This paper sets up a general oligopolistic equilibrium model with multi-product firms and union wage setting in a subset of industries. By claiming a wage premium, labor unions enforce a decline in firm scale and scope and thus dampen industrial output, with negative feedback effects on the...

This paper sets up a general oligopolistic equilibrium model with unionized labor markets. By accounting for productivity dierences, the model features prot and wage dierentials across industries. We use this setting to study the impact of trade liberalization on employment, welfare, and the...

We analyze a market game where firms choose capacities under uncertainty about future market conditions and make output choices after uncertainty has unraveled. We show existence and uniqueness of equilibrium under imperfect competition and establish that capacity choices by strategic firms are...

We analyze the effect of price caps on equilibrium production and welfare in oligopoly under demand uncertainty. We find that high price caps always increase production and welfare as compared to the situation without price cap. Price caps close to marginal cost may lead to zero production,...

If duopolistic firms can choose their strategy variable, uncertainty about demand conditions and the degree of substitutability have countervailing effects on variable choice. High uncertainty favors prices, while close substitutability favors quantities. For intermediate values, a hybrid...

The existing literature on "two-sided markets" addresses partici- pation externalities, but so far it has neglected pecuniary externalities between competing platforms. In this paper we build a model that incorporates both externalities. In our setup di®erentiated platforms compete in...

Using data from the social survey ALLBUS for West Germany in the period 1980 to 2006, this paper demonstrates that union members are on average older than non-unionized employees. The probability of being unionized shows the inverted U-shaped pattern in age conjectured by Blanchflower (BJIR...

An empirical analysis of various waves of the ALLBUS social survey shows that union density fell substantially in Germany from 1980 to 2004. Such a negative trend can be observed for men and women and for different groups of the workforce. Regression estimates indicate that the probability of...

An empirical analysis of various waves of the ALLBUS social survey shows that the level and the structure of unionization has become more and more similar in eastern and western Germany in the period 1992 to 2000. The originally high level of union density in eastern Germany has dropped below...

A large number of potential determinants of union membership, which often can be interpreted in terms of costs and benefits, have been incorporated into economists' traditional supply and demand framework or into new models of an individual's decision to unionise (such as social custom theory)....