the impact of monetary policy on inequality in the uk an empirical analysis the uk has experienced a dramatic increase in earnings and income inequality over the past four decades we use detailed micro level information to construct quarterly historical measures of inequality from 1969 to 2012 we investigate whether monetary policy shocks played a role in explaining this increase in inequality we find that contractionary monetary policy shocks lead to an increase in earnings income and consumption inequality and contribute to their fluctuation the response of income and consumption at different quantiles suggests that contractionary policy has a larger negative effect on low income households and those that consume the least when compared to those at the top of the distribution our evidence also suggests that the policy of quantitative easing may have contributed to the increase in inequality over the great recession

the rising skill premium and deunionization abstract during the past 50 years the us economy has seen a rapid decline in labor union membership and a substantial rise in wage inequality since labor unions compress wages between skilled and unskilled workers a rising skill premium encourages skilled workers to withdraw from the union if this withdrawal is accompanied by a fall in the productivity of unskilled workers firms become reluctant to hire the relatively expensive union workers reinforcing the decline in the unionization rate evaluating this hypothesis we find that the rise in the skill premium explains about 40 of the decline in the unionization rate

the effect of unions on the structure of wages a longitudinal analysis this paper studies the effects of unions on the structure of wages using an estimation technique that explicitly accounts for misclassification errors in reported union status and potential correlations between union status and unobserved productivity the econometric model is estimated separately for five skill groups using a large panel data set formed from the u s current population survey the results suggest that unions raise wages more for workers with lower levels of observed skills in addition the patterns of selection bias differ by skill group among workers with lower levels of observed skill unionized workers are positively selected whereas union workers are negatively selected from among those with higher levels of observed skill despite a large and sophisticated literature there is still substantial disagreement over the extent to which differences in the structure of wages between union and nonunion workers represent an effect of trade unions rather than a consequence of the nonrandom selection of unionized workers over the past decade several alternative approaches have been developed to control for unobserved heterogeneity between union and nonunion workers 2 one method that has been successfully applied in other areas of applied microeconometrics is the use of longitudinal data to measure the wage gains or losses of workers who change union status unfortunately longitudinal estimators are highly sensitive to measurement error even a small fraction of misclassified union status changes can lead to significant biases if the true rate of mobility between union and nonunion jobs is low this sensitivity led lewis 1986 to essentially dismiss the longitudinal evidence in his landmark survey of union wage effects in this paper i present some new evidence on the union wage effect based on a longitudinal estimator that explicitly accounts for misclassification errors in reported union status the estimator uses external information on union status misclassification rates along with the reduced form coefficients from a multi variate regression of wages on the observed sequence of union status indicators to isolate the causal effect of unions from any selection biases introduced by a correlation between union status and the permanent component of unobserved wage heterogeneity recognizing that unions may raise wages more or less for

evaluating the evidence on union employment and wages using current population survey data for the years 1973 86 this study tests the hypothesis that the steep decline of union employment shares since 1973 is related to increases in union wages relative to nonunion wages the authors show that although the aggregate union wage premium has changed little since 1973 some industry specific premiums have risen substantially and the industries with the rising premiums are those experiencing declines in union employment shares the increase in the premium explains from 21 to 64 of the decline in union shares depending on the equation specification the paper also presents a detailed set of union wage premiums and employment shares for the sample period

a dynamic analysis of a demand curve based capacity market proposal the pjm reliability pricing model because of high generation adequacy standards in the power industry some peaking capacity operates for a limited time during the year and may not receive sufficient energy revenues to meet its fixed costs this is particularly true when energy prices are capped in order to mitigate market power the northeastern u s independent system operators isos have responded to this issue by establishing capacity obligations for loads and markets for installed capacity thus providing a capacity revenue stream to generators the installed capacity icap markets in the northeastern u s markets are a response to this need for additional incentives to construct generation the federal energy regulatory commission ferc has accepted the pjm interconnection s pjm proposal to replace the present fixed icap requirement that is placed upon load serving entities lses with a demand curve based system in which the iso would be responsible for acquiring residual capacity on behalf of lses the demand curve approach pays more when reserve margins are smaller and provides a reduced incentive for investment when installed reserves are above the target another goal is to make revenues more predictable for generators making investment less costly and ultimately lowering prices for consumers a dynamic representative agent model is presented for projecting effects upon reserve margins generator profitability and consumer costs and is applied to alternative demand curves proposed for the pjm market the consumer costs resulting from a sloped demand curve are robustly lower compared to the present fixed requirement under a wide range of assumptions concerning behavior of generation owners including risk attitudes bidding behavior and willingness to build capacity as a function of forecast profit the cost savings arise from lower capital costs to generators due to reduced risk and risk premiums also average installed capacity is less for the same level of reliability because of reduced fluctuations in installed reserves

