The system of wage setting in the Nordic countries is often regarded as highly centralised, contributing to considerable real wage flexibility. This view has been questioned, as the sizeable wage drift may offset the effect of the central negociations. This paper presents evidence from the four...

Debate over labor market flexibility focuses mainly on firing costs, while largely ignoring wage determination and the need for collective bargaining reform. Most countries affected by the euro debt crisis have two-tier bargaining structures in which plant-level bargaining supplements national...

Two-tier bargaining structures, in which plant-level wage negotiations supplement industry-level wage setting, are present in a number of EU countries, as unions resist pressures for greater decentralization in wage determination. In principle, these two-tier structures could reconcile...

Actual wages typically exceed collectively set standard wages. Standard wages are, therefore, not binding, yet they seem to influence actual wages strongly. An explanation for this phenomenon is offered along the lines of the Fair Wage/Effort Hypothesis proposed by G. Akerlof and J. Yellen...

Despite the importance of collective bargaining in the economic sphere, there is little empirical evidence on the evaluation of it as an effective instrument for fixation of minimum wages. Furthermore, existing studies on deviations between wages actually paid and agreed, focus on analyzing the...

The main objective of this work was matching categories that emerge from collective bargaining with the industries surveyed by the Encuesta Continua de Hogares (ECH). This tool is useful to assess, among others, the effects of wage changes on average wages and wage differentials and the...