Unions, qualification choice, and output

Daniel Cardona and Fernando Sánchez-Losada

Oxford Economic Papers, 2006, vol. 58, issue 1, 50-76

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of the unions' bargaining power on production and wages. In our model a competitive final good is produced from two substitutable intermediate goods. One of them is produced in a unionized unskilled sector and the other in a unionized skilled one. Potential workers decide at their cost to become skilled or remain unskilled and, thus, labor supplies are determined endogenously. We find that in a right-to-manage bargaining framework, the reallocation of the labor supplies due to a change in the unskilled (or skilled) unions' bargaining power may have a positive impact on the final goods production. At the same time, total labor earnings increase with the unskilled unions' bargaining power if the final goods production increases too. We also show that minimum wage legislation is equivalent in its effects to an increase in the bargaining power of the unskilled unions. However, in an efficient bargaining framework, an increase in the unskilled (or skilled) unions' bargaining power has always a negative impact on the final goods production. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpi038 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:oxecpp:v:58:y:2006:i:1:p:50-76

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Oxford Economic Papers is currently edited by James Forder and Francis J. Teal

More articles in Oxford Economic Papers from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().