The paper examines the implications of an important aspect of the ongoing reorganization of work – the move from occupational specialization towards multi-tasking – for centralized wage bargaining. The analysis shows how, on account of this reorganization, centralized bargaining becomes...

The paper analyzes a variety of government policies that can stimulate employment when unemployment is generated through the conflicting of interest between insiders and outsiders. It also provides guidelines for identifying policies that may be ineffective. We show how supply side policies can...

The paper examines the determinants of the division of labour within firms. It provides an explanation of the pervasive change in work organization away from the traditional functional departments and towards multi-tasking and job rotation. Whereas the existing literature on the division of...

This paper explores the implications of the ongoing reorganization of firms for inequality in the labour market. We show how recent technological advances in physical and human capital can lead to the breakdown of occupational barriers, creating demands for new combinations of skills, and...

The paper presents a stochastic insider-outsider model that accounts for the following stylized facts: (1) unemployment rates display a high degree of serial correlation, or `persistence'; (2) the average rate of unemployment has been higher in the United States than in Europe over the 1950s and...

We present a theory of involuntary unemployment which explains why the unemployed workers ("outsiders") are unable or unwilling to find jobs even though they are prepared to work for less than the prevailing wages of incumbent workers ("insiders"). The outsiders do not underbid the insiders...

The paper shows how prolonged price inertia can arise in a macroeconomic system in which there are temporary price rigidities as well as production lags in the use of intermediate goods. In this context, changes in product demand -- generated, say, by changes in the money supply -- have...

The paper suggests alternatives to the Harris-Todaro theory to explain unemployment in segmented labour markets. We focus on a labour market with a perfectly competitive secondary sector and an imperfectly competitive primary sector, the latter combining salient features of the efficiency-wage,...

This Paper presents a new approach to the theory of the firm by identifying factor complementarities as central to the determination of the firm’s boundaries. The factor complementarities may take a variety of forms: technological and informational complementarities, as well as economies of...

In an analysis of the risk-sharing properties of different types of pension systems, we show that only fixed-fee pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension systems can provide risk sharing for living individuals. Under some circumstances, however, other PAYG pension systems can enhance the expected welfare of...