Financial globalisation and the labour share in developing countries: The type of capital matters

In this paper, we investigate how de facto financial globalisation has influenced the labour share in developing countries. Our main argument is the need to distinguish between different types of capital in this context as they differ in their effect on the host countries' production process and vary concerning their bargaining power vis-à-vis labour. Our econometric analysis of the impact of foreign direct versus portfolio investment in a sample of about 40 developing and transition countries after 1992 supports this claim. Using different panel data techniques to address potential endogeneity problems, we find that foreign direct investment has a positive effect on the labour share in developing countries, while the impact of portfolio investment is significantly smaller and potentially negative. Our results also highlight that de facto foreign investment cannot explain the decline of the labour share in developing countries over the investigated period.     

Job security,wage bargaining and duopoly outcomes

This paper develops a model where labour supply is constrained because training new workers is costly and redundant workers cannot be fired. An entrant draws labour from an incumbent firm through a wage contest while wages in the latter are bargained with its unionized workers. In a Cournot equilibrium, the union's bargaining power has a positive effect on the incumbent's output, but a negative effect on the industry output. Social welfare under duopoly may fall short of the monopoly level. The distribution of bargaining gains within the incumbent firm is sensitive to whether wage and output choices are made sequentially or simultaneously.     

Simulated Negotiations in the Hiring of a Salesforce Manager: Tests of Two-Person Bargaining Solutions

This paper examines the ability to predict bargaining outcomes consistent with Nash, Kalai-Smorodinsky, and Gupta-Livne bargaining models as well as two heuristic solutions based on interpersonal (cardinal) comparisons of utility. Equal earning and equal loss solutions are developed from bargainers' multi-attribute utility functions. An experimental test of these bargaining solutions is conducted for simulated negotiations between a representative of sales force management and a representative of sales force employees over the hire of a regional sales manager. Results show that proportional (Kalai-Smorodinsky) solutions are generally more likely when bargaining is conducted in attribute space, and equal loss solutions are more likely in utility space.     

Disagreement points in trade negotiations

This paper analyzes trade negotiations between two large countries in the framework of an alternating-offer bargaining model with endogenous interim disagreement actions. Despite of the flexibility in disagreement tariff selection, the countries would keep the status quo tariffs in disagreement periods as far as the country which benefits from keeping the status quo tariffs compensates for the other country’s foregone gains from deviating in disagreement actions. Each equilibrium outcome converges to a corresponding Nash bargaining solution whose disagreement point reflects the status quo tariff rates as well as the threat of raising the tariff to the Nash tariff rate.     

基于动态讨价还价博弈的“壳公司”定价模型

买壳上市是我国证券市场一个重要的特征,通过对以往相关研究文献的梳理、提炼,形成了一个基于动态讨价还价博弈的"壳公司"定价模型,并由此得出买壳上市实质上是一个帕累托改进过程,而双方得益权重则取决于公司自身的讨价还价能力。     

Some concepts of distributive justice in bargaining problems

In this article we study the problems associated with distributive justice in an abstract framework originally conceived for the analysis of social choice and bargaining problems. Induced social choice correspondences are derived by considering alternatives which are invariant under permutations of the status quo point. We study in particular the fairness correspondence and a generalized Walrasian bargaining solution and establish links between the two concepts. The analysis in this article can be extended far beyond the point at which it ends.     

Trade policy-making in a model of legislative bargaining

In democracies, trade policy is the result of interactions among many agents with different agendas. In accordance with this observation, we construct a dynamic model of legislative trade policy-making in the realm of distributive politics. An economy consists of different sectors, each of which is concentrated in one or more electoral districts. Each district is represented by a legislator in the Congress. Legislative process is modeled as a multilateral sequential bargaining game à la Baron and Ferejohn (1989). Some surprising results emerge: bargaining can be welfare-worsening for all participants; legislators may vote for bills that make their constituents worse off; identical industries will receive very different levels of tariff. The results pose a challenge to empirical work, since equilibrium trade policy is a function not only of economic fundamentals but also of political variables at the time of congressional negotiations — some of them random realizations of mixed bargaining strategies.     

