Trade unions tend to reduce the dispersion of wages among their members. Skilled workers may therefore have an incentive to separate from an encompassing union and organize into a separate craft union. In this paper, we examine a theoretical model to gain insight into the determinants of the...

In a corporatist country, of which the Netherlands is an example, wages should not be distinguished by union membership status, but by the bargaining regime. Four bargaining regimes can be distinguished: (i) company level bargaining, (ii) industry level bargaining, (iii) mandatory extension of...

This study documents two empirical regularities, using data for Denmark and Portugal. First, workers who are hired last, are the first to leave the firm (Last In, First Out; LIFO). Second, workers’ wages rise with seniority (= a worker’s tenure relative to the tenure of her colleagues). We...

We present an experimental test of a shirking model where monitoring intensity is endogenous and effort a continuous variable. Wage level, monitoring intensity and consequently the desired enforceable effort level are jointly determined by the maximization problem of the firm. As a result,...

This paper tests the pro-competitive effect of trade in the product and labour markets of UK manufacturing sectors between 1988 and 2003 using a two-stage estimation procedure. In the first stage, we use data on 9820 firms from twenty manufacturing sectors to simultaneously estimate mark-up and...

Embedding the efficient bargaining model into the R. Hall (1988) approach for estimating price-cost margins shows that both imperfections in the product and labor markets generate a wedge between factor elasticities in the production function and their corresponding shares in revenue. This...

We introduce collective bargaining in a static framework where the firm and its risk-neutral employees negotiate over wages in a non-binding contract setting. Our main result is the equivalence between the non-binding collective equilibrium wage-employment contract and the equilibrium contract...

If distortions in the labour market lead to inefficiently high

Labor market theories allowing for search frictions make marked predictions on the effect of the degree of frictions on wages. Often, the effect is predicted to be negative. Despite the popularity of these theories, this has never been tested. We perform tests with matched worker-firm data. The...

We analyse a model of equilibrium directed search in a large labour market. Each worker, observing the wages posted at all vacancies, makes a fixed, finite number of applications, a. We allow for the possibility of ex post competition should more than one vacancy want to hire the same worker....