Over the last three decades, wage inequality and the importance of the minimum wage presented an interesting negative correlation in Portugal. Using a semiparametric approach, counterfactual decomposition methods, and an extremely rich matched employer-employee dataset of all employees in the...

Unconditional and conditional quantile regressions are used to explore the determinants of labour earnings at different parts of the distribution and, hence, the determinants of overall labour earnings inequality. The analysis combines several household surveys to provide comparable estimates...

Although a large body of research has examined the effects of unions on the wage distribution, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the effects of unions on the distribution of income. This paper examines the long-run relationship between unionization and income inequality for a...

One Achilles’ heel of post-Apartheid South Africa is the growing intra-racial income inequality, particularly among Africans. This paper examines the role of labour unions in explaining this phenomenon among African men given that labour markets are at the core of income inequality in South...

Considering the contribution of the distribution of individual wages and earnings to that of household incomes we find two separate literatures that should be brought together, and bring “new institutions” into play. Growing female employment, rising dual-earnership and part-time employment...

Over the past 50 years, the U.S. and several European labor markets have undergone two most incisive developments: job market polarization and deunionization. In this paper, we argue that routine-biased technical change is not only the driving force behind polarization, as prevalently assumed,...

The objective of this paper is to assess whether the level of unionization and the rigidity of the exchange rate affected wages and monetary policy in SEE and CIS during the ongoing economic crisis. Towards that end, a New Keynesian model with price and wage rigidities is used. The model is...

It is now a few years since the introduction of the common currency, and Europe is still experiencing high unemployment. The conventional logic attributes this problem to strong trade unions and other flaws in the labour market. This article takes a different approach. Using a game theoretic...

Wenige Jahre nach der Etablierung der EWU zeigt sich ein gespaltenes Bild. Trotz unbestreitbarer Erfolge bei der Sicherung von Preisstabilität scheint die Beschäftigungs-Performance des Euroraums getrübt. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird die These vertreten, dass dies auch an einer mangelhaften...

In this paper I study the relation between real wage rigidity (RWR) and nominal price and wage rigidity. I show that in a standard DSGE model RWR is mainly affected by the interaction of the two nominal rigidities and not by other structural parameters. The degree of RWR is, however,...