Unionization,international integration,and selection

Abstract We study how unionization affects competitive selection between heterogeneous firms when wage negotiations can occur at the firm or at the profit‐centre level. With productivity specific wages, an increase in union power has: (i) a selection‐softening; (ii) a counter‐competitive; (iii) a wage‐inequality; and (iv) a variety effect. In a two‐country asymmetric setting, stronger unions soften competition for domestic firms and toughen it for exporters. With profit‐centre bargaining, we show how trade liberalization can affect wage inequality among identical workers both across firms (via its effects on competitive selection) and within firms (via wage discrimination across destination markets).     

International trade and unionization: Evidence from India

We exploit exogenous variation in tariffs to examine the impact of import competition on unionization and union wages in a developing country. Using a combination of nationally representative household data (National Sample Survey Organization) and nationally representative industry‐level data (Annual Survey of Industries) from India, we find that net‐import industries that experienced larger cuts in tariffs also experienced larger declines in unionization. In addition, we find that these industries also experienced larger increases in union wages. These results are consistent with the predictions of an efficient bargaining framework that we extend to endogenize the union formation decision by allowing for a fixed cost of union formation. We also conduct a back‐of‐the‐envelope calculation to show that the total wage gains to unionized workers marginally exceed the total wage losses to deunionized workers.     

Competition and the capital-labor conflict

This paper analyzes the distributional effects of changes in the intensity of product market competition. The focus is on the interaction between imperfect competition in product markets and bargaining in the labor market. The main result is that, while a uniform intensification of product market competition increases employment, it may cause real wages to fall, in the short run as well as in the long run. This is especially likely if labor market regulations are favorable to workers. Therefore, product market and labor market regulations tend to reinforce each other politically, and compensatory fiscal transfers may be needed in order to enact employment-enhancing deregulation policies.     

Prices,Productivity and Wage Bargaining in Open Economies*

According to the standard union bargaining model, unemployment benefits should have big effects on wages, but product‐market prices and productivity should play no role in the wage bargain. We formulate an alternative strategic bargaining model, where labour and product‐market conditions together determine wages. A wage equation is derived and estimated on aggregate data for four Nordic countries. Wages are found to depend not only on unemployment and the replacement ratio, but also on productivity, international prices and exchange rates. There is evidence of considerable nominal wage rigidity. Exchange rate changes have large and persistent effects on competitiveness.     

NON‐RIGID WAGES AND MERGER PROFITABILITY REVERSAL UNDER CONVEX COSTS AND CENTRALIZED UNIONIZATION

Can a merger from duopoly to monopoly be detrimental for profits? This paper deals with this issue by focusing on the interaction between decreasing returns to labour (which imply firms’ convex costs) and centralized unionization. First, it is highlighted that a wage ‘non‐rigidity’ result applies: the post‐merger wage is higher than in the pre‐merger equilibrium. Second, it is shown that a ‘reversal result’ in relation to merger profitability actually realizes when the union is sufficiently oriented towards wages. Moreover, the higher the reservation wage, the degree of product differentiation, and the union's relative bargaining power, the higher the probability that a merger reduces profits.     

Can product differentiation mitigate conflicts of interest between principal stakeholders? A cournot-bertrand comparison

This paper aims to investigate the impact of product differentiation on the extent of conflict of interest between principal stakeholders (shareholders, employees, and consumers), which is one of the most important concerns of stakeholder-oriented corporate governance. We consider a differentiated duopoly competing either in price or quantity after the wages of employees are negotiated with a labor union. We find that price competition and quantity competition have drastically different implications on whether product differentiation mitigates stakeholders' conflicts. Specifically, product differentiation can mitigate stakeholders' conflicts when firms compete in price, but not when they compete in quantity. Therefore, the product differentiation effect in mitigating stakeholders' conflicts differs across markets characterized by price competition versus quantity competition.     

The labor market effects of trade union heterogeneity

Empirical evidence suggests that the bargaining power of trade unions differs across firms and sectors. Standard models of unionization ignore this pattern by assuming a uniform bargaining strength. In this paper, we incorporate union heterogeneity into a Melitz (2003) type model. Union bargaining power is assumed to be firm-specific and varies with firm productivity. This framework allows us to re-analyze the labor market effects of (i) a symmetric increase in the bargaining power of all unions and (ii) trade liberalization. We show that union heterogeneity unambiguously reduces the negative employment effects of stronger unions. Firm-specific bargaining power creates a link between unionization and the entry and exit of firms, implying a reduction of the unions' expected bargaining power. Moreover, union heterogeneity constitutes an (un)employment effect of trade liberalization. If unions are most powerful in the high-productivity (low-productivity) firms, trade liberalization will increase (decrease) unemployment.     

