Facts and Fantasies about Wage Setting and Collective Bargaining

Manudeep Bhuller, Karl Ove Moene, Magne Mogstad and Ola Vestad

No 30437, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In this article, we document and discuss salient features of collective bargaining systems in the OECD countries, with the goal of debunking some misconceptions and myths and revitalizing the general interest in wage setting and collective bargaining. We hope that such an interest may help close the gap between how economists tend to model wage setting and how wages are actually set. Canonical models of competitive labor markets, monopsony, and search and matching all assume a decentralized wage setting where individual firms and workers determine wages. In most advanced economies, however, it is common that firms or employer associations bargain with unions over wages, producing collective bargaining systems. We show that the characteristics of these systems vary in important ways across advanced economies, with regards to both the scope and the structure of collective bargaining.

JEL-codes: J31 J51 J52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Note: LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

Published as Manudeep Bhuller & Karl Ove Moene & Magne Mogstad & Ola L. Vestad, 2022. "Facts and Fantasies about Wage Setting and Collective Bargaining," Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol 36(4), pages 29-52.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30437.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Facts and Fantasies about Wage Setting and Collective Bargaining (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30437

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30437

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().