Contracting in dynamic games

We study the bargaining problem in the dynamic framework. The classical way of solving a dynamic bargaining problem is to transform the extensive form game into the normal form and then apply the theory of bargaining well developed for normal form games. This means that the parties sign a binding contract in the beginning of the game which defines their actions for the full duration of the game. In this article, we consider the setting where the players monitor the contract as the game evolves. The main purpose of the article is to study conditions under which the players do not have a rationale to renegotiate a new contract at any intermediate time period; i.e., the contract is time consistent. Time consistency restricts the set of bargaining solutions in dynamic games. We will show that time consistency of the contract is guaranteed if the bargaining solution satisfies the controversial independence-of-irrelevant-alternatives property.     

Strategic trade policy and union-firm bargaining agenda

In this paper, we revisit the issue of the scope of bargaining between duopolistic firms and unions in an open economy with strategic trade policy. It is shown that, in contrast with the case of the absence of export tax/subsidy, a right-to-manage (RTM) arrangement always emerges endogenously as a sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium in agreement between parties. Moreover, such an arrangement may be also Pareto-optimal in both exporting countries in the sense that profits, workers' welfare (provided that union's power is sufficiently high) and social welfare as a whole are higher than the efficient bargaining (EB) arrangement. Moreover, since the government of the country in which there is EB (while in the other country the alternative agenda RTM is used) levies a tax on export, then the conventional result that under quantity competition it is always optimal for exporting countries to subsidise exports may be reversed.     

Seasonality: A Problem for Workers in the Tourism Labour Market?

Seasonal workers in areas of tourism such as holiday accommodation are, largely on the basis of the pay and conditions that apply, generally viewed as some of the ‘poorest cousins' of the labour market. In this article, the acceptability of such a view is both disputed and reassessed. It is argued that such jobs are often held by those who voluntarily participate in the seasonal labour market but, aside from this, that involuntary participants may also benefit, perhaps, for example, in gaining respite from the dole. Moreover, and regardless of the motives behind participation, seasonal jobs are often laced with substantial non-pecuniary attractions that set them aside from other, far less satisfactory, forms of intermittent employment.     

Household savings and present bias among Chinese couples: A household bargaining approach

Family savings is crucial to long-term wellbeing for all members in a household, particularly in a Chinese context where costs of living increasingly shift from government to individuals. Savings are typically examined as a balance of financial behaviors and spending preferences; however, this study highlights how savings in a family context is also a function of relationship status. Drawing on intra-household bargaining models, we analyze data from the 2014 China Family Panel Studies to examine the extent to which men's and women's relative power in the household explain variation in savings levels across families. Our findings indicate that women's greater bargaining positions (e.g., income and assets) correspond with greater savings for the family. However, such bargaining power constitutes a net negative for family savings when women have both greater relational power and higher spending preferences. We suggest that family savings can and should be understood as an outcome of dynamic bargaining conditions in addition to income factors.     

产品质量、议价能力与通道费

零售商通道费的产生机理和福利效应是理论界研究的热点,而零售商现有货架上的在售商品对潜在厂商交易条件的影响却少有研究。文章在货架稀缺的视角下,以包含产品质量的经典效用函数为起点,基于现实中零售商普遍采用的预付费合约和相应商务谈判过程的实际,建立了量化零售商产品质量和议价能力的渠道博弈模型,考察了通道费的产生条件、作用机制和福利效果,并探讨了预付费合约本身的现实基础和例外情况。结果表明：当预付费模式是一种刚性的制度安排时,通道费是否产生取决于零售商的议价能力和现有产品质量,只有议价能力和产品质量都很低的零售商才无法收取通道费;当零售商有能力在预付费模式和买断模式之间选择时,预付费一定实现为通道费,代理费必然不会产生。对生产商而言,通道费迫使低质量厂商退出市场,客观上起到了产品质量筛选的作用。这一筛选机制也决定了消费者福利的损益。     

不完全契约下的劳动剩余控制权安排研究

员工与雇主之间的劳动关系具有平等与隶属的双重性,劳动争议的发生本质上是＂平等＂与＂隶属＂的争议,表现为劳动过程中对劳动剩余控制权的谈判与争夺。在不完全契约条件下,对剩余控制权分配的机制安排取决于劳资双方的谈判实力,应当设计有利于提升劳动者相对谈判实力的机制来实现社会和谐与经济的可持续发展。     

