This paper extends the small existing theoretical literature on negative campaigning, building on work by Harrington and Hess (1996). While their analysis explores the determinants of negative campaign spending using a classic spatial voting model, this paper relies instead on a probabilistic...

We consider campaign competition in which candidates compete for votes among a continuum of voters by engaging in persuasive efforts that are targetable. Each individual voter is persuaded by campaign effort and votes for the candidate who targets more persuasive effort to this voter. Each...

This paper studies the effects on electoral competition of political parties relying on monetary donations and volunteer labor for their electioneering activities. It also examines whether a recorded decline in party activism increases special-interest influence on party policy platforms....

This paper analyses the link between political strength and public sector wages using a unique matched individual-employer data set for Norwegian local governments during the period 1990-1998. The results indicate that political strength, measured in several ways, has a positive effect on wages,...

We analyze the following question associated with flexible outsourcing under imperfect domestic labour market: How does the implementation of profit sharing influence flexible outsourcing? We show that in general profit sharing has a negative effect on low skilled wage and thus an outsourcing...

This paper analyzes unemployment insurance (UI) schemes in the presence of mobile workers and trade unions at industry or regional level that are capable of internalizing the effect of wage demands on UI contribution rates. We compare two types of existing UI systems. When UI is organized at...

The need to give incentives is usually absent in the literature on minimum wages. However, especially in the service sector it is important how well a job is done, and employees must be incentivized to perform accordingly. Furthermore, many aspects regarding service quality cannot be verified,...

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

We analyze the following questions associated with outsourcing and profit sharing under imperfect labour markets. How does strategic outsourcing influence wage formation, profit sharing and employee effort when firms commit to optimal profit sharing before wage formation or decide for profit...

The difficulty of optimal decision making in uncertain dichotomous choice settings is that it requires information on the expertise of the decision makers (voters). This paper presents a method of optimally weighting voters even without testing them against questions with known right answers....