Empirical studies have emphasized three important factors in firm-labor relationships: (a) organization costs of workers, (b) management opposition against workers' organizing drives, (c) the possibility of productivity enhancing effects due to voice/response reasons. In this paper the interplay...

The conservative central banker has come under attack recently. Explicitly modeling the interaction of a trade union with monetary policy, it has been argued that the standard solution to the inflationary bias in monetary policy might actually be welfare reducing if the trade union has an...

Building on the right-to-manage model of collective bargaining, this paper tries to infer union power from the observed results in wage setting. It derives a time-varying indicator of union strength and confronts it with annual data for Germany. The results show that union power was relatively...

Building on the right-to-manage model of collective bargaining, this paper tries to infer union power from the observed results in wage setting. It derives a time-varying indicator of union strength and confronts it with annual data for Germany. The results show that union power was relatively...

Key aspects in economic integrated areas like the EU are both the internationalization of productive activities, which usually occurs in unionized countries, and the ongoing process of labor market integration. In a symmetric two-country duopoly model with integrated product markets, this paper...

Despite declining bargaining power, unions continue to generate a wage premium. Some feel collective bargaining has had its day. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have recently called for the removal of bargaining rights from workers in the name of wage and employment flexibility, yet...

This paper addresses the design of the machinery of collective bargaining from the perspective of the needs of microeconomic and macroeconomic flexibility. In the former context, greater attention is given over to enterprise flexibility than external adjustment. In the latter context, close...

The return of social pacts in the context of the current economic crisis, as seen in southern European countries, invites the revival of the discussion about the development of social dialogue practice in its specific context. Based on a longitudinal analysis we examine the agenda of Spanish...

This article investigates the transformations of the French unionism and of the French system of industrial relations over the last years and their probable future. It shows: an evolution from a militant unionism to a professionalized trade unionist system; the decline of collective actions; the...

This article discusses the current characteristics of trade unionism in Italy. First, however, attention is paid to the initial imprinting of the model, which stemmed from the circumstances in which the trade unions were reconstituted at the end of WWII, and whose far-reaching consequences are...