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...

This paper extends Hall’s (1988) methodology to analyse imperfections in both the product and the labour market for firms in the Belgian manufacturing industry over the period 1988-1995. We investigate the heterogeneity in price-cost mark-up and union bargaining power parameters among 18...

Using a unique 3-digit firm-level data set of all medium and large manufacturing enterprises in Bulgaria covering the years 1997-1998, we investigate how wages are affected by ownership status, firm size and rent sharing. Our pooled OLS, panel and first-difference TSLS estimates clearly point to...

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 endow individuals that differ in skill levels and tastes for working with altruistic preferences for redistribution in a voting model where a unidimensional redistributive parameter is chosen by majority voting in a direct democracy. When altruistic preferences are desert-sensitive, i.e. when...

The design of the income transfer program for the lower incomes is a hot issue in current public policy debate. Should we stick to a generous welfare state with a sizeable basic income, but high marginal tax rates for the lower incomes and thus little incentives to work? Or, should we “make...

We propose two axioms that introduce lower bounds into resource monotonicity require- ments for rules for the problem of adjudicating con?icting claims. Suppose the amount to divide increases. The ?rst axiom requires that two claimants whose lower bound changes equally experience an equal change...

We study a two-stage R&D project with an abandonment option. Two types of uncertainty influence the decision to start R&D. Demand uncertainty is modelled as a lottery between a proportional increase and decrease in demand. Technical uncertainty is modelled as a lottery between a decrease and...

This paper presents an alternative implementation of firm-level collective wage bargaining, where bargaining proceeds as a finite sequence of sessions between a firm and a union of variable size. We investigate the impact of such a `gradual' union on the wage-employment contract in an economy...