Many countries suffer from persistently high unemployment rates. The scope for labour market reforms is often limited to measures that hurt neither shareholders nor workers. This paper develops a policy proposal, which allows the government to reduce wage costs without changing the income...

We study firms' incentives to offer profit-sharing schemes in a unionized differentiated goods duopoly in which firms bargain with a sector-wide union or firm-specific unions over the selected remuneration schemes. We show that unions always prefer to form a sector-wide union and conduct...

I show that one reason why employers use profit sharing is to weaken their unions and increase their share of the surplus. I develop a model where by making compensation dependent on output, profit sharing weakens unions’ ability to motivate employees to strike. Unions lose reputation for...

Efficiency wage effects of profit sharing are combined with option values related to stochastic future profit variations. These option effects occur if the workers' profit share is fixed by long-term contracts. The Pareto-improving optimal level of the sharing ratio is calculated for two...