Labour market institutions and the industry wage distribution

The paper studies the industry wage structures of Austria, Norway, the union sector of the U. S. as well as the non-union sector of the U. S. We make comparable regressions for each country, and are thus able to compare the sectoral earnings patterns controlling for the usual individual characteristics. Our results confirm the hypothesis that the pattern of the inter-industry pay structure is largely independent of labour market institutions: High paying industries in a non-union environment tend to pay high wages also in regimes where bargaining is very centralised and coordinated.This, however, does not mean that collective bargaining does not matter. The influence is mainly on the amount of wage dispersion: We find considerably lower industry pay gaps in centralised Austria and Norway than in decentralised U. S. Within the U. S., pay differentials within the union sector slightly exceed those of the non-union sector.The results give support to non-competitive explanations of the labour market. If efficiency wage mechanisms are the reason for wage differentials we expect central bargainers to internalise these effects. Competitive explanations, on the other hand, would predict no difference between the non-union outcome and a central agreement aiming at achieving full employment.This work was conducted while we were both affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley, and we thank the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California, Berkeley, for its support and hospitality. The research was supported by the Austrian Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung under the project JO548-SOZ (Zweimüller) and the Norwegian NORAS under the LOS program (Barth). A preliminary version of the paper was presented at the Labour Seminar at the University of California, Berkeley. We thank the participants, especially Bill Dickens and Jonathan Leonard for valuable comments. We are indebted to Bill Dickens also for giving us access to the U. S. data set CPS 1983. Thanks also to Herbert Walther for useful comments.     

Strategy-proof and individually rational social choice functions for public good economies

Summary We consider the problem of choosing an allocation in an economy in which there are one private good and one public good. Our purpose is to identify the class of procedures of choosing an allocation which satisfy strategy-proofness, individual rationality, no exploitation and non-bossiness. Any such procedure is a scheme of semi-convex cost sharing determined by the minimum demand principle.I wish to thank Professors Salvador Barbera, Matthew Jackson, Herve Moulin and William Thomson for their helpful suggestions and two anonymous referees for their detailed comments. Conversations with Professors Hideo Konishi, Shinji Oseto Ken-ichi Shimomura and Stephen Ching were helpful. This work is supported by the Japan Economic Research Foundation and Research Grants PB89-0294 and PB89-0075 from the Direcion General de Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnica, Spanish Ministry of Education.     

“Buy Domestic” Campaigns and Optimal Tariffs

This paper attempts to analyze the strategic use of optimal tariffs and to examine the effects of national bias on the optimal trade policy and social welfare in a two-country, two-good, price competition model derived from Neven et al. (1991). The major findings are as follows. (1) If all consumers prefer the domestic good, then buy domestic campaigns will decrease the prohibitive tariff rate and increase local welfare. (2) If at least some consumers prefer the foreign good, but not to a great extent, then buy domestic campaigns will not change the optimal tariff rate, but may improve local welfare. (3) When all consumers greatly prefer the foreign good, then promotion of buy domestic decreases the optimal tariff rate, but it cannot improve social welfare. With this framework, we also prove that buy domestic campaigns serve as a substitute for tariffs with respect to a strategic trade policy.     

The supply side in a post-Keynesian two-sector model

Summary In order to avoid missing the wood for trees a brief summary of the results having been obtained above appears to be appropriate.Firstly, we regard it as a result in itself of the present paper to have presented a two-sector model encapsulating a Kaleckian (and Kaldorian) vision of a capitalist economy, a model in which supply conditions of primary products take up a prominent position.Secondly, it belongs to the main results of the paper that it has laid bare, through the model presented, an astoundingly simple pattern in the way economic key-concepts such as activity, employment and distributive shares are affected by on one hand the demand side (which has so far captured an excessive amount of attention in macroeconomic modelling) and on the other hand the largely neglected supply side of the economy.Thirdly, by means of an arbitrary but not implausible numerical example we have attempted to indicate how changes in activity and distributive shares caused by exogeneous changes on the demand and supply side of the economy, respectively, are in themselves crucially dependent on (the assumptions concerning) the supply elasticity of primary products.The notation applied will be as follows C consumption - C ⁰ autonomous element of the consumption function - I investment (gross) - A autonomous expenditure - S savings (gross) - U stock of the primary product - Q real output (not necessarily real income) (gross) - Y income (gross) - W wage bill - L employment - w money wage rate - p price level - mark-up factor - level parameter of the production function pertaining to the primary sector - a labour-input coefficient of the industrial sector - b raw-material input coefficient of the industrial sector - s _w marginal propensity to save out of wages - s marginal propensity to save out of profits - s (weighted) average ofS _w ands - (unit) raw material costs as a proportion of total (unit) prime costs - share of wages in total income - E _{y, x} partial or total elasticity ofY with respect toX. I am most grateful to Søren Gammelgård, Peter Guldager, Erik Strøjer Madsen, Jørgen Ulff-Møller Nielsen, Kurt Pedersen and an anonymous referee for their valuable suggestions and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Precautionary Demand for Education, Inequality, and Technological Progress

