We study how unionization affects competitive selection between heterogeneous firms when wage negotiations can occur at the firm or at the profit-centre level. With productivity specific wages, an increase in union power has: (i) a selection-softening; (ii) a counter-competitive; (iii) a...

Foreign producer services can provide substantial benefits for domestic firms. We build on earlier monopolistic-competition models of intermediate producer services in this paper. Results show that: (1) while foreign services are partial-equilibrium substitutes for domestic skilled labour, they...

We develop a multi-country model with imperfect labour markets to study the effect of labour market frictions on bilateral trade flows. We use a framework that allows for goods trade and capital mobility and show that labour market imperfections exert opposite effects in the absence of capital...

When the world economy was recently hit by a severe recession, governments all over the world reacted by initiating stimulus packages. Some countries (among them, most notably, China and the US) tried to put special emphasis on their home industries by including `Buy National' clauses into the...

We analyze the impact of labour market rigidities on tax competition between two imperfectly integrated countries. Following a shift from a competitive to a unionized labour market in both countries, the capital tax can be adjusted upward in the country with the less rigid labour market, whereas...

This paper examines the effects of trade liberalization between symmetric countries on the skill premium. I introduce skilled and unskilled labour in a model of trade with heterogeneous firms à la Melitz (2003) and assume a production technology such that more productive firms are more skill...

This paper implements a fair wage constraint into an analytically tractable core-periphery agglomeration model. This enables us to study the role of imperfect labour markets for the pattern of agglomeration. In the short run, a marginal increase in fair wage preferences leads to an unambiguous...

We investigate the impact of alternative unionization structures on firms' incentives to invest on cost-reducing R&D and to form Research Joint Ventures (RJVs), in the presence of R&D spillovers. We show that if firms invest non-cooperatively and spillovers are low, R&D investments are higher...

A link between unionization and research and development rates (research and development expenditures divided by output) is tested for in thirteen aggregate Canadian industries. A balanced panel of thirteen industries covering 1968 to 1986 reveals a negative relationship between industry...

Evidence on the effect of product market competition on unionized wages is mixed. In this paper we show theoretically that the result may reflect genuine heterogeneity in the response of union wages to product market conditions. For low levels of unionization, union bargaining power may actually...