collective bargaining arrangements closed shops and relative pay this paper uses establishment level data to examine the impact on union nonunion pay differentials of the industrial relations setting in which bargaining takes place the pre entry closed shop is found to be of prime importance for the pay of both skilled and semiskilled manual workers for skilled workers and for semiskilled workers in larger establishments the differentials are found to be insignificantly different from zero in the absence of a pre entry closed shop copyright 1987 by royal economic society

pay setting self employment and the unions one of the important influences that has shaped recent labour market policy is the idea that pay should depend on the employer s financial per formance this is believed both by politicians and by businessmen and comes in various guises it was the subject of long debate in the spring issues of the financial times prime minister john major argued that there should be no such thing as automatic pay increases pay must be linked to

relative earnings and individual union membership in the united kingdom considerable attention has been focused in recent years on the empirical analysis of the effect of trade unions on the structure of earnings such empirical investigation usually entails measurement of the union non union differential in wages or earnings at the level of the individual this involves comparison of the earnings of union members with estimates of what their earnings would be were they not union members or equivalently examination of differences in earnings between individuals comparable with regard to all other relevant characteristics who differ in their union membership alone in the united kingdom all previous attempts at estimation of this differential have used aggregate data at either the industry or occupation level 1 the conventional methodology involves regression of the logarithm of the average wage on either the proportion of workers who are union members or the proportion covered by a collective agreement together with a vector of industry characteristics that are deemed to determine the non union wage however several problems are immediately apparent with this methodology first the model ignores the possibility of variation in the differential across industries which has potentially serious consequences second the vector of other characteristics customarily used is somewhat limited and raises doubts concerning the adequacy of the standardization for what might loosely be termed labour quality third only a sub sample of industries is ever used owing to lack of data those industries excluded are generally smaller in terms of employment that those included if the differential varies with the size of the industry a further bias will be induced all of these problems are either removed or lessened by the use of individual level data for an analysis of their impact at the industry level see geroski and stewart 1981 2 as a result it is now widely accepted that the appropriate way to measure such differentials is to use micro data sets at the level of the individual worker until recently suitable data have not been available for the united kingdom and hence such analysis was not possible this paper presents the first estimates for the united kingdom based on individual level data if the value of the union non union differential were the same for all workers in the unionized sector analysis at the industry level and the individual level would produce similar results however the marshallian laws of derived demand suggest that this will not be the case despite this clear prediction of variation in the differential there has been little systematic investigation of the variation this paper also presents such an analysis since variation in the differential across industries results in aggregation bias in industry level studies such an analysis is of considerable relevance to the evaluation of the evidence from such studies as well as being of interest in its own right the paper is laid out as follows section i presents a method of estimating the union non union differential at the individual level while section ii

truthfulness with value maximizing bidders on the limits of approximation in combinatorial markets abstract in some markets bidders want to maximize value subject to a budget constraint rather than payoff this is different to the quasilinear utility functions typically assumed in auction theory and leads to different strategies and outcomes we refer to bidders who maximize value as value bidders while simple single object auction formats are truthful standard multi object auction formats allow for manipulation it is straightforward to show that there cannot be a truthful and revenue maximizing deterministic auction mechanism with value bidders and general valuations approximation has been used as remedy to achieve truthfulness on other mechanism design problems and we study which approximation ratios we can get from truthful mechanisms we show that the approximation ratio that can be achieved with a deterministic and truthful approximation mechanism with n bidders cannot be higher than 1 n for general valuations for randomized approximation mechanisms there is a framework with a ratio that is tight

women and the union wage gap this paper uses the social change and economic life initiative 1986 data set to provide new estimates for the female union wage gap for britain the joint endogeneity of trade union and full time part time employment status is addressed within the econometric framework of a bivariate sample selection model the mean unconditional union mark up estimate for female full time workers is estimated at 14 6 percent with the comparable estimate for part time female workers estimated at 15 3 percent copyright 1992 by royal economic society

constrainedly fair job assignments under minimum wages a number of jobs are to be assigned to a greater number of workers while having to abide by the law of minimum wages firms must determine who should be assigned which job and at what salary in such situations fair envy free allocations usually fail to exist to cope with this situation this paper proposes a new concept of fairness called constrained fairness among the set of constrainedly fair allocations the so called constrainedly fair and minimal allocations are of particular interest the reason for this is that the salaries are not only compatible with the minimum wages they are also optimal from the standpoint of cost minimizing firms and the assignment of jobs is efficient from the viewpoint of workers a convergent dynamic procedure that identifies constrainedly fair and minimal allocations is proposed furthermore strategic properties of the mechanism are derived and two notions of efficiency are evaluated