This paper offers an explanation for the evolution of wage inequality within and between industries and education groups over the past several decades. The model is based on the disproportionate depreciation of technology-specific skills versus general skills due to technological progress, which occurs randomly across sectors. Consistent with empirical evidence, the model predicts that increasing randomness is the primary source of inequality growth within uneducated workers, whereas inequality growth within educated workers is determined more by changes in the composition and return to ability. Increasing randomness generates a precautionary demand for education, which we show empirically to be significant.     

A note on repeated-offers bargaining with one-sided incomplete information

Summary This note analyzes a modified version of the standard repeated-offers bargaining game with one-sided incomplete information studied in Fudenberg, Levine and Tirole (1985), Gul, Sonnenschein and Wilson (1986) and Ausubel and Deneckere (1989). The modification, which is introduced in the extensive form, is that the (uninformed) seller can choose to withdraw her offer immediately after the (informed) buyer accepts it. This modification is important because it removes the (implicit) commitment assumption built into the standard model that the seller is committed not to withdraw her price offer. A main result obtained is, that whether or not there is a gap between the seller's valuation and the lowest possible buyer's valuation, any seller payoff between zero and the static monopoly profit can be supported by sequential equilibria. Thus, even in the gap case there exist equilibria that completely reverse the Coase conjecture.I thank Ian Jewitt and an anonymous referee for their helpful advice and comments.     

Anonymous sequential games: Existence and characterization of equilibria

Summary In this paper we consider Anonymous Sequential Games with Aggregate Uncertainty. We prove existence of equilibrium when there is a general state space representing aggregate uncertainty. When the economy is stationary and the underlying process governing aggregate uncertainty Markov, we provide Markov representations of the equilibria.Table of notation Agents' characteristics space ( ) - A Action space of each agent (aA) - Y Y = x A - Aggregate distribution on agents' characteristics - (X) Space of probability measures onX - C(X) Space of continuous functions onX - _X Family of Borel sets ofX - State space of aggregate uncertainty ( ) - x _t=1 aggregate uncertainty for the infinite game - = (₁,₂,...,_t,...) - ^{t t} (₁, ₂,..., _t) - L₁(^t,C ×A),v _t Normed space of measurable functions from ^t toC( x A) - 8o(^t,( x A)) Space of measurable functions from ^tto( x A) - X^t X^t= x _s=1 ^t X - _X ^t Borel field onX ^t - v Distribution on - v_t Marginal distribution of v on ^t - v(^t)((¦^t)) Conditional distribution on given ^t - v^t(^s)(v_t(¦^s)) Conditional distribution on ^t given ^s (wheres) - _t Periodt distributional strategy - Distributional strategy for all periods =(₁,₂,...,_t,...) - _t Transition process for agents' types - ( _t,^t,y)(P _t+1(, _t , ^t ,y)) Transition function associated with _t - u _t Utility function - V _t (, a, , ^t) Value function for each collection (, a, , ^t ) - W _t (, , ^t ) Value function given optimal action a - C() Consistency correspondence. Distributions consistent with and characteristics transition functions - B() Best response correspondence (which also satisfy consistency) - E Set of equilibrium distributional strategies - x _t=1 ( ^t , (x A)) - S Expanded state space for Markov construction - (, a, ) Value function for Markov construction - P( _t ^* , _t y)(P(, _t ^* , _t , _y )) Invariant characteristics transition function for Markov game We wish to acknowledge very helpful conversations with C. d'Aspremont, B. Lipman, A. McLennan and J-F. Mertens. The financial support of the SSHRCC and the ARC at Queen's University is gratefully acknowledged. This paper was begun while the first author visited CORE. The financial support of CORE and the excellent research environment is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Some unfamiliar dynamics of a familiar macro model a note

