Local unemployment and specialisation

Peer Ritter and Uwe Walz

No 135, Tübinger Diskussionsbeiträge from University of Tübingen, School of Business and Economics

Abstract: Recent empirical work has shown that there exists a negative relation between wages and unemployment estimated across regions. Our model recognises the spatial dimension of the so-called wage curve by using a Hotelling/Salop framework in which a finite number of firms compete for heterogeneous workers. We incorporate this set-up into an efficiency-wage framework. In setting wages firms perceive their influenae on the wage-unemployment trade-off, thus taking the employment decisions of their competitors as an externality. The model predicts that in larger local labour markets with firms demanding more specialised labour, workers receive higher wages and face lower unemployment.

Keywords: specialization and heterogeneity of labour; efficiency wages; local unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J41 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/104894/1/tdb135.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:tuedps:135

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tübinger Diskussionsbeiträge from University of Tübingen, School of Business and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().