trade unions and the efficiency of the natural rate of unemployment decentralized wage setting in search equilibrium models is inefficient because the meeting firm and worker ignore the dependence of job matching probabilities on the number of firms and workers engaged in search this paper investigates whether risk neutral monopolistic unions will have an incentive to internalize this externality i find that the externality will be internalized only if the union s policy is chosen by unemployed persons if employed persons influence union policy both the union wage and unemployment will be too high a tax on the union wage combined with an employment subsidy to firms can correct this inefficiency

job destruction and propagation of shocks this paper considers propagation of aggregate shocks in a dynamic general equilibrium model with labor market matching and endogenous job destruction cyclical fluctuations in the job destruction rate magnify the output effects of shocks as well as making them much more persistent interactions between capital adjustment and the job destruction rate play an important role in generating persistence propagation effects are shown to be quantitatively substantial when the model is calibrated using job flow data incorporating costly capital adjustment leads to significantly greater propagation

intra firm bargaining under non binding contracts we present a new methodology for studying the problem of intra firm bargaining based on the notion that contracts cannot commit the firm and its agents to wages and employment we develop and analyse a general non cooperative multilateral bargaining framework between the firm and its employees and consider outcomes which are immune to renegotiations by any party equilibrium firm profits are characterizable as both a weighted average of a neo classical non bargaining firm s profits and a generalization of shapley value for a corresponding cooperative game furthermore the resulting payoffs induce economically significant distortions in the firm s input and organizational design decisions

sovereign debt and joint liability an economic theory model for amending the treaty of lisbon as the euro area crisis drags on it is evident that a part of the problem lies in the architecture of debt within the euro area this study argues that at least part of the debt problem could be addressed through limited cooperative action entailing appropriately structured contracts generating cross country liability for sovereign debt incurred by individual nations within the european union such agreements are currently proscribed by the treaty of lisbon we construct a game theoretic model demonstrating that there exist self fulfilling equilibria which are pareto superior to the existing outcome and which would come into existence if cross country debt liabilities were permitted

union organizing costs and benefits this paper examines the costs and benefits to current union members in manufacturing of programs to organize the unorganized the marginal cost of organizing an additional employee in constant dollars is estimated for a sample of unions between 1964 and 1977 the primary benefit of organizing that is quantifiable is the extent to which the maintenance or extension of union coverage permits the maintenance of or increase in the union wage estimates of this benefit are derived from previous econometric research linking the union wage to the percentage of the industry organized this single benefit is found to be larger than the estimated marginal cost of extending union coverage in 19 of 20 manufacturing industries

paying to queue a theory of locational differences in nonunion wages abstract traditional theories of the effect unions have on nonunion wages are difficult to reconcile with firm and worker mobility we show how differences in nonunion wages can persist in a two city search model nonunion wage differences across cities are driven by transition rates into the union sector should union queues form in the nonunion sector union power decreases nonunion wages as workers are willing to take lower wages to line up for union jobs however if queues are formed in the unemployed sector union power increases nonunion wages as nonunion firms pay premiums to induce workers to leave the queue

unionization and the pattern of nonunion wage supplements negotiated standard wage policies reduce dispersion in the log earnings of union members when compared to those of otherwise equal nonunion members 5 6 as large as these dispersion differences are they may underestimate the true influence of union wage policy kahn and curme 14 have suggested that high degrees of unionization actually result in reduced nonunion wage dispersion this follows from a particular model of the union threat effect in which nonunion employers tilt induced wage increases toward low wage workers such tilting makes sense because lower paid workers are assumed to be more likely to support unions ceteris paribus this assumption fails to emphasize that low wage workers may be the least likely to be retained by a newly unionized employer and that this also influences their ultimate decision to support unionization in the face of union avoidance strategies that routinely imply the possibility of job loss low wage employees may recognize that the employer faces greater costs of bringing them up to a standard union wage and thus their chances for retention are lower including this realization results in ambiguous predictions about the influence of unionization on nonunion dispersion not only should the ambiguity of the proper theoretical prediction be highlighted but it should be recognized that the relevant prediction from theoretical models has not yet been tested previous tests are inappropriate because the threat induced wage increases could be tilted toward low wage workers without a necessary reduction in the typical measures of wage dispersion similarly those measures of wage dispersion may actually decline without a general tilt of wages toward low wage workers this possibility exists because of the sensitivity of the usual variance measures to outliers and because of aggregation and endogeneity problems affecting previous methodologies this paper uses 1983 and 1988 current population survey cps data to directly estimate the impact of unionization on the earnings of lowand high wage nonunion workers after controlling for traditional human capital locational and occupational variables unionization increases the log earnings of low wage nonunion workers significantly more than those of high wage nonunion workers this result is found with the very data belman and heywood 2 used to demonstrate that