The idea that for small disturbances the full employment equilibrium is stable while for large disturbances it is unstable was coined by Leijonhufvud in the notion of a corridor. We discuss the existence of a corridor in the standard Keynesian-monetarist textbook macro-model. It turns out that though the full employment steady state of this model may be locally stable — which is the case when the well-known Cagan condition holds — the model is never globally stable. This is due to the inherent non-linearity in the demand for money function, arising from non-negativity of the nominal rate of interest. Thus, perhaps surprisingly, the Cagan condition is both necessary and sufficient for the existence of a corridor in the Keynesian-monetarist model.This note is adapted from a paper presented at the European Meeting of the Econometric Society, Bologna, August 1988. I would like to thank Søren Bo Nielsen and Peter Birch Sørensen (Copenhagen Business School), Thomas Lux (University of Bamberg), and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. Remaining errors and shortcomings are mine.     

Full-cost pricing in the classical competitive process: A model of convergence to long-run equilibrium

In the last 10–15 years a lot of attempts has been devoted to study the calssical process of convergence of market prices toward natural prices. The two forces that one has thought could achieve this target were capital mobility, that determines the dynamics of output, and demand-supply forces, that determine the dynamics of prices. In this article a model of classical competition is proposed in which a full-cost pricing mechanism is adopted in the rule of evolution of market prices. An asymptotical stability result of long-run equilibrium is proved for a two-commodity model with and without a final demand.     

Public-Choice Analysis of a New International Organization: The International Sea-Bed Authority

The usefulness of the public-choice approach for a better understanding of international organizations can be demonstrated by applying it to the analysis of the structure and functions of a new international organization, the International Sea-Bed Authority, established in 1994, after two decades of negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations, with the aim to control the oceans' mineral resources beyond the limits of national jurisdictions (which have been proclaimed by the U.N. Assembly common heritage of mankind). First, the reasons for establishing this organization, whose basis is the common heritage of mankind nature of ocean resources, are examined under two aspects: 1) definition and protection of property rights; 2) environmental control of sea-bed mining activities. Secondly, the organization's decisionmaking system is presented, including such features as the assembly, council with chamber voting, finance committee with decision by consensus, features that balance the voting power of members and protect those countries that bear the financial responsibility for the budget. Finally, some comments are offered about more general aspects of the theory of international organizations: the bureaucracy (and diplomacy) of these organizations as well as the interdependence among international organizations, which opens the way to forms of international logrolling and makes it advisable for countries not to exit from these organizations, even when they have no primary interest in them.     

Insider Bargaining Power, Starting Wages and Involuntary Unemployment

Recent studies of wage bargaining and unemployment have emphasized the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and that unions act in the interest of insiders. Yet it is typically assumed that insiders and recently hired outsiders are paid the same wage. We consider a model where the starting wage may differ from the insider wage, but incentive constraints associated with turnover affect the form of the contract. We examine under what conditions the starting wage is linked to the insider wage so that increased bargaining power of insiders raises the starting wage and reduces the hiring of outsiders.
JEL classification : J 23; J 31; J 33     

Stores

Summary There is scope and incentive for stores to endogenously arise in an exchange economy when agents possess different levels of bargaining power and coalition formation is costly. In the absence of stores, agents face a trading lottery where the expected outcome for an individual agent depends upon his relative bargaining strength. By setting appropriate, preannounced prices, a store can profitably offer relatively weak bargainers trading opportunities which they prefer to the trading lottery. While relatively weak bargainers are attracted to the store, relatively strong bargainers prefer the trading lottery to the store. Thus, the simultaneous existence of barter and mediated trade is explained.The work reported here was conceived while both authors were visiting the University of Southern California. We thank Martine Quinzii and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.     

Hot vs. Cold: Sequential Responses and Preference Stability in Experimental Games

In experiments with two-person sequential games we analyze whether responses to favorable and unfavorable actions depend on the elicitation procedure. In our hot treatment the second player responds to the first player's observed action while in our cold treatment we follow the strategy method and have the second player decide on a contingent action for each and every possible first player move, without first observing this move. Our analysis centers on the degree to which subjects deviate from the maximization of their pecuniary rewards, as a response to others' actions. Our results show no difference in behavior between the two treatments. We also find evidence of the stability of subjects' preferences with respect to their behavior over time and to the consistency of their choices as first and second mover.     