A “Managerial” trade union and economic growth

By setting up a simple Romer-type [Romer, P.M., 1989. Capital accumulation in the theory of long-run growth. In: Barro, R.J. (Ed.), Modern Business Cycle Theory. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA] endogenous growth model embodying a political trade union (rather than the traditional economic labor union), this paper explores the effects of unionization on unemployment, growth and welfare by highlighting the essence of internal conflict within the union. It is shown that the conflicting interests between the leadership and membership within the union play a decisive role in the unemployment, growth and welfare effects of unionization. Given the fact that taxation is another potential candidate besides unions in explaining the poor performance of a macro-economy, we re-examine the taxation effects within the growth model with equilibrium unemployment caused by the presence of the trade union and compare our findings with those for the traditional full-employment growth model. In general, we find that the taxation effects of income and consumption crucially depend not only on the institutional arrangements for taxing unemployment benefits, but also on the way the government budget is balanced.     

Stakeholders’ relationships and product market competition

In this article, we study the relationships between main stakeholders (shareholders, consumers and employees) when firms are consumer oriented (CO) in the sense of caring about consumers’ interests in the objective function. We let these firms first bargain with labour union over their employees’ wages and then compete either in the quantity space (Cournot competition) or in the price space (Bertrand competition). Our model shows that taking care of the consumers’ interests when determining product market strategies may reverse the traditional ranking between Cournot and Bertrand equilibria. This implies that if shareholders in a CO firm can choose either a quantity or a price strategy, they will surprisingly choose the latter. Moreover, we show that the conflicting interests between main stakeholders are attenuated under Bertrand competition compared to Cournot competition.     

Employee share ownership in a unionised duopoly

Profit sharing schemes have been analysed assuming Cournot competition and decentralised wage negotiations, and it has been found that firms share profits in equilibrium. This paper analyses a different remuneration system: employee share ownership. We find that whether firms choose to share ownership or not depends on both the type of competition in the product market and the way in which workers organise to negotiate wages. If wage setting is decentralised, under duopolistic Cournot competition both firms share ownership. If wage setting is centralised, only one firm shares ownership if the degree to which goods are substitutes takes an intermediate value; otherwise, the two firms share ownership. In this case, if the union sets the same wage for all workers neither firm shares ownership. Therefore, centralised wage setting discourages share ownership. Finally, under Bertrand competition neither firm shares ownership regardless of how workers are organised to negotiate wages.     

What are the determinants of hiring? The importance of product market demand and search frictions

In this article, we study the importance of product market demand and search frictions for hiring. We use a search-matching model with imperfect competition in the product market to derive an equation for total hiring in a local labour market, and estimate it on Swedish panel data. If product markets are imperfectly competitive, product demand shocks should have a direct effect on employment for given levels of prices and wages. Our main finding is that product demand has such a direct effect on hiring. This highlights the importance of taking imperfect competition in the product market into account in studies of employment dynamics and hiring. We also find that, for given levels of prices, wages, and product demand, the number of unemployed workers in a local labour market has a positive effect on hiring, suggesting that search frictions matter. Quantitatively, product demand shocks seem to be more important for understanding the variation in hiring than shocks to the number of unemployed workers.     

Unionized oligopoly and vertical integration

Labor market structures may have important effects on imperfectly competitive rivalries between firms. This paper examines the consequences of unionization for the rivalry between duopoly firms in two types of contracts: vertical integration and vertical separation. If a franchise fee is used to extract the retailer’s profit, then it is in the individual interest of each manufacturer to choose vertical separation and charge his retailer a wholesale price in excess of the unit production cost, depending on the specific time structures. These arguments could make integration preferable for the manufacturer if the wage bargaining power of the union is relatively powerful.     

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- and low-skilled workers. When the labour union adopts a solidaristic wage policy, it will dampen this tendency. Further, higher outsourcing will increase equilibrium unemployment among the high-skilled workers, whereas it will reduce it among the low-skilled workers. Overall, outsourcing will reduce economy-wide equilibrium unemployment under the reasonable condition that the proportion of high-skilled workers is sufficiently low.     

