In this paper we study the endogenous determination of minimum wage employing a political-economic game-theoretic approach. A major objective of the paper is to clarify the crucial role of the strength of the workers' union and of political culture on the determination of the minimum wage. In...

OBJECTIVES AND MOTIVATION: This paper considers the impact of interactions between fiscal policy and monetary institutions in the presence of unionized labour markets on economic outcomes and welfare in the long run. Two main classes of questions are investigated. First, what is the impact of...

This paper provides a brief overview of the East German employment problem and presents a simple model in which to evaluate two rival policy proposals: wage subsidies and revenue-sharing subsidies. Revenue-sharing subsidies have received little, if any, attention in the ongoing public debate on...

This paper develops a framework for studying the interactions between labour unions, fiscal policy, monetary policy and monopolistically competitive firms. The framework is used to investigate the effects of labour taxes, the replacement ratio, labour market institutions and monetary...

In this paper we analyse the underlying causes behind Spanish unemployment which is now at 24%. We interpret this unfortunate outcome as the result of a series of adverse shocks, compounded by disinflationary policies and by a flawed system of labour market institutions. Our aim is to explain...

This paper studies the effect of economic integration of two regions on the mobility of skilled and unskilled workers across regions and on the resulting location of industrial activity. In particular, it studies what happens when wages in both regions are set by the unions of the ‘West’ –...

What happens when a previously uncovered labour market is regulated? We exploit the introduction of a minimum wage in South Africa and variation in the intensity of this law to identify increases in wages for domestic workers and find no statistically significant effects on the intensive or...

This paper analyzes the contribution of the minimum wage to the well documented rise in earnings inequality in Mexico between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. We find that a substantial part of the growth in inequality, and essentially all the growth in inequality in the bottom end, is due to...

Changes in legislation in mid-80s Portugal provide remarkable conditions for economic analysis, as the minimum wage increased very sharply for a very specific group of workers. Relying on a matched employer-employee panel dataset, we model gross job flows - accessions and separations - in...

In this paper, we present a summary of recent microeconometric results on the evaluation of the effects of active labour market policies on youth employment in France. We focus our discussion on three types of policies: (1) youth employment schemes for out-of-employment and low-skilled young...