In this paper we construct a simple model of the effects of immigration on the labour market outcomes of natives. In this model, skilled and unskilled labour are substitutes, immigrants are complementary to the former, and wages are determined by bargaining. We are able to prove that,...

In this paper we develop a fully game-theoretic version of the right-to-manage model of firm-level bargaining where strategic interactions among firms are explicitly recognized. Our main aim is to investigate how equilibrium wages and employment react to changes in the labour and product...

This paper investigates economic determinants and effects of aggregate union membership in the Federal Republic of Germany. We establish that in the long run, high union membership levels coincide not only with a large labour force, but also with a high level of real wages, a small dispersion of...

While ageing is accepted as a major problem for most industrialized societies, its labour market consequences are not yet fully understood. This paper analyses the effects of changes in the age composition of the Federal Republic of Germany on the incidence of unemployment in different sex-age...

Standard economic reasoning based on competitive labour markets suggests that migrant inflow will unambiguously lead to allocative gains for the native population of a host country. Even abstracting from the costs of integration, however, this result is not robust when important labour market...

In contrast to the United States or the United Kingdom where union status is generally tied to the job, the typical unionized worker in Germany is a member of an industry union and there is no direct institutional link between union membership and the worker's wage. Using micro data from the...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labour market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

Empirical evidence on the labour market performance of immigrants shows that migrant workers suffer from an initial earnings disadvantage compared to observationally equivalent native workers, but that their subsequent earnings tend to increase faster than native earnings. Economists usually try...

This paper analyzes the strikingly different response of unemployment to the Great Recession in France and Spain. Their labor market institutions are similar and their unemployment rates just before the crisis were both around 8%. Yet, in France, unemployment rate has increased by 2 percentage...

This paper analyzes the effect of having a large gap in firing costs between permanent and temporary workers in a dual labour market on TFP development at the firm level. We propose a simple model showing that, under plausible conditions, both temporary workers' effort and firms' temp-to-perm...