An advantage of collective wage agreement is that search and business-stealing externalities can be internalized. A disadvantage is that it takes more time before an optimal allocation is reached because more productive firms (for a particular worker type) can no longer signal this by posting...

This paper explores the possibility of privately inefficient job separations due to bargaining friction and its implications for the unemployment dynamics. I propose a simple specification of bargaining friction by including bargaining wedges in the standard Nash bargaining model. Such...

An advantage of collective wage agreement is that search and business-stealing externalities can be internalized. A disadvantage is that it takes more time before an optimal allocation is reached because more productive firms (for a particular worker type) can no longer signal this by posting...

A natural holdup problem arises in a market with search frictions: firms have to make a range of investments before finding their employees and larger investments translate into higher wages. In particular, when wages are determined by ex post bargaining, the equilibrium is always inefficient:...