nonunion wage rates and the threat of unionization i investigate how the threat of union organization affects the wage paid to nonunion workers i start by outlining the standard model of wage determination by a nonunion employer when faced with the threat of union organization the model suggests that the nonunion wage will be directly related and the union wage gap will be inversely related to the threat i use repeated cross section data from the cps from 1977 2002 to develop a measure of the threat as the predicted probability of union membership i use this measure to estimate earnings functions that use several sources of variation in the likelihood of union membership to identify the threat effect in a manner that reduces the likelihood of omitted variable bias finally i investigate two cases where there has arguably been a change in the likelihood of union organization that is not correlated with changes in the demand for labor these include the wage changes surrounding the introduction of rightto work rtw laws in two states during the period studied and wage changes surrounding deregulation of key industries in the late 1970s and early 1980s the results are mixed the preferred estimates from the analysis using predicted probability of unionization as the threat measure imply very little relationship between either nonunion wages or the union wage gap and the threat the estimates that rely on the introduction of rtw laws show a significant relationship between nonunion wages and the introduction of rtw laws in one of the two states stronger evidence of threat effects is found in the experience of deregulated industries where regulation was a central factor in union strength

job queues and the union status of workers this paper develops a model of the determination of the union status of workers that allows for the possibility of queuing for union jobs the empirical results derived using a sample from the university of michigan panel study of income dynamics are supportive of the queuing hypothesis the no queue model can be rejected using a likelihood ratio test this suggests that a simple probit or logit model for union status is misspecified because it is not based on any consistent behavioral theory an important implication of the model is that because most new entrants to the labor market prefer union jobs but cannot get them and because accrual of nonunion seniority makes workers progressively less likely to desire union jobs the union status of workers is largely determined by their success in being selected from the queue early in their working life

union effects on nonunion wages evidence from panel data on industries and cities the authors test for threat and crowding effects of unions on non union wages at the industry and city levels using panel data on the percent organized and nonunion industry and city wage differentials constructed from current population surveys over the period 1973 89 at the industry level increases in the percent organized were associated with decreases in the nonunion industry wage differential suggesting that crowding effects were the predominant union effect on nonunion industry wage differentials in contrast at the city level increases in the percent organized were associated with increases in the nonunion city wage differential suggesting that threat effects predominated the authors also find evidence of negative cross occupation union effects on nonunion industry wage differentials supporting their hypothesis that the industry level results were partly driven by complementarity between union and nonunion labor

counterpart funding requirements and the foreign aid procyclicality puzzle official development assistance is a key source of external finance in many developing countries a striking feature of these aid flows is their positive correlation with business cycles in recipient countries this pattern is puzzling in that it reinforces recipients already strong and costly macroeconomic fluctuations we propose a simple model of investment financing and aid provision under asymmetric information that rationalizes such a pattern we assume that donor agencies and recipient governments value projects differently and that donors know less than recipients do about project characteristics we show that donors can make a recipient government identify high return projects by requiring that the latter contribute some of its own funds to projects providing these matching grants or counterpart funds is less affordable for recipients during economic downturns which leads to aid procyclicality our model produces aid contracts consistent with those used by aid agencies rationalizes observed aid patterns and yields a rich set of testable empirical predictions

the rise and fall of unions in the united states abstract union membership in the united states displayed a shaped pattern over the 20th century while income inequality sketched a a model of unions is developed to analyze these facts there is a distribution of productivity across firms in the economy firms hire capital plus skilled and unskilled labor unionization is a costly process a union chooses how many firms to organize and the union wage simulation of the model establishes that skill biased technological change which affects the productivity of skilled labor relative to unskilled labor can potentially explain the observed paths for union membership and income inequality

