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...

A basic feature of the industry wage model presented here is a distinction between unionized industries, with collective bargaining and thus a rigid setting framework, and non-unionized industries, where wage determination is more competitive.

For most of the twentieth century, collective bargaining provided the terms on which labour was commonly employed in Britain. However, the quarter century since 1980 has seen the collapse of collectivism as the main way of regulating employment. Our argument is that the tacit settlement between...

We investigate the effects of wage compression through centralized collective bargaining when growth depends on the continual reallocation of labor from older, less productive plants to new, more productive plants.

Der Beitrag skizziert die Entwicklung der Arbeitsbeziehungen in Deutschland seit dem erstmaligen Erscheinen der Zeitschrift „Industrielle Beziehungen“ aus arbeitsrechtlichem Blickwinkel. Dabei zeigt sich, dass es im Koalitionsrecht, im Tarifvertragsrecht, im Arbeitskampfrecht und im...

Der Beitrag untersucht auf der Basis von Fallstudien, standardisierten Befragungen von Beschaeftigten sowie von Personalraeten die Einfuehrung, die Akzeptanz und die Funktionalitaet von leistungsorientierter Bezahlung (LOB) im oeffentlichen Dienst am Beispiel der Kommunen Nordrhein-Westfalens....

The purpose of our research is to investigate whether the high school basketball player is better off attending or forgoing his college career to enter the NBA directly out of high school. We measure “better off” by total salary earned in the first ten years of a player’s NBA career. Using...

The 1993 Income Policy Agreements (concertazione) reformed wage setting institutions in Italy. This change introduced a relevant ability in absorbing macroeconomic shocks and a curb in inflation- ary expectations, at the cost of stagnant aggregate real wages. The firm-level wage premia remained...

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...