse the question of optimal taxation in a dual economy, when the government is concerned about the distribution of labour income. Income inequality is caused by the presence of sunk capital investments, which creates a ‘good jobs’ sector due to the capture of quasi-rents by trade...

We analyse how different labour market institutions - employment protection versusflexicurity - affect technology adoption in unionised firms. We consider both trade unions’ incentives to oppose or endorse labour-saving technology, and firms’ incentives to invest in such technology. We find...

We analyze unionized firms’ incentives to outsource intermediate goods production to foreign (low-cost) subcontractors. Such outsourcing leads to increased wages for the remaining in-house production. We find that stronger unions, which imply higher domestic wages, reduce incentives for...

We study how incentives for North-South technology transfers in multinational enterprises are affected by labour market institutions. If workers are collectively organised, incentives for technology transfers are partly governed by firms’ desire to curb trade union power. This will affect not...

This paper studies the interaction between public and private health care provision in a National Health Service (NHS), with free public care and costly private care. The health authority decides whether or not to allow private provision and sets the public sector remuneration. The physicians...

The purpose of this article is to analyze how competitive forces may influence the way media firms like TV channels raise revenue. A media firm can either be financed by advertising revenue, by direct payment from the viewers (or the readers, if we consider newspapers), or by both. We show that...

We consider a model of a TV oligopoly where TV channels transmit advertising and viewers dislike such commercials. We show that advertisers make a lower profit the larger the number of TV channels. If TV channels are sufficiently close substitutes, there will be underprovision of advertising...

We analyze strategic interactions between two competing distributors of an independent TV channel. Consistent with most of the relevant markets, we assume that the distributors set end-user prices while the TV channel sets advertising prices. Within this framework we show that the distributors...