a parametrization of the auction design space abstract we present an extensive breakdown of the auction design space that captures the essential similarities and differences of many auction mechanisms in a format more descriptive and useful than simple taxonomies this parametrization serves as an organizational framework in which to classify work within the field and uncovers parameter combinations corresponding to novel mechanisms the structured characterization of auction rules can be exploited for the modular design of configurable auction servers it also facilitates the communication of auction rules to software agents enabling the automation of flexible market based negotiation journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 d44

a multi item auction with budget constrained bidders and price controls we extend the multi item auction model of talman and yang 2008 and andersson et al 2015 by considering both unit demand bidders with budget constraints and price controls on bidding items due to these budget and price restrictions a walrasian equilibrium generally fails to exist to achieve efficiency we propose a rationed equilibrium whose allocation is in the core we also construct an ascending auction to find the proposed rationed equilibrium in pseudo polynomial time

unions and profitability over the 1980s some evidence on union firm bargaining in the united kingdom in this paper an attempt is made to assess the behaviour of the rate of return on sales of unionised firms as compared to the non unionised ones in the late 1980s in the united kingdom the main aim is to examine what has happened to the relationship between unionisation and profitability after the changes in the union legislation competition environment and cyclical variations that took place over this period the impact of different forms of union firm bargaining on the union profitability effect is also examined the data reveal that the negative union effect on profitability exists even after controlling for firm specific fixed effects but that it has been sharply reduced over the 1980s

are effort bargaining models consistent with the facts an assessment of the early 1980s recent research has attempted to explain the impact of changes in union bargaining of the uk productivity miracle of the 1980s a central part of these explaniations is the concept of effort or working conditions as an observable component of negotiations after reviewing the evidence this paper shiows that in models where effort and wages are jointly negotiated in an environmenit of weakenitig union power a positive effort wage association as observed in the early 1980s in the uk emerges only unider quite special assumptions we show that the stylized facts are better explained by a model where effort and wages are bargained over sequentially

using first price auctions to sell heterogeneous licenses abstract this paper considers three alternative ways to sell heterogeneous licenses via a first price format when there is single unit demand it has been suggested that incorporating a first price element may bolster competition in this case klemperer paul d 2002 what really matters in auction design journal of economic perspectives 16 169 189 in a controlled laboratory setting we compare the performance of the simultaneous first price auction the sequential first price auction and the simultaneous descending auction with that of the simultaneous ascending auction the experiments involve several bidding environments of varying complexity we find that the simultaneous ascending auction achieves the highest levels of efficiency but also has drawbacks i its revenues are low and variable ii per license profits vary and iii the incidence of winner s curse outcomes is high seller s revenues are highest when the licenses are sold in a sequential first price auction in decreasing order of quality

ramsey optimal tax reforms and real exchange rate dynamics abstract we solve the ramsey optimal tax plan for a small open economy with an endogenously determined real exchange rate the open economy constrains the government s setting of the capital income tax rate since physical capital cannot be dominated in rate of return by foreign assets however the endogenous real exchange rate loosens this constraint relative to a one good open economy model in which the real exchange rate is necessarily fixed we find that the dynamics of the two good small open economy model more closely resemble those of a closed economy model than a one good small open economy model

internet advertising and the generalized second price auction selling billions of dollars worth of keywords we investigate the generalized second price gsp auction a new mechanism used by search engines to sell online advertising although gsp looks similar to the vickrey clarke groves vcg mechanism its properties are very different unlike the vcg mechanism gsp generally does not have an equilibrium in dominant strategies and truth telling is not an equilibrium of gsp to analyze the properties of gsp we describe the generalized english auction that corresponds to gsp and show that it has a unique equilibrium this is an ex post equilibrium with the same payoffs to all players as the dominant strategy equilibrium of vcg

