The “conservative central banker” has come under attack recently. Explicitly modeling the interaction of a trade union with monetary policy, it has been argued that the standard solution to the inflationary bias in monetary policy might actually be welfare-reducing if the trade union has an exogenous preference against inflation. We reframe this discussion in a standard trade union model. We sh...

This paper tracks the rise in the percentage of employees who have never become union members (‘nevermembers’) since the early 1980s and shows that it is the reduced likelihood of ever becoming a member rather than the haemorrhaging of existing members which is behind the decline in overall union membership in Britain. We estimate the determinants of ‘never-membership’ and consider how much of ...

Policy, Institutional Factors and Earnings Mobility This paper uses ECHP and OECD data for 14 EU countries to explore the role of labour market factors in explaining cross-national differences in the dynamic structure of earnings: in permanent inequality, transitory inequality and earnings mobility. Based on ECHP, minimum distance estimator is used to decompose earnings inequality into the perm...

We study the effects of competition in a context in which people’s actions can not be contractually fixed. We find that in such an environment the very presence of competition does neither increase efficiency nor does it yield any payoff gains for the short side of the market. We also find that competition has a strong negative impact on social well-being, the disposition towards others, and in...

This study analyses employers‘ support for the introduction of industry-specifi c minimum wages as a cost-raising strategy in order to deter market entry. Using a unique data set consisting of 800 fi rms in the German service sector, we fi nd some evidence that high-productivity employers support minimum wages. We further show that minimum wage support is higher in industries and regions with l...

German Works Councils and Productivity: First Evidence from a Nonparametric Test This paper presents the first nonparametric test whether German works councils go hand in hand with higher labor productivity or not. It distinguishes between establishments that are covered by collective bargaining or not. Results from a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for first order stochastic dominance tend to indicate...

This study analyses employers‘ support for the introduction of industry-specifi c minimum wages as a cost-raising strategy in order to deter market entry. Using a unique data set consisting of 800 fi rms in the German service sector, we fi nd some evidence that high-productivity employers support minimum wages. We further show that minimum wage support is higher in industries and regions with l...

Workplace Performance, Worker Commitment and Loyalty Using matched employer-employee level data drawn from the 2004 UK Workplace and Employee Relations Survey, we explore the determinants of a measure of worker commitment and loyalty (CLI) and whether CLI influences workplace performance. Factors influencing employee commitment and loyalty include age and gender, whilst workplace level characte...

The inverse amplitude method is used to unitarize the two-loop pp scattering amplitudes of SU~2! chiral perturbation theory in the I50,J50,I51,J51, and I52,J50 channels. An error analysis in terms of the low energy one-loop parameters l̄ 1,2,3,4 and existing experimental data is undertaken. A comparison to standard resonance saturation values for the two-loop coefficients b̄1,2,3,4,5,6 is also ca...