the union threat this paper studies the impact of unions on wage inequality output and unemployment to do so it proposes a search and matching model of union formation in which unions arise endogenously through a voting process within firms in a union firm workers bargain their wages collectively in a nonunion firm each worker bargains individually with the firm because of this wage setting asymmetry a union lowers the profit of a firm and compresses the wage distribution of the workers furthermore to prevent unionization nonunion firms distort their hiring decisions in a way that also lowers the dispersion of wages after being calibrated on the united states the model shows that even though a partial equilibrium estimate would predict a small impact of unions on inequality removing the threat of unionization increases the variance of wages substantially completely outlawing unions increases wage inequality further moreover outlawing unions increases welfare and output and lowers unemployment these results suggest that even with a small membership unions might have a significant impact on the economy through general equilibrium mechanisms and the way they distort firms decisions i am greatly indebted to nobuhiro kiyotaki esteban rossi hansberg and oleg itskhoki for their invaluable advice and support throughout this project special thanks go to esteban for suggesting the title i also wish to thank manuel amador orley ashenfelter francisco buera jeff campbell pablo fajgelbaum henry farber baris kaymak david lee thomas lemieux benjamin moll justinas pelenis edouard schaal andrew shephard christopher sims liz tennant as well as seminar participants at princeton university and the chicago fed rookie seminar for helpful comments and suggestions i gratefully acknowledge financial support from the fonds quebecois de recherche sur la societe et la culture email mtascher princeton edu address 001 fisher hall department of economics princeton university princeton nj 08544 for the most recent version go to http sites google com site mathtd

intra firm bargaining and shapley values we study two wage bargaining games between a firm and multiple workers we revisit the bargaining game proposed by stole and zwiebel we show that in the unique subgame perfect equilibrium the gains from trade captured by workers who bargain earlier with the firm are larger than those captured by workers who bargain later as well as larger than those captured by the firm the resulting equilibrium payoffs are different from those reported in stole and zwiebel as they are not the shapley values we propose a novel bargaining game the rolodex game which follows a simple and realistic protocol in the unique no delay subgame perfect equilibrium of this game the payoffs to the firm and to the workers are their shapley values

unions and nonunion wage dispersion previous research has found that union standard rate policies lower the dispersion of union wages and that unions indirectly raise nonunion wage levels as firms weigh the probability of unionizing and wage costs these two findings imply that unions lower the dispersion of nonunion wages since for a given payroll a nonunion firm can achieve the greatest reduction in the probability of unionism by giving raises to those who would benefit most from a union this hypothesis is confirmed on current population survey data taking into account the endogeneity of unionism ceteris paribus nonunion wage dispersion is lower in more highly unionized industries copyright 1987 by mit press

wage differentials across labor markets and workers does cost of living matter wage differentials studies rarely account for interarea differences in cost of living owing both to data limitations and theoretical ambiguity this study develops a price index for 185 metropolitan areas comprising about 70 of the u s labor force current population survey data for 1985 95 and data on sitespecific amenities are used to estimate earnings differentials based on nominal wages wages fully adjusted for measured cost of living and a simple approximation of real wages with partial adjustment for pricelevel differences dispersion in approximate real wages across 185 labor markets and differentials by region and city size are substantially lower than dispersion in nominal or full adjustment wages estimates of racial and ethnic differentials display moderate sensitivity to choice of a wage measure whereas other standard differentials do not both nominal wages and wages fully adjusted for cost of living may provide misleading estimates of real wage differentials absent data on interarea prices and amenities researchers should include detailed controls for region and city size in nominal wage equations jel j31 r23

a theory of wages and labor demand with intra firm bargaining and matching frictions this article provides a model of labor market equilibrium with search and within firm strategic bargaining we yield explicit closed form solutions with heterogeneous labor inputs and capital the solution exhibits overemployment we show that higher relative bargaining power for some groups of workers may lead to overemployment relative to other groups with such other groups being underemployed instead if they have a lower relative bargaining power similarly the hold up problem between capitalists and employees does not necessarily lead to underinvestment in physical capital beyond the neo classical analysis firms are the field of several strategic interactions between capital owners and labor between marginal employees and incumbents and more generally between different groups with various bargaining positions within the firm it is usually considered that the bargaining power of workers entails an employment level that is lower than in a competitive labor market and any increase in the bargaining power of workers raises unemployment these results are true for a wide class of models and notably in the now standard framework to analyze unemployment namely search and matching models of pissarides 2000 however stole and zwiebel 1996a 1996b show that the above results are totally changed in the intra firm bargaining model where employees engage in individual wage negotiation with the firm in fact under the assumption that contract incompleteness does not enable either party to commit to future wages and employment decisions they show that intra firm bargaining yields no rent for employees and gives rise to overemployment compared to a competitive labor market the basic idea of stole and zwiebel is that a firm with a diminishing marginal productivity of labor can decrease the bargained wage which increases in the marginal productivity of labor by raising employment in stole and zwiebel s setting firms overemploy strategically up to the point where workers get their reservation wage