l investissement francais dans les colonies 1876 1940 une autre analyse de l enquete de gouvernement de vichy 1943 this paper presents an econometric model of trade union membership in the united kingdom the empirical model utilizes cyclical variables in the explanation of membership changes and separates the short and long run dynamics explicitly it proves to be a superior specification to previous business cycle models estimated for the united kingdom and predicts satisfatorily the recent decline in membership the inclusion of a dummy variable reflecting the political complexion of the government is the only secular variable which significantly improves equation performance but the composition of changes in employment plays no part in explaining the recent decline in membership copyright 1988 by the london school of economics and political science

robust auctions for revenue via enhanced competition in robust auctions for revenue via enhanced competition t roughgarden i talgam cohen and q yan revisit the classic bulow klemperer result this result compares the revenues of two well know

online ad auctions i describe how search engines sell ad space using an auction i analyze advertiser behavior in this context using elementary price theory and derive a simple way to estimate the producer surplus generated by online search advertising it appears that the estimated value of online advertising tends to be between 2 and 2 3 times advertising expenditures jel d44 auctions d21 firm behavior

the strategy structure of some coalition formation games in coalitional games with side payments the core predicts which coalitions form and how benefits are shared the predictions however run into difficulties if the core is empty or if some coalitions benefit from not blocking truthfully these difficulties are analyzed in games in which an a priori given collection of coalitions can form as the collection of pairs of buyer seller in an assignment game the incentive properties of the core and of its selections are investigated in function of the collection furthermore the relationships with vickrey clarke groves mechanisms are drawn

double implementation in a market for indivisible goods with a price constraint i consider the problem of assigning indivisible objects to agents in which each agent pays a price for his object and all prices sum to a given constant the objective is to select an assignment price pair that is envy free with respect to the agents true preferences i propose a simple mechanism whereby agents announce valuations for all objects and an envy free allocation is selected with respect to these announced preferences i prove that the proposed mechanism implements both in nash and strong nash equilibrium the set of true envy free allocations

vickrey dutch procurement auction for multiple items we consider a setting where there is a manufacturer who wants to procure multiple items from a set of suppliers each of whom can supply one or more of these items bundles we design an ascending price auction for such a setting which implements the vickrey clarke groves outcome and truthful bidding is an ex post nash equilibrium our auction maintains non linear and non anonymous prices throughout the auction this auction has a simple price adjustment step and is easy to implement in practice as offshoots of this auction we also suggest other simple auctions in which truthful bidding is not an equilibrium by suppliers which may be suitable where incentives to suppliers are not a big concern computer simulations of our auction show that it is scalable for the multi unit case and has better information revelation properties than its descending auction counterpart

elicitation of honest preferences for the assignment of individuals to positions the problem of eliciting honest preferences from individuals who must be assigned to a set of positions is considered individuals know that they will be charged for the positions to which they are assigned a set of prices that provide no incentive for the individual to misrepresent his preferences is suggested it is shown that these prices constitute an element of the optimal solution to the dual of a linear programming assignment problem both the optimal allocation and the prices to be charged can be derived by solving two linear programming problems once preferences have been elicited the procedure can usefully be viewed as a simulation of a competitive market under conditions where such a market cannot be expected to function well it results in an efficient allocation where all resources are valued at their opportunity costs and consumer surplus is maximized its outcome thus has the desirable properties of competitive market equilibria

an algorithm for identifying fair and optimal allocations the concept of a fair and optimal allocation was recently introduced by sun and yang sun n yang z 2003 a general strategy proof fair allocation mechanism economics letters 81 73 79 this note states some basic properties of fair and optimal allocations and provides a simple algorithm for identifying them c 2007 elsevier b v all fights reserved

approximation in mechanism design with interdependent values abstract this paper studies the revenue maximization problem in environments wherein buyers have interdependent values and correlated types we show that 1 when the system of feasible sets is a matroid and buyer valuations satisfy a single crossing condition the generalized vickrey clarke groves mechanisms with lazy reserves vcg l are ex post incentive compatible and ex post individually rational 2 if in addition the valuation distribution satisfies a generalized monotone hazard rate condition the vcg l mechanism with conditional monopoly reserves is approximately optimal then we construct an ascending auction that implements the truth telling equilibrium of a vcg l mechanism in ex post equilibrium finally we discuss the connection between the vcg l mechanisms and greedy algorithms studied in lehmann et al 2002 and deferred acceptance auctions studied in milgrom and segal 2014 and the impact of competition by proving a bulow and klemperer 1996 type result

