China's transition to a market economy with ‘Chinese characteristics' has fundamentally transformed the foundations of its labour market and the relationship between state, labour, and capital. Since the 2000s, there has been a proliferation of labour laws, policies, and institutions for...

The technique of permitting unions to derogations from core employment standards has been increasingly advocated as a means of making labour law more flexible while still protecting workers since the union is considered to bring countervailing power in support of workers' preferences. The new...

The temporary placement industry has seen remarkable growth both in France and in Quebec over the past few decades. Interim workers hired by temporary work agencies to provide work services within end user businesses have seen an increase in their ranks over the past twenty years. However, if...

Recent fights for a $15-an-hour minimum wage at Walmart and in the fast-food industry have interested academics, captivated the press, and energized the public. For good reason. The campaigns upend conventional wisdom about what unions do (help workers win collective bargaining rights) and why...

This paper studies the incentives for firms and unions to establish profit sharing contracts as a strategic instrument in a Cournot product market oligopoly with decentralized and centralized wage bargaining. Therefore, we examine the stability of these institutional arrangements and show that...

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...

This paper considers a small open economy with an input-output industrial structure that creates vertical linkages and multiple equilibria. An imperfect labor market is introduced by assuming unionized labor. It is shown that a deregulation of the labor market may trigger a large discontinuous...

Gewerkschaften wird häufig ein baldiges Verschwinden prophezeit. Sie wären das Opfer von Strukturwandel, Globalisierung, dezentralisierten Tarifverhandlungen und veränderten Einstellungen der Arbeitnehmer. Doch sind eher der demografische Wandel, die schwierige Rekrutierung junger...

This paper applies several extensions of Hall's (1988) methodology to analyse imperfections in both the product and the labour market for firms in the Belgian manufacturing industry over the period 1988-1995. We investigate (1) the heterogeneity in mark-up and bargaining power parameters among...

We estimate how trade openness affects the relationship between wages, labour productivity and foreign wages using sector-level time series for several EU member states. In some countries wages became less responsive to foreign wages as trade costs declined. We show this counter-intuitive result...