We develop a model of wage bargaining with private information in a duopoly. We investigate how product differentiation and market competition (Bertrand vs. Cournot competition) affect wages and strikes. If bargaining takes place at the industry-level, then both the wage outcome and the strike activity do not depend on the degree of product differentiation whatever the type of market competitio...

Optimal Taxation with Capital Accumulation and Wage Bargaining This study examines optimal taxation in a unionized economy in which households save capital. The main findings are as follows. Judd’s (1985) and Chamley’s (1986) classical results of zero taxation on capital income holds. This is true independently of workers’ savings behaviour or the capitalists’ weight in the social welfare funct...

In this paper we derive a model for the joint endogeneity of centrally contracted wages and wage drift in which central union attempts to reduce wage dispersion plays a pivotal role. Empirical results demonstrate that union efforts to level wage differentials exerted large positive effects on both centrally negotiated wage changes and wage drift. We also show that wage drift was accurately pred...

This paper considers collective bargaining in a public sector institutional setting. The model demonstrates how budget constraints and hierarchical structure affect the bargaining outcome. A trade union bargains over wage and employment either with an output-maximizing bureau or the bureau’s sponsoring institution. The slope of the contract curve depends on the bargaining level because the budg...

Unions, Wage Gaps, and Wage Dispersion: New Evidence from the Americas Using a common methodology, the effects of unions on wage levels and wage dispersion are estimated for two neighboring countries, Bolivia and Chile, and for the U.S. The analysis shows that unions have broadly similar effects on the wage distribution within these three economies. The findings suggest that the political econo...

Rearrangement of T cell receptor (TCR) V8-J8 genes has been analyzed in 20 myasthenia gravis (MG) cases and 17 controls (blood donors) using the seminested polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Unlike the healthy subjects the majority of patients demonstrated a monoor oligoclonal type of rearrangement of TCR V51-6-J51 genes. It is suggested that T lymphocytes may undergo clonal expansion in myasthen...

Effort-biased technological change and other explanations for work intensification are investigated. It is hypothesised that technological and organizational changes are one important source of work intensification and supportive evidence is found using establishment data for Britain in the 1990s. Work intensification has also been stimulated by the use of highcommitment human resource policies...

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 ...

Inflation Adjustment and Labour Market Structures: Evidence from a Multi-Country Study An empirical analysis of the impact of labour market structures on the response of inflation to macroeconomic shocks is presented. Results based on a 20 country panel show that if labour market coordination is high, the effect on inflation of movements in unemployment, import prices, tax rates and productivit...

Equilibrium Unemployment with Outsourcing and Wage Solidarity Under Labour Market Imperfections We evaluate the effects of outsourcing and wage solidarity on wage formation and equilibrium unemployment in a heterogeneous labour market, where wages are determined by a monopoly labour union. We find that outsourcing promotes the wage dispersion between the high-skilled and low-skilled workers. Wh...