union wage differentials product market influences and the division of rents this paper examines the extent to which product market conditions limit the ability of trade unions to establish wage differentials over nonunion pay the mean union pay differential is estimated to be of the order of 8 percent to 10 percent in establishments with some degree of product market power but zero in establishments facing competitive product market conditions when competitive conditions are faced a preentry closed shop and high union coverage of the industry are both required it is estimated that only 5 percent of the establishments in which there are significant differentials over nonunion pay face generally competitive product market conditions copyright 1990 by royal economic society

an efficient dynamic auction for heterogeneous commodities this paper proposes a new dynamic design for auctioning multiple heterogeneous commodities generalizing earlier work that treated identical objects an auctioneer wishes to allocate one or more units of each of k heterogeneous commodities to n bidders the auctioneer announces a vector of current prices bidders report back quantities demanded at these prices and the auctioneer adjusts the prices units are credited to bidders at the current prices as their opponents demands decline and the process continues until every commodity market clears bidders rather than being required to behave as price takers are permitted to strategically exercise their market power nevertheless with pure private values the proposed auction yields walrasian equilibrium prices an efficient outcome results as from a vickrey clarke groves mechanism but bidders are only required to evaluate their demands along a one dimensional path of prices rather than reporting their utilities over the entire k dimensional consumption set the auction is also more transparent and potentially simpler for bidders to understand and has the advantage of assuring the privacy of the upper portions of bidders demands theoretically the new auction provides a new foundation for convergence to walrasian equilibrium in an exchange economy practically it provides an efficient method for simultaneously auctioning two or more related types of securities for example three month and six month treasury bills it is also potentially useful for auctioning multiple types of communications spectrum for example licenses for paired and unpaired spectrum

why does private consumption rise after a government spending shock recent empirical evidence suggests that private consumption is crowded in by government spending this outcome violates existing macroeconomic theory according to which the negative wealth effect brought about by a rise in public expenditure should decrease consumption

union wage differentials in the face of changes in the economic and legal environment this paper examines changes in union wage differentials in britain between 1980 and 1984 on the basis of two comparable establishment level data sets this period saw considerable economic and legislative change with potential effects on the outcomes of collective bargaining despite these changes the mean differential has little change between these two years and what there is is attributable to compositional changes such as the shift away from the manufacturing sector and the downward shift in the establishment size distribution the impact of the changes in unemployment and union coverage that took place is found to be minimal copyright 1991 by the london school of economics and political science

the macroeconomic effects of lockdown policies abstract a tractable incomplete market model with endogenous unemployment risk sticky prices real wage rigidity and a fiscal side is calibrated to euro area countries and used to analyze the macroeconomic effects of lockdown policies modeling them as a shock to the extensive margin of labor adjustment a rise in separations produces large and persistent negative effects on output unemployment and welfare raises precautionary savings and lowers inflation in line with early evidence about inflation dynamics modeling lockdowns as a shock to the intensive margin a fall in labor utilization produces small and short lived macroeconomic and welfare effects and implies a counterfactual rise in inflation conditional on a lockdown separation shock raising public spending or extending ui benefits by large amounts is much more effective in stimulating the economy than during normal times quantitatively however the ability of such policies to flatten the output and unemployment curves remains limited even though these policies can alleviate a reasonable share of the aggregate welfare losses from the lockdown

episodes of war and peace in an estimated open economy model we analyze the effects of world wars on the macroeconomic dynamics of the u s france germany and the uk by means of an estimated open economy model the model allows wars to affect the economy through capital depreciation sovereign default a military draft household preferences and spillovers on other exogenous processes productivity investment trade policy variables if the bulk of fluctuations during war episodes can be explained by the rise in government spending in the u s other factors are crucial in other countries we also discuss the size and state dependence of public spending multipliers and a counterfactual welfare exercise

joint bidding in the name your own price channel a strategic analysis in this paper we study the name your own price nyop channel we examine theoretically and empirically whether asking consumers to place a joint bid for multiple items rather than bid one item at a time as practiced today can increase nyop retailers profits relatedly we also examine whether allowing consumers to self select whether to place a joint bid or itemwise bids increases retailers profits and consumers surplus we construct a dynamic model that incorporates both demand uncertainty and supply uncertainty to address these issues our theoretical analysis identifies the conditions under which joint bidding can increase both nyop retailers profits and consumers surplus we find that some consumers might bid more for the very same items when they place joint bids the increase in bid amount is related to the fact that joint bidding reduces the chance of mismatch between nyop retailers costs and consumer bids we conducted a laboratory study to assess the descriptive validity of some of the

