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 coordination and social pacts in the EMU. But such coordination is not likely to be sustainable in the long run, as it...

We study the impact of tax policy on wage negotiations, workers' effort, employment, output and welfare when workers' effort is only imperfectly observable. We show that the different wage-setting motives - rent sharing and effort incentives - reinforce the effects of partial tax policy measures...

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...

Collective bargaining agreements have been said to decrease deployment since the work of Calmfors and Driffill (1988). We investigate empirically whether opening clauses, flexible elements that have been introduced to reduce the decline in coverage, can indeed minimise this effect and increase...

This paper analyses the impact of opening clauses in German collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) on job flows. Opening clauses should provide firms with more flexibility in economic crises. Therefore, firms operating under a CBA with opening clauses are expected to have lower job turnover, in...

In 2012, a new law allowed firms in Portugal to reduce the overtime premium paid by half. Until then, as in other countries, premiums were subject to a minimum level. We analyse matched panel data, including worker-level (base and overtime) hours and pay, to study the effects of the resulting...