This paper argues that wage determination is best seen as a kind of rent-sharing in which workers' bargaining power is influenced by conditions in the external labor market. It uses British establishment data from 1984 to show that pay depends upon a blend of insider pressure (including the...

This paper suggests a new test for rent-sharing in the U.S. labor market. Using an unbalanced panel from the manufacturing sector, it shows that a rise in a sector's profitability leads after some years to an increase in the long-run level of wages in that sector. The paper controls for workers'...

The paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the economic effects of profit sharing between workers and firms. It is critical of the case for government subsidization of such sharing schemes. Copyright 1987 by Royal Economic Society.

The determinants of British white-collar pay are investigated using two surveys of establishments and four surveys of employees. It is found that, just as for manual employees, wages are highest in large foreign-owned workplaces with low proportions of part-time and female workers. There is some...

Following A. W. Phillips's (1958) original work on the United Kingdom, applied research on unemployment and wages has been dominated by the analysis of highly aggregated time-series data sets. However, it has proved difficult with such methods to uncover statistically reliable models. This paper...

Although there exists a large literature on the effects of trade unions upon wages, there is no published work that uses microeconomic data on establishments to examine the employment consequences of unionism. This paper addresses this issue with a recent British data set and shows that, even...

This paper estimates that, in 1984, 43 percent of British private sector establishments had some form of profit- related pay. Regression results do not show that these establishments had statistically-significant better financial performance. Cross-ta bulations do not suggest that the...

The paper uses newly available cross-section data to study wage determination in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. The main results are as follows: (1) fear of unemployment substantially depresses pay; (2) there is some evidence of a wage ratchet whereby rates of pay are more flexible upwards...

The paper provides evidence to show that many U.S. labor contracts havelittle or no private unemployment insurance provision. A model of an optional contract under asymmetric information, with no private unemployment insurance, is presented. Underemployment and involuntaryunemployment may...