Trade unions tend to reduce the dispersion of wages among their members. Skilled workers may therefore have an incentive to separate from an encompassing union and organize into a separate craft union. In this paper, we examine a theoretical model to gain insight into the determinants of the...

This paper extends the Diamond (1980) model with labor unions to study optimal income taxation and to analyze whether unions can be desirable for income redistribution. Unions bargain with firms over wages in each sector and firms unilaterally determine employment. Unions raise the efficiency...

In flow models of the labor market, wages are determined by negotiations between workers and employers on the surplus value of a realized match. From this perspective our study presents an econometric analysis of the influence of labor market flows on wage formation as alternative to the...

In this paper we derive a structural measure for labor market density based on the Ellison and Glasear (1997) "Index for industry concentration". This labor market density measure serves as a proxy for the number of workers that can reach a certain work area within a reasonal amount of traveling...

In this paper we demonstrate that intra-industry trade (or FDI)between identical countries could produce theobserved deterioration in the relative wages of unskilled workers.This involves a model of North-Northintegration through either increased trade flows or increased MNE-based production....

There has been much attention for the causes of the increase in wageinequality in the United States since the mid seventies. DiNardo,Fortin, and Lemieux (1996) showed that minimum wages can explain 25%. The present paper uses a more general approach requiring noassumptions on how minimum wages...

Estimates of the effect of education on GDP (the social return) have been hard to reconcile with micro evidence on the private return to schooling. We present a simple explanation combining two ideas: imperfect substitution and endogenous skill-biased technological progress and use cross-country...