economic impacts of new unionization on private sector employers 1984 2001 economic impacts of unionization on employers are difficult to estimate in the absence of large representative data on establishments with union status information estimates are also confounded by selection bias because unions could organize at highly profitable enterprises that are more likely to grow and pay higher wages using multiple establishment level data sets that represent establishments that faced organizing drives in the united states during 1984 1999 this paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impact of unionization on business survival employment output productivity and wages essentially outcomes for employers where unions barely won the election e g by one vote are compared with those where the unions barely lost the analysis finds small impacts on all outcomes that we examine estimates for wages are close to zero the evidence suggests that at least in recent decades the legal mandate that requires the employer to bargain with a certified union has had little economic impact on employers because unions have been somewhat unsuccessful at securing significant wage gains

international credit and welfare a paradoxical theorem and its policy implications abstract this paper considers a developing nation that faces a foreign exchange shortage and hence its demand for foreign goods is limited both by its income and its foreign exchange balance availability of international credit relaxes the second constraint we develop a simple model of strategic interaction between lending institutions and firms and show that the availability of international credit at concessionary rates can leave the borrowing nation worse off than if it had to borrow money at higher market rates this paradox of benevolence is then used to motivate a discussion of policies pertaining to international lending and the southern government s method of rationing out foreign exchange to the importers

union effects on white collar compensation this paper uses two new data sources each of which combines information on worker and establishment characteristics with detailed information on the components of employee compensation to examine union nonunion pay differentials for white collar workers estimates reveal that nonunion wages and total compensation are more responsive than union pay levels to worker productivity differences such as education and work experience also large firms pay 10 to 15 percent more to their white collar employees than small firms in the nonunion sector but only 5 percent or less in the union sector overall the white collar union wage differential appears to be 3 5 to 4 0 percent rising to 7 1 percent when fringe benefits are included in the dependent variable significant spillovers to nonunion white collar workers which appear to erode the measured union nonunion pay differentials are also found

aid policies and growth the authors of this paper use a new database on foreign aid to examine the relationships among foreign aid economic policies and growth of per capita gdp in panel growth regressions for 56 developing countries and 6 four year periods 1970 93 they find that the policies that have a great effect on growth are those related to fiscal surplus inflation and trade openness they construct an index for those three policies and have that index interact with foreign aid they have instruments for both aid and aid interacting with policies they find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies in the presence of poor policies aid has no positive effect on growth this result is robust in a variety of specifications which include or exclude middle income countries include or exclude outliers and treat policies as exogenous or endogenous they examine the determinants of policy and find no evidence that aid has systematically affected policies either for good or for ill they estimate an aid allocation equation and show that any tendency for aid to reward good policies has been overwhelmed by donors pursuit of their own strategic interests in a counterfactual they reallocate aid reduce the role of donor interests and increasing the importance of policy such a reallocation would have a large positive effect on developing countries growth rates

estimating the effects of unions on wage inequality in a panel data model with comparative advantage and nonrandom selection this article considers the estimation of the structure of wages in union and nonunion sectors it proposes an estimator that extends standard panel data techniques to the case in which the return to the permanent component of the error term is differently rewarded in the two sectors the econometric model is used to estimate the effect of unions on both the level and the variance of wages in canada the findings indicate that unions increase the average wage of workers and compress the returns to observable measures of skill and to a time invariant unobservable measure of skill

the effect of unions on wage inequality in the u s labor market this study uses current population survey micro data for 1973 74 and 1993 to evaluate the effect of changing union membership on trends in male and female wage inequality unionization rates of men fell between the two sample periods with bigger declines among lower skill groups these trends account for 15 20 of the rise in male wage inequality union membership rates of low wage women also declined while unionization increased among higher wage women on balance shifting unionization accounts for very little of the rise in female wage inequality economy wide trends in unionization mask a sharp divergence between the private sector where unionism was declining and the public sector where it was rising comparisons across sectors suggest that unionization substantially slowed the growth in wage inequality in the public sector

unions in a frictional labor market abstract a labor market with search and matching frictions where wage setting is controlled by a monopoly union that follows a norm of wage solidarity is found vulnerable to substantial distortions associated with holdup with full commitment to future wages the union achieves efficient hiring in the long run but hikes up wages in the short run to appropriate rents from firms without commitment in a markov perfect equilibrium hiring is too low both in the short and the long run the quantitative impact is demonstrated in an extended model with partial union coverage and multiperiod union contracting