a theory of buyer seller networks this paper introduces a new model of exchange networks rather than markets of buyers and sellers it begins with the empirically motivated premise that a buyer and seller must have a relationship a link to exchange goods networks buyers sellers and the pattern of links connecting them are common exchange environments this paper develops a methodology to study network structures and explains why agents may form networks in a model that captures characteristics of a variety of industries the paper shows that buyers and sellers acting strategically in their own self interests can form the network structures that maximize overall welfare

a nonuniform pricing model of union wages and employment unlike implicit contracts models the nonuniform pricing model of unions assumes that firms can always shut down ex post to avoid any payments to the union under this restriction employment can differ from a first best even if both workers and firms are risk neutral in general the union chooses to offer quantity discounts on labor and needs to use a seniority rule that regulates the order in which workers are hired to implement these discounts unions lower almost all workers employment probabilities and increase the cyclical volatility of employment and the union nonunion average wage differential will move countercyclically workers preferences over union wage profiles conditional on their seniority exhibit within limits a convenient unanimity property

the employer size wage gap evidence for britain university of edinburgh and university of sussexfinal version received 5 may 1992 this paper presents estimates for the employer plant size wage gap for britain using anordered probit model selectivity corrected wage equations are estimated for three plant sizecategories in a comparison between plants with more than 500 workers and those with lessthan 100 a wage gap estimate of over 17 per cent is detected the wage effects of unionizationin plants with more than 500 workers is reported as insignificant in contrast to evidenceprovided by idson and feaster 1990 for the united states no evidence of non randomsorting of workers across plant size is detected

on optimal reservation prices in auctions the theory of auction design examines how various factors affect the outcome of an auction most of the existing literature focuses on how varying the amount of information available to each bidder affects the bid taker s expected revenue when all other factors remain constant this paper studies how the bid taker s expected revenue varies with changes in the auction format when such changes affect the number of bidders and in turn the bidders maximum value for the object being sold specifically we examine how varying the reservation price or screening level affects the bid taker s expected revenue though its effect on the number of bidders for two simple examples the losses associated with a reduced number of bidders outweighs any benefits that nontrivial reservation prices might have had in models with an exogonously set number of bidders

the package assignment model we study assignment problems where individuals trade packages consisting of several rather than single objects although buyers reservations values are non additive efficient assignments can be formulated as a linear programming problem in which the pricing functions expressing duality may be non linear in the objects constituting the packages the interconnections among the linear programming formulation walrasian equilibrium and the core are established in the single seller auction version a necessary and sufficient condition is given for the vickrey payoff point to be implementable by a pricing equilibrium journal of economic literature classification numbers c62 d44 d51

on ascending vickrey auctions for heterogeneous objects abstract we construct an ascending auction for heterogeneous objects by applying a primal dual algorithm to a linear program that represents the efficient allocation problem for this setting the auction assigns personalized prices to bundles and asks bidders to report their preferred bundles in each round a bidder s prices are increased when he belongs to a minimally undersupplied set of bidders this concept generalizes the notion of overdemanded sets of objects introduced by demange gale and sotomayor for the one to one assignment problem under a submodularity condition the auction implements the vickrey clarke groves outcome we show that this type of condition is somewhat necessary to do so when classifying the ascending auction literature in terms of their underlying algorithms our auction fills a gap in that literature we relate our results to various ascending auctions in the literature

sequential rules for house allocation with price restrictions this paper considers a housing market with price restrictions on such markets the existence of a unique minimum rationing equilibrium price vector has been established for each preference profile on a general preference domain that contains almost all preference profiles this vector can be used as a key ingredient in a direct and strategy proof allocation mechanism the main contribution of this paper is to provide two price sequences one with increasing prices and one with decreasing prices that both terminate to a minimal rationing equilibrium price vector in a finite number of steps these sequences are demonstrated to play key roles in an english auction and a dutch auction respectively for the considered housing market with price restrictions less

the trade union wage gap in britain some new estimates abstract new estimates of the union non union wage gap in britain derived from household data are reported the results about 12 for manual and about 4 for non manual workers expand upon the tentative conclusions of the few earlier similar british studies

