We analyze the following questions under imperfect labour markets. How does strategic outsourcing influence wage formation, profit sharing and employee effort when firms commit to optimal profit sharing before wage formation or decide for profit sharing after wage formation? What is the relationship between outsourcing, profit sharing, and equilibrium unemployment? We find that in both scenario...

We examine empirically the effect of international outsourcing on labour demand at the level of the individual plant. We do so by estimating a dynamic model of plant level labour demand, using a Generalised Method of Moments estimator. We use plant level data for the Irish Electronics sector, an industry that has expanded rapidly over the last decade and that has witnessed significant offshorin...

The role of product market reforms in achieving the objective of higher employment and growth has recently received much attention amongst academics. The aim of this paper is to analyse some of the channels through which cross-market effects come about and to assess their policy relevance. The analytic strategy of this paper relies upon the stochastic real options modelling approach. In a nutsh...

This paper examines the impact of US income and payroll taxes on the decision of wage-and-salary employees to become self-employed. I exploit variations in the tax treatment of wage and self-employment income using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Results show that differential taxation has significant effects on the probability of making a transition into self-employment. Reducing an indivi...

We estimate a standard human capital earnings model, augmented to allow for different firmspecific wage premia. The earnings of an individual depend on her human capital bundle and the earnings mark-up of the firm she is currently working for. We use linked employer-employee data from Norway which allows us to directly estimate the skill premium as a function of firm specific variables such as ...

The consequences of free trade are investigated in an international duopoly under horizontal di¤erentiation and convex transportation costs. It is shown that the smaller country may bene...t from trade if it is su¢ciently small to allow for a signi...cant volume of exports by the domestic ...rm. On the contrary, the larger country never bene...ts from trade, since liberalization decreases the d...

There isn't nearly as much trade as standard models suggest there should be. Formal trade barriers and transport costs are too low to account for the difference. The pattern of missing trade has interesting variation across country pairs. These clues suggest the need for theoretical and eventually structural empirical work on the missing transactions costs. This paper reviews recent empirical f...

Why would the US threaten punitive tariffs on luxury autos to implement a market share target in auto parts? We show that by making threats to a linked market, a market share target may be implemented with fairly weak informational and administrative requirements. Moreover, such policies can be both pro-competitive and advantageous to US firms. ( 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. ...