How are wages set in an open economy? What role is played by demand pressure, international competition, and structural factors in the labour market? How important is nominal wage rigidity and exchange rate policy for the medium term evolution of real wages and competitiveness? To answer these...

In an analysis of the formation of unions within a single firm, this paper addresses conditions under which encompassing unions form. It is shown that a production function satisfying decreasing marginal productivity leads to the formation of encompassing unions. This result holds for different...

The paper examines the effects of an environmental tax reform in a model of a small open economy with decentralised wage bargaining and monopolistically competitive firms. The economy includes a tradable sector as well as a non-tradable sector and features unemployment in general equilibrium....

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of wage compression for the gender wage gap in Sweden during the period 1968-1991. We find that the effects of changes in the wage structure on women's wages have varied over time and have had partly counteracting effects. Changes in industry wage...

According to the standard union bargaining model, unemployment benefits should have big effects on wages, but product market prices and productivity should play no role in the wage bargain. We formulate an alternative strategic bargaining model, where labour and product market conditions...

We analyze the effects of increased immigration of foreign workers on the unionization rates of native workers in Austrian firms over the period 2002-2012. Our results suggest that lower union density of natives' in firms with more foreign workers is driven not by natives leaving unions, but by...

The role and importance of employee organizations (i.e., unions) on policies concerning international migration have been studied extensively for decades. However, we know very little about the strategies of the organized interests of health care professionals. This paper will contribute to...

Labour market developments have Germany undergone two shocks: German reunification in the early 1990s, and the Hartz reforms in the early 2000s. They separated the German labour market into the traditional rather corporatist labour market segment, characterised by a high degree of coordination,...

Till the early-1990s the collectively-bargained labor contract (between the trade-union that presented the employees, and the employer or the employers'-association) was the norm, granting salaried workers a stable and protected labor contract. Thereafter, and more significantly after 1995, the...

This paper models corporatism as affecting both the preferences of the parties involved as well as the rules of the game. The analysis is conducted in a union-government game on determining wages and unemployment benefits. The result indicates that international conditions might be important for...