an efficient ascending bid auction for multiple objects when bidders exhibit multi unit demands standard auction methods generally yield inefficient outcomes this article proposes a new ascending bid auction for homogeneous goods such as treasury bills or telecommunications spectrum the auctioneer announces a price and bidders respond with quantities items are awarded at the current price whenever they are clinched and the price is incremented until the market clears with private values this dynamic auction yields the same outcome as the sealed bid vickrey auction but has advantages of simplicity and privacy preservation with interdependent values this auction may retain efficiency whereas the vickrey auction suffers from a generalized winner s curse

a simple selling and buying procedure abstract for the assignment game we analyze the following mechanism sellers simultaneously fix their prices first then buyers sequentially decide which object to buy also each buyer may report his or her indifferences along with the previous buyers indifferences to the following buyer the first phase determines the potential prices while the second phase determines the actual matching reporting truthfully the indifferences is always a dominant strategy for the buyers moreover when buyers state their true indifferences the subgame perfect equilibria outcomes of the mechanism correspond to the maximum equilibrium price vector together with optimal matchings journal of economic literature classification numbers c78 d78

on the land assembly problem abstract we consider a segment of the land market where the entire available land stock is needed for the realization of some indivisible development project the stock is shared by several landholders who either collude or negotiate independently with the developer over the prices of their lots investigating the price setting behavior of the landowners and the optimal strategy of the developer we show that landowners set more moderate prices under collusion than when acting independently in the latter case the individual asking price falls with the size of the land share and the total price increases with the number of landowners as regards the optimal strategy we find that the developer will in general not offer the lowest price he expects to be accepted by the landowners

bargaining in stationary networks we study an infinite horizon game in which pairs of players con nected in a network are randomly matched to bargain players who reach agreement are replaced by new players at the same positions in the network we show that all equilibria are payoff equivalent the payoffs and the set of agreement links converge as players become patient several new concepts mutually estranged sets partners and shortage ratios provide insights into the relative strengths of the positions in the network we develop a procedure to deter mine the limit equilibrium payoffs for all players characterizations of equitable and nondiscriminatory networks are also obtained jel c78 d85 competitive equilibrium theory assumes large and anonymous markets in which every buyer can trade with every seller underlying these assumptions are standard goods and services that may be traded at low transaction costs by agents who are not in specific relationships with one another however in many markets goods and services are heterogeneous e g cars apartments or need to be tailored to particular needs e g manufacturing inputs technical support furthermore trad ing opportunities may depend on transportation costs social relationships infor mation advertising trust technological compatibility joint business opportunities free trade agreements etc in such cases it is natural to model the market using a network where only pairs of connected agents may engage in exchange new theories are needed to explore the influence of the network structure on market outcomes many questions arise how does an agent s position in the net work determine his bargaining power and the local prices he faces who trades with whom and on what terms when are prices uniform in the network one possible conjecture is that an agent s bargaining power is determined by his relative number of connections in the network however this simple theory is implausible consider the network of four sellers located at the top nodes and nine buyers located at the bottom nodes depicted in figure 1 assume that each seller supplies one unit of a homogeneous indivisible good each buyer demands one unit of the good and all buyers have identical values for the good the buyer located in the middle has the largest number of links in the network as he is connected to each

the english auction with differentiated commodities abstract we study economies with indivisibilities that satisfy the gross substitutes gs condition we define an excess demand set with the property that increasing the prices of all goods in excess demand eventually leads to the smallest walrasian prices this procedure is a generalization of the auction studied by g demange d gale and m j sotomayor polit econ 94 1986 863 872 in our auction truthful revelation of demand is a perfect bayesian equilibrium if the smallest walrasian prices correspond to the vickrey clarke groves payments however no dynamic auction can reveal sufficient information to implement the vickrey mechanism if all gs preferences are allowed journal of economic literature classification numbers d4 d44 d5 d51

fiscal policy in a tractable liquidity constrained economy we analyse the effects of fiscal expansions when public debt is used as liquidity by the private sector aggregate shocks are introduced into an incomplete market economy where heterogenous agents face occasionally binding borrowing constraints and store wealth to smooth out idiosyncratic income fluctuations debt financed increases in spending facilitate self insurance by bond holders and may crowd in private consumption they also loosen the borrowing constraints faced by firms thereby raising labour demand and possibly the real wage whether private consumption and wages rise or fall ultimately depends on the relative strengths of the liquidity and wealth effects that arise following the shock

