This paper investigates the impact of a collective agreement stipulating a one shot increase in establishment-specific wage levels in a public-sector setting where wages otherwise are set according to individualized wage bargaining. The agreement stipulated that wages should increase in...

Several countries extend collective bargaining agreements to entire sectors, therefore binding non-subscriber workers and employers. These extensions may address coordination issues but may also distort competition by imposing sector-specific minimum wages and other work conditions that are not...

In Portugal, as in many other countries in continental Europe, the collective wage agreements between trade unions and employer associations that define wage floors for specific job titles are systematically extended to the whole industry. This means that many firms are obliged to increase the...

This paper studies the impact of downward wage rigidity on wage dynamics and employment flows after the outbreak of major recessions over the last 30 years in Spain. Downward wage rigidity stems from collective agreements, which set province-industry-skill specific minimum wage floors for all...

This paper studies the impact of downward wage rigidity on wage and employment dynamics after the outbreak of major recessions in Spain. Downward wage rigidity stems from collective agreements, which set province-sector-skill specific minimum wage floors for all workers. By exploiting variation...

The present paper has two aims. The first one concerns primarily an issue of method. I set up and analyse an explicitly stochastic model of the optimal behaviour of a firm, which recruits from a search labour market. The second aim of my paper concerns very much an issue of substance in...

Several authors have proposed staggered wage bargaining as a way to introduce sticky wages into search and matching models while preserving individual rationality. I evaluate the quantitative implications of such an approach. I feed through a series of estimated shocks from US data into a search...

A perceived need to increase nominal wage flexibility as a substitute for domestic monetary policy and a tendency to less wage moderation are likely to promote bargaining co-ordination and social pacts in the EMU. But such co-ordination is not likely to be sustainable in the long run, as it...

We study the impact of graduating in a recession in Flanders (Belgium), i.e. in a rigid labor market. In the presence of a high minimum wage, a typical recession hardly influences the hourly wage of low educated men, but reduces working time and earnings by about 4.5% up to twelve years after...

We study the impact of graduating in a recession in Flanders (Belgium), i.e. in a rigid labor market. In the presence of a high minimum wage, a typical recession hardly influences the hourly wage of low educated men, but reduces working time and earnings by about 4.5% up to twelve years after...