Entry Barriers in Politics,or: Why Politics,Like Natural Monopoly,Is Not Organised as an Ongoing Market-Process

In the paper Entry Barriers in Politics, or: Why Politics, Like Natural Monopoly, Is Not Organised as an Ongoing Market-Process, an analytical framework for dealing with processes of political competition is presented. The idea goes back to Tullock's model of democracy as franchise-bidding for natural monopoly. To this, basic insights of New Institutional Economics and Austrian Ecomomics are added. It is shown that incomplete contracts which arise in economic bidding schemes, characterise political competition. At the same time, they create leeway for political entrepreneurship. The same is true for various barriers to entry in politics. These barriers affect a trade-off between political stability and contestability which is discussed in view of incentives and opportunities for politicians to engage in positive-sum, long-term investments in political reforms.     

Welfare effects of 1992: A general equilibrium assessment for EC and EFTA countries

In this paper production, trade and welfare effects of European integration are discussed, with particular emphasis on the effects for the EC and EFTA. Insights from previous partial and general equilibrium analyses of the internal market are reviewed, and new model simulations are presented. In addition to the standard experiments of 1992 — as reduced trade costs and as full market integration — for the EC alone, and for the European Economic Area (EEA), an intermediate case, with full integration in the EC but only lower trade costs between the EC and EFTA, is analysed. All cases show that EFTA will benefit significantly from freer trade and closer integration with the EC. With regard to non-European regions, the simulations of European integration show some degree of trade diversion, but stylized model experiments indicate that a successful outcome of the Uruguay-round may more than offset the trade-diverting effects of 1992.     

Inter-industry wage differentials and strategic trade policy

Recent studies suggest that inter-industry wage differentials exist which are neither caused by different endownments of the workers with human capital, nor by different working conditions, nor by institutional rigidities. Higher employment in high-wage sectors due to exports, therefore, raises welfare. According to empirical evidence presented here more likely than not net exports from sectors paying wage premia lead to some extra gains from trade (that cannot be explained by trade policy promoting primary sectors by high amounts of subsidies per employee) for the German economy. A case is made, however, against strategic trade policy in favour of these sectors pointing to uncertainty about the amount of the differentials, their international (dis)similarity, and their sources.

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Zusammenfassung Empirische Untersuchungen deuten darauf hin, daß auch in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Arbeitskräfte mit gleicher Humankapitalausstattung, die unter gleichen Arbeitsbedingungen in Unternehmen gleicher Größe in einer Region arbeiten, unterschiedlich entlohnt werden, wenn sie in unterschiedlichen Sektoren arbeiten. Bestehen solche Sektorlohndifferentiale, dann hat eine Ausweitung der Beschäftigung in Hochlohnsektoren positive Wohlfahrtseffekte. Es wird daher vielfach gefordert, diese primären Sektoren vor internationaler Konkurrenz zu schützen und sie durch Subventionen zu fördern. Die vorliegende Arbeit präsentiert empirische Evidenz dafür, daß die Bundesrepublik Deutschland Extra-Gewinne aus dem Außenhandel bezieht, weil zwischen der Netto-Exportquote und der Höhe des Sektorlohndifferentials ein positiver Zusammenhang besteht, ohne daß sich die Subventionspolitik an diesen Differentialen orientiert. Gegen eine gezielte Förderung der Hochlohnsektoren im Rahmen einer strategischen Handelspolitik werden dann drei Argumente vorgebracht, die mit Unsicherheiten über Höhe, internationale Ähnlichkeit und Ursachen der Differentiale zusammenhängen.

