This paper explores the role that employers’ associations may play in centralized wage bargaining processes. It thereby adds to the literature on labor markets, in which the relationship between union behavior and unemployment has been explored quite extensively, while employers’...

This paper explores the anticompetitive effects that wage determination between an employers. association and the industry.s labor union may have when wages are generally binding. It is shown that employers. associations can, under certain circumstances, use generally binding standard wages to...

This paper examines how unionization structures that differ in the degree of wage centralization affect firms' incentives to increase labor productivity. We distinguish three modes of unionization with increasing degree of centralization: (1) “Decentralization” where wages are determined...

Der vorliegende Beitrag interpretiert die Standortentscheidung von Unternehmen als den Abschluß eines impliziten Franchisevertrages zwischen dem Standort als Franchisegeber und dem Unternehmen als Franchisenehmer. Standorte bieten ein Bündel von Dienstleistungen wie die Nutzung von...

In the literature on international trade, very little attention has been given to informational asymmetries between firms and consumers with respect to product quality. The few economic models that analyze the question of how asymmetric information about product quality might affect trade flows...

This paper presents a set of panel data to study the diffusion of retail checkout barcode scanning in ten European countries over the period 1981-1996. Estimates from a standard diffusion model suggest that countries differ most in the long-run diffusion level of barcode scanning and less in...