From a theoretical viewpoint, there can be market failures resulting in an underprovision of occupational health and safety. Works councils may help mitigate these failures. Using establishment data from Germany, our empirical analysis confirms that the incidence of a works council is...

Rapid growth in productivity combined with increasing wage dispersion in some countries, notably Anglo-Saxon, has been the subject of numerous studies. The main hypothesis in the literature is that an increased skill premium provides a link between productivity growth and inequality. If this...

We derive aggregate supply (AS) relationships for an intermediate-run macro model.The wage-price spiral provides the conceptual framework for a synthesis of different contesting theoretical and empirical perspectives on the AS curve: the Phillips curve model (PCM) and the wage-price equilibrium...

A standard model of equilibrium unemployment consists of static equations for real wage ambitions (wage curve) and real wage scope (price curve), which jointly determine the NAIRU. The heuristics of the model states that unless the rate of unemployment approaches the NAIRU from any given initial...

Previous empirical literature has shown that technological change can be considered the main cause of the skill bias (increase in the number of highly skilled workers) exhibited by manufacturing employment in developed countries over the last decades. However, recent papers have also introduced...

We present a growth model in which R&D increases productivity, union-firm bargaining determines the distribution of rents and the government can support unions by labour market regulation. We show that if unions are initially very strong, regulation increases only the workers? profit share and...

In a two-country model with trade driven by comparative advantages, it is considered how imperfectly competitive labour markets are affected by lower frictions in international goods trade. Easier goods trading is equivalent to increased mobility of employment across countries and thus a change...

This study is concerned with the development of a theoretical model and its empirical application to the estimation of the interaction between firms and trade union in determining wages and employment. The focus is on analyzing the effects of unions? demands on the firm?s choice of factors of...

In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of employment determination in four transition economies as they move from central planning to a market economy in the early 1990s. We use firm level panel data sets from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia to estimate dynamic...

Using quantile regressions and a rich cross section data set for German manufacturing plants, this paper reports that the impact of works councils on labor productivity varies along the conditional distribution of value added per employee. It emerges that the positive and statistically...