In oligopolistic industries, increased cost saving opportunities via offshoring have a moderating effect on trade unions. In order to discourage mobile firms from leaving the country, unions accept lower sector wages. In effect, the negotiated wage becomes independent of workers' bargaining...

This paper sets up a general oligopolistic equilibrium trade model for two integrated countries that are similar in all respects except of the prevailing labor market institutions. In one country, the labor market is perfectly competitive, while in the other country labor unions are active in a...

We analyse how different labour market institutions - employment protection versus flexicurity - affect technology adoption in unionised firms. We consider both trade unions' incentives to oppose or endorse labour-saving technology, and firms' incentives to invest in such technology. We find...

This paper investigates whether the higher prevalence of South multinational enterprises (MNEs) in risky developing countries may be explained by the experience that they have acquired of poor institutional quality at home. We confirm the intuition provided by our analytical model by empirically...

We study how incentives for North-South technology transfers in multinational enterprises are affected by labour market institutions. If workers are collectively organised, incentives for technology transfers are partly governed by firms' desire to curb trade union power. This will affect not...

This paper analyses tax competition between a unionised and a non-unionised country for the location of an outside firm. We show that unionisation offers an extra incentive for the government to attract a foreign competitor to a concentrated domestic market, in order to affect the behaviour of...

Ogawa et al. (2006) analyze capital tax competition in a fixed-wage approach and show that the original results of Zodrow and Mieszkowski (1986) are not preserved in the presence of unemployment. In the present paper we challenge this view and investigate capital tax competition for some...

We analyze union behavior in a model with membership dynamics and compare the labor market outcomes to static union models. Based on empirical findings we modify standard models and show that the well-known result that static models overstate distortions caused by unions only holds in the...

We show the effects of the bargaining power of labour unions on product innovation under decentralised and centralised wage bargaining. In this context, we show the implications of preference function, which affects the market size. A higher union bargaining power increases innovation if...

Unions appear to have an aversion to wage disparities among their members, leading to wage compression. This paper analyses the consequences of this for income tax policy. In a two-sector general equilibrium model we highlight the tradeoff between correcting the resource misallocation created by...