The paper uses a bilateral trade gravity model to evaluate the effects of freedom of association and collective bargaining (FACB) rights and democracy on exports, evaluating exports by labour intensity (using several classifications of industries by labour-intensity) for the 1993 to 1999 period....

The interaction between labor unions and international competition has received a lot of attention. In the first decade of the 21st century, increasing number of companies in unionized oligopolistic industries has shifted production abroad. However, the issue of outsourcing in the context of a...

Trade unions are often argued to cause allocative inefficiencies and to lower welfare. We analyze whether this evaluation is also justified in a Cournot-oligopoly with free but costly entry. If input markets are competitive and output per firm declines with the number of firms (business...

This paper analyses the impact of immigration on the welfare of the native population in an economy that consists of skilled and unskilled workers. Due to unionisation, the wage rate in the market for unskilled labour is above the competitive level. For a given skill endowment of the native...

The paper analyses the welfare effects of immigration when some sectors of the economy are characterized by wage bargaining between unions and employers. We show that immigration is unambiguously beneficial if the wage elasticity of labor demand in the competitive sectors is smaller than in the...