In oligopolistic industries that are unionised and may be affected by offshoring, falling offshoring costs have a moderating effect on trade unions. They will accept lower sector wages in order to discourage mobile forms from leaving the country. Since such wages are independent of the workers'...

This paper discusses the costs and benefits of welfare state intervention in the labour market, and argues that many forms of intervention can be justified for efficiency reasons. The paper reviews recent evidence on income inequality and income mobility, and it discusses labour market reforms...

In a model with a unionised immobile labour force we analyse how labour taxes and transfers towards unemployed workers are optimally chosen when a welfare maximising government faces oligopolistic and partly mobile firms. We consider two polar types of government: one whose objective consists of...

In oligopolistic industries, increased cost saving opportunities via offshoring have a moderating effect on trade unions. In order to discourage mobile firms from leaving the country, unions accept lower sector wages. In effect, the negotiated wage becomes independent of workers’ bargaining...

Previous empirical studies have found a positive relationship between the size of legislature and the size of government. Those studies, however, do not adequately address the concerns of endogeneity. In contrast, this paper uses variation in legislature size induced by statutory council size...

A rich array of institutional diversity makes the United States an excellent place to study the relationship between political institutions and public policy outcomes. This Paper has three main aims. First, it reviews existing empirical evidence on the relationship between institutional rules,...