the effect of company campaigns on certification elections law and reality once again recent studies have challenged the conclusion getman goldberg and herman reached in their 1976 study that company campaigns have little if any effect on how workers vote in union certification elections this study attempts to reconcile these conflicting results by re analyzing data collected by getman goldberg and herman for their study the author estimates a probit model of voting that controls for several variables not considered in other studies he finds that employer threats and actions taken against union supporters some written communications and captive audience speeches all have statistically significant effects on voting election simulations based on the voting model also show that the effects of these employer tactics can be important in determining election outcomes

public sector earnings and the extent of unionization many studies have examined the influence of union density union members as a percentage of all workers on earnings in the private sector but few such studies have looked at the public sector using data from the 1991 current population survey this study estimates the determinants of earnings for state and local government employees in both the union and nonunion sectors the extent of public sector unionization appears to be positively correlated with earnings for both state and local government workers and for those covered and not covered by collective agreements although the effect for non covered employees is smaller than that for covered employees both effects are larger than those typically found in similar estimates for the private sector the authors also find that bargaining structure has some influence on earnings with the most consistent effect being a positive influence of arbitration on the earnings of local government workers

wage effects of increased union coverage methodological considerations and new evidence although many studies show a positive relationship between extent of unionization and union members wages some analysts suggest that this relationship could reflect a concentration of labor organization in industries with potentially high wage gains rather than unions efficacy in raising wages consistent with that speculation studies across occupations or geographic areas generally show a much weaker relationship between unionization and wages than do studies across industries the authors of this study argue however that the weakness of the relationship found in some empirical research is due to the use of data sets mixing local market industries characterized by local bargaining with national market industries characterized by national bargaining an empirical analysis supports this hypothesis wages are positively correlated with the extent of unionization in a local market industry supermarkets but not in a national market industry aerospace

the role of energy efficiency spending in maryland s implementation of the regional greenhouse gas initiative what are the economic consequences of increased state spending on electricity consumption efficiency the state of maryland faces this question in deciding how much of its co2 allowances auction proceeds under the regional greenhouse gas initiative to devote to such programs starting at a base of 25 of the proceeds we consider the energy savings emissions reductions employment and other impacts of increasing that percentage to 50 and 100 a series of models haiku jhu outec and implan are used for the analysis we conclude that increasing the state s expenditures on energy efficiency programs would result in a decline in electricity consumption in the state and a corresponding decline in expenditures on electricity program implementation would lead to net positive growth in statewide economic activity and include growth in both jobs and wages

a model of monopoly with strategic government intervention abstract a formal model of firm government interaction is developed in which the firm chooses the producer price and the government chooses the ad valorem tax rate to maximise revenue collection this game is then embedded as the second stage of a two stage game where in stage 1 the firm gets to choose its technology and therefore its cost function the main results of the paper are i to characterise the nash and stackelberg equilibria of the government firm game ii to demonstrate that strategic inefficiency i e the choice of high cost technologies when lower cost options are available is pervasive in these models whenever the government uses ad valorem taxes and iii to show that if the government s choice between ad valorem tax and specific or per unit tax is endogenised then in a perfect equilibrium the government will in fact choose the ad valorem system

the effect of unionism on fringe benefits this study analyzes the impact of unionism on fringes paid to production workers using data on individual establishments it compares fringe expenditures in establishments having the same level of compensation per hour and finds that unionism raises the share of compensation allotted to fringes particularly to pensions vacation pay and life accident and health insurance in addition since unionism also raises the straight time wage rate itself a prime determinant of expenditures on fringes unionism has a very sizeable impact on total fringe expenditures as well as on the fringe share of compensation the union fringe effect exceeds in percentage terms the union wage effect and is sufficiently large to suggest that standard union wage studies understate the union effect on total compensation the study also compares the fringe expenditures of production and non production workers within the same establishment controlling for within establishment pay policies the findings suggest that the pres

an oligopolistic power market model with tradable no sub x permits models formulated as complementarity problems have been applied previously to assess the potential for market power in transmission constrained electricity markets here we use the complementarity approach to simulate the interaction of pollution permit markets with electricity markets considering forward contracts and the operating reserve market because some power producers are relatively large consumers of permits there could be interaction between market power in the permits and energy markets market power in the energy market is modeled using a cournot game while a conjectured price response model is used in the permits market an illustrative application is made to pennsylvania new jersey maryland interconnection pjm which we represent by a 14 node dc load flow model and the usepa ozone transport commission no sub x budget program the results show that forward contracts effectively mitigate market power in pjm energy market and both simulated solutions of perfect and cournot oligopoly competition are a good approximation to actual prices in 2000 except that the cournot model yielded higher peak prices the no sub x market influences the cournot energy market in several ways one is that cournot competition lowers the price of no sub x permits which in turn affects on low and high emission producers differently in general because pollution permits are an important cost high concentration in the market for such permits can exacerbate the effects of market power in energy markets

