This paper uses the British Household Panel Survey to investigate when seniority is rewarded by automatic incremental scales. Scales are seen as an alternative to individual merit pay. They are likely to be used when individual productivity is hard to measure, when firms provide all workers with...

Popular characterizations of union preferences assume that the income of laid-off union members is exogenous. There is evidence, however, of intra-union distribution schemes such as severance payments, unemployment insurance, retraining arrangements and early retirement schemes. This paper...

The model developed in this paper examines the relationship between firing costs and unemployment in a simple two-period model with uncertainty. Where there are long-term employment relationships, and where risk-averse workers and risk-neutral firms bargain over wages and firing costs, average...

This paper develops a simple model of employment, non-statutory redundancy pay and wage determination. An interesting feature of this model is that the contract curve is vertical. Some of the predictions of the model are confronted with the available British data on non-statutory firing costs,...