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Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the international economists' group of the Verein für Socialpolitik at Hohenheim University in May 1991, at the Sixth Annual Congress of the European Economic Association in Cambridge in September 1991, and at the Universities of Hamburg and Bielefeld. I would like to thank participants at the discussions and four anonymous referees for helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Die Komponenten des Rückganges der Ausländerbeschäftigung

Summary During the crisis of 1974/75 the number of foreign workers in Western European countries has been reduced. This has caused a new discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of the employment of foreign workers. Whatever the attitude towards this problem may be, it is useful to decompose the reduction of foreign labour into categories. First of all a certain amount of foreign labour will be reduced due to a general decrease of overall employment. This influence may be called proportionality effect. The share of foreign workers in the different branches of the economy allows the calculation of a structural effect. Both of them measure influences, which concern foreigners as well as nationals. Only the remaining influence is specific to foreigners. It may again be split into a reduction effect and a substitution effect. The former ist concerned with that part of total reduction of foreign workers, which corresponds to the decrease of employment, i.e. employment reduction by dismissal of foreign workers. The latter pertains to that part of reduction, which exceeds the decrease of employment, i.e. by this magnitude domestic labour has been substituted for foreign labour.The application of this model to the years 1974 and 1975 shows no proportionality effect (1974 it is even positive), a limited structural effect, but a high reduction effect. The substitution effect is considerable in 1974 but of minor importance in 1975. So foreign labour in Austria served actually as cyclical buffer but mainly by reduction and only partly by substitution.     

Good News and Bad News: Search from Unknown Wage Offer Distributions

The largest market in national economies is the labor market. Labor market contracting is characterized by job search, often from unknown wage offer distributions. This paper reports experimental tests of finite horizon models of job search in which the wage offer distribution is unknown. Theoretically-optimal search from an unknown wage offer distribution can have the seemingly paradoxical property that some offers will be accepted that are lower than other offers that will be rejected in the same period of the search horizon. Thus the reservation wage property (or lowest acceptable wage path) may not exist. This can occur because an offer that is a priori relatively high (good news) can imply that it is highly probable that search is from a favorable distribution, and such an offer can look unattractive when it is an a posteriori relatively low offer from a favorable distribution (bad news). This paper reports results from experimental treatments for search from unknown distributions in which the reservation wage property does exist and treatments in which it does not exist. We find that the consistency of search behavior with search theory reported in earlier papers is robust to the presence or absence of the reservation wage property and to whether the draws come from known or unknown distributions.     

Ex ante versus interim rationality and the existence of bubbles

Summary Tirole (1982) is commonly interpreted as proving that bubbles are impossible with finitely many rational traders with common priors. We study a simple variation of his model in which bubbles can occur, even though traders have common priors and common knowledge that the asset has no fundamental value. In equilibrium, agents purchase the asset at successively higher prices until the bubble bursts and no subsequent trade occurs. Each trader's initial wealth determines the last date at which he could possibly trade. The date at which the bubble bursts is a function of these finite truncation dates for the individual traders. Since initial wealth is private information, no trader knows when the bubble will burst. There are two key differences between our model and Tirole's which enable us to construct equilibrium bubbles this way. First, Tirole requires ex ante optimality, while we only require every trader's strategy to be optimal conditional on his information — i.e., interim optimal. As we argue in the text, this would seem to be the relevant definition of optimality. Second, Tirole considers competitive equilibria, while we analyze a simple bargaining game.We thank Abhijit Banerjee, James Dow, Itzhak Gilboa, Debra Holt, Fallaw Sowell, Sanjay Srivastava, Stan Zin, seminar participants at Pennsylvania State University, Indian Statistical Institute at Calcutta, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Rochester, the University of Maryland, the London Business School, the University of British Columbia, and the Sixth World Congress, and Michael Woodford and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. Both authors were at Carnegie Mellon University when this research was begun. The second author also thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support.     

Efficiency wages and union-firm bargaining with private information

We consider efficiency wage effects in a union-firm bargaining model with private information. We show that an increase in the efficiency wage effects does not necessarily increase the wage level at equilibrium, even when the wage bargaining with private information is close to one with complete information. However, if it is commonly known that the firm is stronger than the union and the demand is sufficiently elastic, then an increase in the efficiency wage effects increases for sure the wage at equilibrium.JEL Classification: J41, J50, J52We thank Juan Dolado and two anonymous referees for valuable comments. Vincent Vannetelbosch is Chercheur Qualifié at the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique. The research of Ana Mauleon has been made possible by a fellowship of the Fonds Européen du Développement Economique Régional (FEDER). Financial support from the Belgian French Communitys program Action de Recherches Concertée 99/04-235 (IRES, Université catholique de Louvain) is gratefully acknowledged.