Wages,Prices and Politics: Evidence from Norway

This paper studies the empirical relevance of the close ties between a central trade union and the social democratic political party using time series data for Norway. Using a structural wage-price model we estimate that changing from a bourgeois to a social democratic government reduces manufacturing wages in the long run by 2.3 percent. This result is consistent with a wage bargaining model augmented by political preferences of the union leaders. Private service wages are not directly affected by government type, but wage spillover effects imply that the long-run dampening effect in the private service sector is around 2 percent. The results also support the proposition of the Scandinavian model of inflation that the traded goods sector is the wage leader.     

Wages, Welfare Benefits and Migration

Differences in economic opportunities give rise to strong migration incentives, across regions within countries, and across countries. In this paper we focus on responses to differences in welfare benefits across States. We apply the model developed in Kennan and Walker (2008), which emphasizes that migration decisions are often reversed, and that many alternative locations must be considered. We model individual decisions to migrate as a job search problem. A worker starts the life-cycle in some home location and must determine the optimal sequence of moves before settling down. The model is sparsely parameterized. We estimate the model using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979). Our main finding is that income differences do help explain the migration decisions of young welfare-eligible women, but large differences in benefit levels provide surprisingly weak migration incentives.     

Unionism and the public sector

It is incorrect and misleading to speak of unionization as a ‘human right’. The only human right is ‘self-ownership’, i.e. to pursue goals with one's own abilities but with no force or fraud against others. Government cannot dispense rights, only privileges and protections to some at the expense of others. A minimal degree of coercion exercised by government is unavoidable. But labor unions are not governments. Government has granted significant privileges to unions in the private sector, but such are not appropriate for public sector unions.     

Unemployment: Subsidies and Minimum Wages

The author outlines the 1981 'Youth Workers Scheme' he devised, and contends it was both successful and cheap. Minimum wages and wages councils are pernicious, the first ensuring that young people are priced out of hobs and the second leading to the suppression of competition.     

Wages,fringe benefits and worker turnover

Linked employer–employee data from Norway are utilised to study how employers use wages and fringe benefits in managing their workforce. The analysis shows that on average across all establishments, we observe a positive correlation between wages and fringe benefits. This indicates the presence of labour market frictions and thus is not supportive of the classical frictionless hedonic wage model. Higher wages and more fringe benefits reduce the worker turnover rate. Fringe benefits have stronger negative impact on the excess worker turnover rate than indicated by the reported monetary value.     

The State of Public Sector Unionism: Challenges and Opportunities

The face of unionism in the United States is becoming increasingly public sector. On the surface, public sector unionism appears as a bright spot for labor. A more careful examination of the data, however, reveals that such unionism is at a standstill. Absolute growth has been insufficient to offset losses in private industry, and it is largely tied to increases in public employment. Public employee unions face numerous serious challenges, and questions have been raised in the federal service about the very legitimacy of union representation. Future scenarios suggest that public sector unionism as a whole will likely remain in a more or less stagnant position.     

Prices and Wages

Inflationary pressures cooled over the latter months of 2013, with CPI inflation finally moving back to the 2% target for the first time in four years in December. The slowdown in inflation was largely a function of base effects; big rises in food prices in the autumn of 2012 were not repeated last year and increases in domestic energy bills, while still very large, were also lower than in the previous year. In addition, the impact of higher university tuition fees was smaller in 2013 than in 2012, which also helped to slow inflation a little…     

Real Wages and Employment: Four Great Economists: Pigou, Simons, Keynes and Hansen

Professor Eli Schwartz of Lehigh University reviews the theories of Pigou, Simons, Keynes and Hansen concerning unemployment. He concludes that we are in a'Pigovian'world where unemployment is due to defects in the labour market.     

Wages,non-wage characteristics,and predominantly male jobs

This paper estimates the wage premium associated with working in predominantly male jobs. It also examines whether this wage premium is greater than the compensation workers demand for the less desirable non-wage characteristics of such jobs. The coefficients of the change in the proportion of men in an occupation on the change in wages for quits and layoffs provide opposing biased estimates of the wage premium; because workers who voluntarily quit move to better matches, but those that are laid off accept jobs from the representative distribution of job offers. Specifically, when the premium paid over- (under-)compensates for undesirable work characteristics, the quit estimate is a downward (upward) biased estimate of the wage premium, while the layoff estimate is biased upward (downward). Results from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) indicate that: (1) the estimated bounds of the wage premium are large; and (2) the wage premium overcompensates for the non-wage characteristics of male jobs.     

Wages,implicit contracts,and the business cycle: Evidence from a European panel

We study the joint behavior of hours and wages over the business cycle in a unique panel of 13 European countries, and document significant history dependence in wages. Workers who experience favorable market conditions during their tenure on the job have higher wages, and work fewer labor hours. Unobserved differences in productivity, such as varying job quality, or match-specific productivity are not likely to explain this variation. The results instead point to the importance of contractual arrangements in wage determination. In economies with decentralized bargaining practices, such arrangements resemble self-enforcing insurance contracts with one-sided commitment (by the employer). On the other hand, in countries with strong unions and centralized wage bargaining, wage behavior is better approximated by full-commitment insurance contracts. The co-movement of hours and wages further confirms a contractual framework with variable worker hours. Despite the strong prevalence of contracts in Europe, however, the elasticity of labor supply is considerably smaller compared to the U.S. labor market.