Imports as Product and Labour Market Discipline

This article tests the pro‐competitive effect of trade in the product and labour markets of UK manufacturing sectors between 1988 and 2003 using a two‐stage estimation procedure. In the first stage, we use data on 11,799 firms from 20 manufacturing sectors to simultaneously estimate mark‐up and workers' bargaining power parameters according to sector, firm size and period. We find a significant drop in both the mark‐up and the workers' bargaining power in the mid‐1990s. In the second stage, we relate our parameters of interest to trade variables. Our results show that imports from developed countries have significantly contributed to the decrease in both mark‐ups and workers' bargaining power.     

Has International Trade Affected Workers’ Bargaining Power?

In this paper, we investigate whether globalization has affected workers’ bargaining power in the Belgian manufacturing industry over the period 1987–1995 using a sample of more than 20,000 firms. We find little evidence of international trade and inward foreign direct investment having an impact on the workers’ bargaining power. We find some evidence that technological change has a positive impact on the workers’ bargaining power. JEL no. C23, D21, F16, F23, J50, L13     

Estimation of price-cost margins and union bargaining power for Belgian manufacturing

This paper extends Hall's (1988) [Hall, R.E., 1988. The relationship between price and marginal cost in US industry, Journal of Political Economy, 96, 921–947] methodology to analyze imperfections in both the product and the labor market for firms in the Belgian manufacturing industry over the period 1988–1995. We investigate the heterogeneity in price-cost mark-up and workers' bargaining power parameters among 18 sectors within the manufacturing industry as well as the relationship between both parameters. Using a sample of more than 7000 firms, our GMM results indicate that ignoring imperfection in the labor market leads to an underestimation of the price-cost margin evaluated at perfect competition in the labor market. These findings are confirmed in the sectoral analysis. Sectors with higher workers' bargaining power typically show higher price-cost margins.     

Panel data estimates of the production function and product and labor market imperfections

Consistent with two models of imperfect competition in the labor market—the efficient bargaining model and the monopsony model—we provide two extensions of a microeconomic version of Hall's framework for estimating price‐cost margins. We show that both product and labor market imperfections generate a wedge between factor elasticities in the production function and their corresponding shares in revenue, which can be characterized by a ‘joint market imperfections parameter’. Using an unbalanced panel of 10,646 French firms in 38 manufacturing industries over the period 1978–2001, we can classify these industries into six different regimes depending on the type of competition in the product and the labor market. By far the most predominant regime is one of imperfect competition in the product market and efficient bargaining in the labor market (IC‐EB), followed by a regime of imperfect competition in the product market and perfect competition or right‐to‐manage bargaining in the labor market (IC‐PR), and by a regime of perfect competition in the product market and monopsony in the labor market (PC‐MO). For each of these three predominant regimes, we assess within‐regime firm differences in the estimated average price‐cost mark‐up and rent sharing or labor supply elasticity parameters, following the Swamy methodology to determine the degree of true firm dispersion. To assess the plausibility of our findings in the case of the dominant regime (IC‐EB), we also relate our industry and firm‐level estimates of price‐cost mark‐up and extent of rent sharing to industry characteristics and firm‐specific variables respectively. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.