specification induced uncertainty in the estimation of trade union wage differentials from industry level data at a more specific level the paper is concerned with the estimation of union non union wage differentials from industry level data for the uk manufacturing sector metcalf 1977 reviewing the evidence from such industry level studies concludes that they suggest that a figure of 20 per cent may not be dreadfully in error for the average earnings differential received by manual workers who are covered by a collective agreement a more recent study at the individual level for union membership stewart 1983 suggests that a figure of below 10 per cent may be more appropriate however metcalf s summary figure remains representative of the industrylevel evidence this paper concentrates on two particular problems inherent in these industry level studies and in studies in other areas using such cross section data the first of these concerns the potential industry specificity of parameter values in the case of union wage differentials the marshallian laws of derived demand provide theoretical grounds for expecting the differential to vary across industries failure to take proper account of this will in general result in biased estimation even of the average differential in addition interpreting the estimated average differential as if it were that to be found in a typical industry may be a highly misleading representation of the impact of collective bargaining on the wage structure section i of this paper is concerned with this inter industry variation in the differetial and in particular with modelling how the differential varies with the extent of coverage in the industry our finding is that there is a large inter industry variation in the differential with the average being made up of a large differential in a small group of industries and a much smaller and insignificant differential in the majority of industries in such circumstances the estimated average differential is not representative of that prevailing in either group

the role of labor markets for euro area monetary policy in this paper we explore the role of labor markets for monetary policy in the euro area in a new keynesian model in which labor markets are characterized by search and matching frictions we first investigate to which extent a more flexible labor market would alter the business cycle behavior and the transmission of monetary policy we find that while a lower degree of wage rigidity makes monetary policy more effective i e a monetary policy shock transmits faster onto inflation the importance of other labor market rigidities for the transmission of shocks is rather limited second having estimated the model by bayesian techniques we analyze to which extent labor market shocks such as disturbances in the vacancy posting process shocks to the separation rate and variations in bargaining power are important determinants of business cycle fluctuations our results point primarily towards disturbances in the bargaining process as a significant contributor to inflation and output fluctuations in sum the paper supports current central bank practice which appears to put considerable effort into monitoring euro area wage dynamics and which appears to treat some of the other labor market information as less important for monetary policy

how to efficiently allocate houses under price controls we examine a housing market with price controls and show how the allocation problem can be solved through a price system we demonstrate that the auction of talman and yang 2008 always generates a core allocation thus resulting in a pareto efficient and stable outcome

rental harmony with roommates abstract we prove existence of envy free allocations in markets with heterogenous indivisible goods and money when a given quantity is supplied from each of the goods and agents have unit demands we depart from most of the previous literature by allowing agents preferences over the goods to depend on the entire vector of prices we then show how our theorem may be applied in two related problems existence of envy free allocations in a version of the cake cutting problem and existence of equilibrium in an exchange economy with indivisible goods and money our proof uses shapley s k k m s theorem and hall s marriage lemma

the thatcher miracle since 1979 productivity growth in britain has improved markedly compared with europe the turnaround in productivity growth has two main causes the british economy was subjected to a far more severe contraction of demand in 1980 81 than any other country this led to a new realism which was sustained by the legal changes in trade union power since 1979 there has been a worsening in the trade off between unemployment and inflation the poor unemployment inflation trade off is due to the neglect of skill training and education causing skill shortages and to the build up of long term unemployment which does little to restrain inflation this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed f this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a characterization of the demand for land abstract in a model of an economy where land is modelled explicitly as heterogeneous subsets of the plane and utility takes an integral form demand can be characterized as a specific map from endowments and prices into subsets of the plane a modified form of the neyman pearson lemma is used to obtain this result the modification being necessary because the analog of randomized tests must be excluded from this model

a competitive partnership formation process a group of heterogeneous agents may form partnerships in pairs all single agents as well as all partnerships generate values if two agents choose to cooperate they need to specify how to split their joint value among one another in equilibrium which may or may not exist no agents have incentives to break up any existing partnerships or form new partnerships this paper proposes a dynamic competitive adjustment process that always either finds an equilibrium or exclusively disproves the existence of any equilibrium in finitely many steps when an equilibrium exists partnership and revenue distribution will be automatically and endogenously determined by the process moreover several fundamental properties of the equilibrium solution and the model are derived