a new econometric model of union threat effects the union threat effect is the propensity of non union employers to resist union organization by raising wages this study introduces an empirical model of the non union employer s optimal wage in the presence of threat effects estimates of an equation of a firm s unionization probability provide key variables unlike previous models this specification dervies directly from a theoritical model separstes threat effects from the influence of other union non union spillovers and efficiency wages and includes many factors affecting the probability of unionization wage equation estimates reveal that the predicted threat of unionization did not significantly raise non union wages in the united states in 1980

contraction and expansion the divergence of private sector and public sector unionism in the united states the institutional structure of the american labor market changed remarkably from the 1950s and 1960s to the 1980s in the 50s and 60s trade unions seemed permanently established in the private sector of the economy a third of nonagricultur al wage and salary workers and over half of blue collar workers were union members hundreds of thousands of workers voted annually in national labor relations board nlrb representation elections to join unions most large firms sought stable collective bargaining relations with their unions by contrast in the public sector only 10 12 percent of workers were union members fewer were covered by collective bargaining contracts and most experts regarded public employees as intrinsically nonorganizable according to afl cio president george meany it was impossible to bargain collectively with the government kramer 1962 p 14 the massive contraction of unionism in the private sector and expansion in the public sector in the 1970s and 1980s see exhibit 1 has produced an utterly different situation today in the private sector the proportion of wage and salary workers in unions plummeted to 14 percent in 1986 a level comparable to that in the great depression only a minuscule number of workers joined unions through nlrb elections and national companies openly proclaimed their intent to establish a union free environment by contrast in the public sector over a third of the work force was unionized some 40 percent were covered by collective contracts 1 and 1 estimates of organization in the public sector differ somewhat among sources though all data show greater organization than in the private sector see freeman ichniowski and zax forthcoming for a detailed analysis of the various statistics

nominal and real union wage differentials and the effects of industry and smsa density 1973 83 many studies have examined the influence of union density union members as a percentage of all workers on earnings in the private sector but few such studies have looked at the public sector using data from the 1991 current population survey this

a theory of the firm with non binding employment contracts this paper examines an employment relation in which individual workers enjoy some bargaining power vis a vis the firm although they are not unionized the main elements of the situations studied here are that the employment contracts are non binding across periods of production and that the firm has opportunities to replace workers the paper analyzes a dynamic model in which the processes of contracting and recontracting between the firm and its workers are intertwined with the dynamic evolution of the firm s workforce the analysis of the model is somewhat complicated because the employment level is a nondegenerate state variable that evolves over time and is affected by past decisions the main analytical results characterize certain important equilibria the profit maximizing and stationa ry equilibria the unique stationary equilibrium is markedly inefficient it exhibits inefficient over employment and the steady state wages coincide with the workers reservation wage it confirms earlier results derived by stole and zwiebel 1996a b in the context of a static model and shows that they are very robust even when the firm has nearly frictionless hiring opportunities in contrast in the profit maximizing equilibrium the outcome is nearly efficient and the wage exhibits a mark up over the reservation wage

loan pushing and triadic relations this paper is an attempt to define and explore the phenomenon of loan pushing in international lending in the 1970s the earliest descriptions of loan pushing are anecdotal this paper surveys the various facets that emerge from these anecdotes and suggests a possible definition that serves as the basis for a theoretical model this model inspired by the confessions of a banker explores a triadic relationship between a corporation in the lender country the lender bank and a borrower in a developing country and suggests that a rational profit maximizing commercial bank could end up pushing loans on to the borrower changes in international commercial banking in the 1970s that facilitated this type of loan pushing are discussed next to the extent that the loan pushing doctrine is valid it implies that the commercial banks were at least as responsible for the massive lending boom of the 1970s as the borrowers and should have been made to bear the cost of adjustment as well the process of sovereign lending in the 1970s appears to consist of voluntary and mutually agreeable contracts between the transnational commercial banks and credit seeking developing countries the suggestion that there could be in this process an element of aggressiveness on the part of the commercial banks that actively and systematically pushed loans on to developing country borrowers may at first sight seem inconceivable if a borrower voluntarily enters into a loan contract he is obviously doing so because the contract is beneficial if such is the case then would it be correct to characterize the process as one of loan pushing also the commercial banks are supposed to be rational profit maximizers thus the amount of lending cannot be more than optimal what then is meant by loan pushing these are a few questions that immediately come to mind it has been argued that international credit can contribute to increasing donor exports see for instance winkler 1929 hyson and strout 1968 gwynne 1983 taylor 1985 darity and horn 1988 basu 1991 basu and deshpande 1995 this is indeed one of the arguments used to explain the phenomenon of loan pushing however not the only one the aim of this paper is to explore the idea of loan pushing a little more deeply by first trying to understand the concept along with a brief review of the literature in the area section 2 the confessions of a young banker gwynne 1983 provide the basis of the theoretical model section 3 which considers a triadic relationship between a commercial bank in a creditor country a debtor nation and a corporation in the creditor country and the compulsions of loan pushing arising

