Imports as product and labour market discipline

Herve Boulhol, Sabien Dobbelaere and S. Maioli
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S. Maioli: -

Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

Abstract: This paper tests the pro-competitive effect of trade in the product and labour markets of UK manufacturing sectors between 1988 and 2003 using a two-stage estimation procedure. In the first stage, we use data on 9820 firms from twenty manufacturing sectors to simultaneously estimate mark-up and workers’ bargaining power parameters according to sector, firm size and period. We find a significant drop in both the mark-up and the workers’ bargaining power in the mid-nineties. In the second stage, we relate our parameters of interest to trade variables. Our results show that imports from developed countries have significantly contributed to the decrease in both mark-ups and workers’ bargaining power.

Keywords: Workers’ bargaining power; mark-ups; pro-competitive effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 F16 J51 L13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2007-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com and nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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http://wps-feb.ugent.be/Papers/wp_07_479.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Imports as Product and Labour Market Discipline (2011)
Working Paper: Imports as Product and Labour Market Discipline (2009)
Working Paper: Imports as Product and Labor Market Discipline (2006)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rug:rugwps:07/479

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