the exposure problem and market design markets have an exposure problem when getting to the optimal allocation requires a sequence of transactions which if started but not completed leaves at least one trader with losses we use laboratory experiments to evaluate the effect of the exposure problem on alternative market mechanisms the continuous double auction performs poorly efficiency is only 20 when exposure is high and 55 when it is low a package market effectively eliminates the exposure problem in low and high exposure treatments efficiency is 82 and 89 respectively building on stability notions from matching theory we introduce the concept of mechanism stability a model of trade that combines mechanism stability with noisy best responses and imperfect foresight explains the difference in market performance finally decentralized bargaining with contingent contracts performs well with perfect information and communication but not in the more realistic case when traders preferences are privately known

testing dynamic models of worker effort this article derives three dynamic models of worker effort determination based on a shirking efficiency wage model a compensating differentials model and a union firm bargaining model it shows that all of these three models have the same long run comparative statics but differ in their short run dynamics we use these different predictions about the dynamics as a basis for testing the models euler equations for each model are estimated using panel data on 486 u k companies the evidence supports the shirking model in firms with low levels of unionization but the bargaining model in highly unionized industries

multi item auctions a collection of items is to be distributed among several bidders and each bidder is to receive at most one item assuming that the bidders place some monetary value on each of the items it has been shown that there is a unique vector of equilibrium prices that is optimal in a suitable sense for the bidders in this paper we describe two dynamic auction mechanisms one achieves this equilibrium and the other approximates it to any desired degree of accuracy

multi item vickrey english dutch auctions abstract assuming that bidders wish to acquire at most one item this paper defines a polynomial time multi item auction that locates the vcg prices in a finite number of iterations for any given starting prices this auction is called the vickrey english dutch auction and it contains the vickrey english auction sankaran j k 1994 on a dynamic auction mechanism for a bilateral assignment problem math soc sci 28 143 150 and the vickrey dutch auction mishra d parkes d 2009 multi item vickrey dutch auctions games econ behav 66 326 347 as special cases by means of numerical experiments it is showed that when the auctioneer knows the bidders value distributions the vickrey english dutch auction is weakly faster than the vickrey english auction and the vickrey dutch auction in 89 percent and 99 percent respectively of the investigated problems a greedy version of the vickrey english dutch auction is demonstrated to perform even better in the simulation studies

a determination of bid rents through bidding procedures abstract rent profiles in land markets with finitely many participants are derived under two bidding procedures free unit size bidding and single unit size bidding free unit size bidding is shown to be basically equivalent to an english auction whereas the rent determination problem under single unit size bidding reduces to a mathematical programming problem an application of the latter case is provided in which a density model of land use is shown to be a good approximation of appropriately chosen discrete models

job uncertainty and deep recessions abstract we study a model where households are subject to uninsurable unemployment risk price setting is subject to nominal rigidities and the labor market is characterized by matching frictions and inflexible wages higher risk of job loss and worsening job finding prospects during unemployment depress goods demand because of a precautionary savings motive lower goods demand reduces job vacancies and the job finding rate producing an amplification mechanism due to endogenous countercyclical income risk amplification derives from the combination of incomplete financial markets and frictional goods and labor markets the model can account for key features of the great recession

unions and the financial performance of british private sector establishments summary this paper considers the relationship between unions and financial performance using data from the 1980 and 1984 workplace industrial relations surveys a qualitative indicator of financial performance is utilized and ordered probit estimates presented these indicate that unionized establishments are characterized by lower performance levels than are non union concerns the interface between union effects and relative market power is also explored and the ability of unions to extract a share of the available rents is found to be greater if the plants in which they are located possess a higher market share

macroeconomic fluctuations with hank sam an analytical approach new keynesian models with unemployment and incomplete markets are rapidly becoming a new workhorse model in macroeconomics such models typically require heavy computational methods which may obscure intuition and overlook equilibria we present a tractable version which can be characterized analytically our results highlight that ndue the interaction between incomplete markets sticky prices and endogenous unemployment risk nproductivity shocks may have radically di erent e ects than in traditional nk models that the taylor principle may fail and that pessimistic beliefs may be self fulolling and move the economy into temporary episodes of low demand and high unemployment as well as into a long lasting iunemployment trapi at the zero lower bound the presence of endogenous unemployment risk can create inaation and overturn paradoxical properties of the model we further study onancial asset prices and show that non negligible risk premia emerge