unions and the labor market status of white and minority youth this paper presents data showing that unions have a very substantial effect on the wages of young union workers particularly young blacks but that they also have a negative effect on the wages of young blacks who are not unionized the effects of unions on employment are negative for both groups and especially for blacks in addition the data indicate that young blacks within the labor force have union membership rates that are roughly comparable to those of young whites but rates for young blacks are lower after accounting for differences in the rate of labor force participation of young blacks and whites young blacks also continue to be underrepresented in strongly unionized crafts and in the construction industry while being overrepresented in the weakly organized and low wage service sector these results suggest the need to improve further the access of blacks to unionized employment

a multisectorial matching model of unions abstract we develop an equilibrium matching model where unions have an important institutional presence monopolistic competition characterizes the goods market where only some sectors are unionized thus the model can vary the coverage of collective bargaining it can vary the degree of coordination between unions and alternatively consider national and sectorial unions calibration to the union premium implies a workers rent extraction parameter much lower than assumed in the matching literature we introduce unemployment insurance to study the interactions of policies with unions and find that unions only push for more generous benefits if this does not entail higher payroll taxes

do capital importing countries pay higher prices for their imports of goods abstract we examine the effects that a country s net capital flows have on the border prices that a country pays for its imports of goods using data from 2000 to 2009 for 11 euro area countries we utilize a pricing to market specification to study exporters pricing behavior to the rest of the countries in the sample at the industry level for 900 goods disseminated at the 4 digit standard international trade classification level this allows us to construct a panel dataset which contains observations across exporters importers industries and time we find a strong positive influence of the importing country s net capital inflows on the border prices of its imports of goods this result is robust across different specifications of the underlying model as well to different sample dis aggregations across types of capital flows product categories and exporters

aid and growth regressions this paper examines the relationship between foreign aid and growth in real gdp per capita as it emerges from simple augmentations of popular cross country growth specifications it is shown that aid in all likelihood increases the growth rate and this result is not conditional on good policy there are however decreasing returns to aid and the estimated effectiveness of aid is highly sensitive to the choice of estimator and the set of control variables when investment and human capital are controlled for no positive effect of aid is found yet aid continues to impact on growth via investment we conclude by stressing the need for more theoretical work before this kind of cross country regressions are used for policy purposes

union membership determination and industry characteristics recent literature on the economics of unionism has expanded beyond its customary focus on the wage and nonwage effects of collective bargaining and given increased attention to the determinants of union membership previous union membership studies have been couched primarily within an individual choice framework whereby utility maximizing individuals choose either to join or not to join a union empirical work typically treats membership as a function of some vector of personal characteristics 1 2 10 11 21 it is our contention that such studies can best be interpreted as explaining the determination of the union status of jobs and that several industry and firm characteristics in addition to personal characteristics can be expected to affect significantly union membership in this paper theory and evidence relating to the effects of firm and industry characteristics on union membership are presented industry level data are bridged with a large microdata set containing individual characteristics in order to examine the determinants of unionism among workers in manufacturing utilizing a simultaneous model and controlling for sample selection bias we find that product market concentration capital intensity establishment size and job risk significantly affect the likelihood of union membership

the impact of the threat of bankruptcy on the structure of compensation this article builds and tests a model of the impact of a firm s bank ruptcy probability on its propensity to offer deferred compensation schemes using 1983 current population survey data we find that ceteris paribus lower failure rates raise the incidence of pensions for nonunion workers outside manufacturing further we find some evidence that among those workers with a pension a higher industry failure rate steepens tenure earnings profiles jointly controlling for union nonunion and pension no pension selectivity such a result suggests that workers discount implicit promises of future earnings increases by the likelihood that the firm will not survive