This paper looks at the consequences of introducing employment adjustment costs into two standard models of trade unions--the right-to-manage model and the efficient-bargain model. The authors look at how unions affect both the speed of adjustment to equilibrium and the long-run equilibrium....

This paper aims to embed two popular models of trade union behavior, the monopoly model and the efficient bargaining model, in a more general framework. It does this by analyzing sequential bargaining models where wages are determined before employment and the power of the union in the two...

Most economists believe that wage-setting is very important for understanding macroeconomic behavior, but the form of wage equations commonly estimated suffer from problems of identification. The aim of this paper is to consider whether these problems are inevitable and, if they are not, to...

The National Minimum Wage (NMW) that was introduced in April 1999 is sometimes paraded as evidence of the Blair government s commitment to reversing the rise in inequality that was characteristic of the last 25 years.

In the UK the gender pay gap on entry to the labour market is approximately zero but after ten years after labour market entry, there is a gender wage gap of almost 25 log points. This paper explores the reason for this gender gap in early-career wage growth, considering three main hypotheses -...

This paper shows, using data from both the US and the UK, that average plant size is larger in denser markets. However, many popular theories of agglomeration - spillovers, cost advantages and improved match quality - predict that establishments should be smaller in cities. The paper proposes a...

The paper investigates the effect on the wage distribution of the introduction, in April 1999, of the national minimum wage (NMW) in the UK. Because of the structure of UK earnings statistics, it is not straightforward to investigate this and various methods for adjusting the published...

In this paper we present an investigation of unemployment persistence in Japan, the United States and fourteen European economies. We concentrate on the sources of slow adjustment in the labour market, such as sluggishness in labour demand and persistence in the employment and wage targets of...

It is a common belief that the existence of involuntary unemployment implies that wages are too high and that wage moderation should be encouraged as a way to keep unemployment down. This paper argues for a reconsideration of this view by showing that it is possible for a binding minimum wage to...