Public sector unionism grew rapidly during the late 1960s and early 1970s following the passage of state collective bargaining laws. During the last thirty years, public sector membership has grown at roughly the same rate as the overall workforce. This paper provides a descriptive overview of...

An important aspect of the impact of the economic crisis is how pay in the public sector responds – in the face not only of the evolution of pay in the private sector, but also extreme pressure on public spending (of which pay is a very large proportion) as fiscal deficits soar. What are the...

A rich but tractable variant of the Burdett-Mortensen model of wage setting behavior is formulated and a dynamic market equilibrium solution to the model is defined and characterized. In the model, firms cannot commit to wage contracts. Instead, the Markov perfect equilibrium to the wage setting...

We show that wage setting in the Colombian manufacturing industry is not fundamentally driven by labor productivity in contrast to the standard theoretical prediction. On the contrary, internal institutional arrangements – payroll taxation, the minimum wage or the price wedge between...

We study how different payment modes influence the effectiveness of gift exchange as a contract enforcement device. In particular, we analyze how horizontal fairness concerns affect performance and efficiency in an environment characterized by contractual incompleteness. In our experiment, one...

In this paper, we discuss recent evidence from economic experiments that study the impact of social preferences on workplace behavior. We focus on situations in which a single employer interacts with multiple employees. Traditionally, equity and efficiency have been seen as opposing aims in such...

A growing literature stresses the importance of reciprocity, especially for employment relations. In this paper, we study the interaction of different payment modes with reciprocity. In particular, we analyze how equal wages affect performance and efficiency in an environment characterized by...

How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals’ earnings in 31 different data sets from sixteen countries, from which...

Much of the political economy analysis of reform focuses on the conflict of interest between groups that stand to gain or lose from the competing policy proposals. In reality, there is also a lot of disagreement about the working of the policy: in addition to conflicting interests, conflicting...