The impact of core labour standards on exports

Developed countries contend that trade in goods whose production is not in conformity with internationally recognized basic labour standards should be restricted, while developing countries view any attempt to link trade and labour standards as a form of protectionism that intends to end their comparative advantage. This paper provides an empirical examination of the relation between trade and core labour standards. It develops an export supply function and uses OLS techniques to test it for 58 non-OECD countries. It finds that only one core standard, the right to organize and collective bargaining, has a statistically significant negative impact on exports. The results are insensitive to the level of development of the countries included in the study. The main conclusion that emerges is that, ignoring the right to organize and collective bargaining, core labour standards do not play a significant role in trade performance.     

Globalization,labour and the state: the case of Indonesia

Globalization has allowed internationally mobile capital to successfully ‘demand’ favourable investment climates, thereby increasing pressure on states to restrict the activities of organized labour. In the advanced industrial countries, the enhanced bargaining position of capital has helped to undermine the welfare state, the great compromise between state, capital and labour. But newly emerging labour movements in late industrializing countries like Indonesia are especially disadvantaged because of the global context characterized by the weakened bargaining position of labour. Nevertheless, labour strife has been on the rise in Indonesia in spite of long-established state mechanisms of labour control, usually legitimized in official discourse by reference to supposedly authentic Indonesian values that eschew conflict. This has to do with the gradual development of an urban-based industrial working class as the product of sustained industrialization until the economic debacle of 1997.     

Multi-Party Negotiation When Agents Have Subjective Estimates of Bargaining Powers

This paper presents a method for generating Pareto-optimal solutions in multi-party negotiations. In this iterative method, decision makers (DMs) formulate proposals that yield a minimum payoff to their opponents. Each proposal belongs to the efficient frontier, DMs try to adjust to a common one. In this setting, each DM is supposed to have a given bargaining power. More precisely each DM is supposed to have a subjective estimate of the power of the different parties. We study the convergence of the method, and provide examples where there is no possible agreement resulting from it.     

Effects of marketing and relationship variables on service intermediaries' promotional program participation

Many service companies sell services through independent intermediaries. Using the Taiwanese life insurance industry as a research context, the author investigates the influence of a life insurance company's marketing (product attractiveness and financial incentives) and relationship (interpersonal relationships and bargaining costs) variables on banks' participation in its promotional program. Both marketing and relationship variables significantly affect the bank's participation, though the marketing variables are more important determinants of participation. Product attractiveness dominates all other factors. Finally, these variables have independent rather than contingent effects on the bank's decisions.     

Bilanz des gesetzlichen Mindestlohns: deutliche Lohnerhöhungen,aber auch viele Umgehungen

Three years after the introduction of the minimum wage in 2015, the assessment of its labour market impact is positive. Contrary to early warnings, there has been no apparent decline in employment in most affected parts of the labour market. The share of the working poor who were eligible for drawing in-work benefits declined by 2.7 percentage points. Nevertheless, there still is a pressing problem of 2.2 million minimum wage violations. Those occur more often in establishments that do not have worker representation and are not covered by collective bargaining. Women and East Germans are also more often affected. Lost wages and social insurance contributions in 2016 were as high as €10 billion.     

The role of home governments in entry bargaining of multinationals: China's investment in Central Asia's natural resource sector

Over the last two decades, China's participation in Central Asia's energy sector has increased dramatically. This article explores the case study of China's outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) in Central Asia's natural resource sector through the framework of bargaining model. Although the scholarly literature studied extensively FDI determinants and support of the home government on MNE activities abroad, there is little evidence‐based research on the effect of governmental negotiations on OFDI. The existing research on China's OFDI in natural resource sector highlighted the country's complex approach to energy deals, which was facilitated by investment in infrastructure projects and provision of loans. As this study confirmed, support with loans and investment in the development of export pipeline infrastructure was crucial in securing energy deals for Chinese multinationals (CMNEs). More specifically, this article makes an important contribution toward the understanding of China's investment in developing markets with high levels of political risk such as Central Asian region. The presented evidence suggests that there is a positive correlation between home government support and successful entry of CMNEs to natural resource sectors in emerging markets.