In the mid ninetees unemployment substantially decreased in some EMU-countries, notably in Ireland, Spain and the Netherlands. One important factor underlying this development is wage moderation. This paper investigates wage formation and wage development. Using a theoretical wage bargaining...

Americans generally prefer freedom to coercion, high incomes to low ones, and individual decision-making to collective resolution of issues. For these reasons, they generally do not like laws that constrain their labor market behavior and force them to join collectives of other workers to...

The public policy of the United States is broadly in favor of competition. Our antitrust laws are premised on the idea that in the absence of such legislation private interests would seek to create monopolies, fix prices, restrain trade, and stifle competition. Moreover, the federal government,...

In this paper we show that higher flexibility, measured by lower wage and price mark-ups leads to reduced inflationary pressures, increase in competitiveness, and higher output. A rational expectation and a learning version of the ECB's New Multi-Country Model are used to understand plausible...

When it was passed, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act sought to address the “evils” of underpay and overwork by establishing a minimum wage and requiring premium overtime pay. However, today's low-wage, hourly workers more often face underwork than overwork. In this paper, we examine the...

Using a representative establishment dataset, this paper is the first to analyze the incidence of wage posting and wage bargaining in the matching process from the employer's side. We show that both modes of wage determination coexist in the German labor market, with about two-thirds of hirings...

This paper argues that the large differences among EU countries in post-crisis employment performance are to a large extent driven by the need to adjust corporate balance sheets, which had greatly deteriorated during the boom years in some countries but not in others. To close the large gaps...

We find a strong positive sibling spillover effect in two-children households in rural China, as measured by an increase in the Chinese and Math test scores of elder siblings when their younger sibling starts school. We use the Chinese Law of Compulsory Education as an exogenous variation in the...

Micro-level studies provide insightful knowledge on the drivers of the labor income share. This paper introduces a novel firm-level dataset on the labor income share. Using the World Bank Enterprise Survey data, we put together an unbalanced panel comprising 146,666 firms from 139 countries and...

This paper describes the Workplace-Equilibrium Project, which provides a home for economists interested in the formal analysis of labor pricing and use in specialized firms and economies. The Project emphasizes the unique nature of labor input, especially in the context of agency problems, and...