Unionized oligopoly,labor-management cooperation,and international competitiveness

In a model of a duopolistic product market with a unionized labor force, this paper explores the interaction between firms' duopolistic behavior and union-firm bargaining. In a two-union/two-firm setting, we show that adopting efficient bargaining can improve a firm's competitiveness as well as efficiency, and it arises in equilibrium; while in a one-union/two-firm set-up, we find that an industry union prefers wage bargaining. However, when foreign competition in the product market intensifies, even the industry union prefers efficient bargaining. As an application, the analysis may explain differences in international competitiveness and the recent trend toward labor-management cooperation in the labor market.     

Tenure, business cycle and the wage-setting process

We analyze the interaction between job tenure and external labor market conditions in wage determination. First, we introduce a model that combines job matching with business-cycle effects. As the employment relationship progresses, the worker appropriates a portion of the value of the match-specific human capital she accumulates, gradually becoming shielded from the cyclical variations in external labor market conditions: the employment relationship is progressively “internalized”. Then, we present empirical evidence supporting this prediction: the elasticity of wages to the unemployment rate decreases with tenure. This finding is robust to different specifications that allow for job heterogeneity, and it contributes to the interpretation of recent evidence of changes in the effect of the business cycle on wages.     

The dynamic impact of immigration on natives' labor market outcomes: Evidence from Israel

This paper studies the short and medium run impact of highly skilled immigrants from the Former Soviet Union to Israel on natives' wages and employment. If immigrants are relatively good substitutes for native workers, the impact of immigration will be largest immediately upon the immigrants' arrival, and may become smaller as the labor market adjusts to the supply shock. Conversely, if immigrants upon arrival are poor substitutes for natives, the initial effect of immigration is small, and increases over time as immigrants acquire local labor market skills and compete with native workers. We empirically examine these alternative hypotheses using data from Israel between 1989 and 1999.We find that wages of both men and women are negatively correlated with the fraction of immigrants with little local experience in a labor market segment. A 10 percent increase in the share of immigrants lowers natives' wages in the short run by 1–3 percent, but this effect dissolves after 4–7 years. This result is robust to a variety of different segmentations of the labor market, to the inclusion of cohort effects, and to different dynamic structures in the residual term of the wage equation. On the other hand, we do not find any effect of immigration on employment, neither in the short nor in the medium run.     

Product market competition, open shop union and wage

We show that if the product market is not very much concentrated, open shop union, where the union density is less than one, may not be a justification for a positive relationship between product market competition and unionized wage, irrespective of the union density, bargaining power of the union and the union??s preference for wage and employment.     

Efficient bargaining versus right to manage: A stability analysis in a Cournot duopoly with trade unions

The present study considers a unionised (nonlinear) duopoly with two different labour market institutions, i.e. efficient bargaining (EB) and right to manage (RTM), to analyse product market stability under quantity competition with trade unions. We show that when the preference of unions towards wages is small, (i) the parametric stability region under RTM is higher than under EB, and (ii) a rise in the union power in the Nash bargaining played between firms and unions monotonically increases (resp. reduces) the parametric stability region under RTM (resp. EB). In contrast, when the preference of unions becomes larger, an increase in the union's bargaining power acts: (1) as an economic stabiliser when the union power is small; (2) as an economic de-stabiliser when the union power is high. In addition to established results with regard to equilibrium outcomes, our findings shed some light on the effects of how the labour market regulation affects out-of-equilibrium behaviours in a Cournot duopoly.     

Can minimum wages cause a big push? Evidence from Indonesia

Big Push models suggest that local product demand can create multiple labor market equilibria: one featuring high wages, formalization, and high demand and one with low wages, informality, and low demand. I demonstrate that minimum wages may coordinate development at the high wage equilibrium. Using data from 1990s Indonesia, where minimum wages increased in a varied way, I develop a difference in spatial differences estimator which weakens the common trend assumption of difference in differences. Estimation reveals strong trends in support of a big push: formal employment increases and informal employment decreases in response to the minimum wage. Local product demand also increases, and this formalization occurs only in the non-tradable, industrializable industries suggested by the model (while employment in tradable and non-industrializable industries also conforms to model predictions).     

THE BROTHER‐IN‐LAW EFFECT*

When a firm is forced to pay abnormally high wages, hiring transfers rents. This effectively endows the employer with the ability to grant favors, and he may wish to do so even at some cost to efficient production. We refer to this as the brother‐in‐law effect. This article analyzes its consequences. When the brother‐in‐law effect is due to unionization, decisions regarding both the number and type of workers employed could be inefficient; overemployment could obtain even relative to the workforce that would be employed without unionization. We also identify cases in which nepotism improves efficiency.