We analyse the effects of demographic and education changes on unemployment rates in Europe. Using a panel of European countries for the 1980-2000 period - disaggregated by cohort, gender and education -, we empirically test the economic effects of two stylised facts that have occurred in recent...

The long-term equilibrium unemployment rate has returned to the center of the economic debate in France. It derives from two macroeconomic equations. Wages are the result of wage bargaining on the labor market (wage-setting equation) and firms set the corresponding level of employment...

This article focuses on the role of unionized members in parliament. Unions have not been successful in increasing their monopoly power during the last decades in the US. Similarly, a recent study for Germany comes to the result that union members in the Bundestag cannot be seen as the...

Although coordination of wage bargaining probably affects entry barriers and competition in product markets, research on price determination has typically not considered such factors. We argue that the price markup depends on wage setting institutions and present empirical evidence in form of...

This paper proposes a conceptual framework to investigate the effects of central bank independence, of the degree of centralization of wage bargaining and of the interaction between those institutional variables, on real wages, unemployment and inflation, in a framework in which unions are...

This paper develops a two-sector endogenous growth model with a dual labour market. Trade unions strive for the extraction of as high a rent as possible from the growth generating imperfectly competitive primary sector. This union behaviour results in a non-competitive wage differential between...

We consider a theoretical model in which unions not only take the outside option into account, but also base their wage-setting decisions on an internal reference, called the fairness reference. Wage and employment outcomes and the shape of the aggregate wage-setting curve depend on the weight...

This paper analyzes how the frictions in the labor market simultaneously affect the economic growth and the long run unemployment. To this goal, we develop a schumpeterian model of endogenous growth: agents have the choice between employment and R and D activities. Unemployment is caused by the...

The paper investigates the impacts of demographic change on the financial sustainability of a pay-as-you-go social security system in an economy with unemployment caused by trade unions. Using a simple two-period overlapping generations approach, it can be shown that the trade union behavior...