Unionization and the Evolution of the Wage Distribution in Sweden: 1968 to 2000

James Albrecht, Anders Bjorklund and Susan Vroman

No 4246, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We examine the evolution of the Swedish wage distribution over the periods 1968-1981 and 1981-2000. The first period was the heyday of the Swedish solidarity wage policy with strongly equalization clauses in the central wage agreements. During the second period, there was more scope for firm-specific factors to affect wages. We find a remarkable compression of wages across the distribution in the first period, but in the second period, wage growth was quite uniform across the distribution. We decompose these changes across the distribution into two components – those due to changes in the distribution of characteristics such as education and experience and those due to changes in the distribution of returns to those characteristics. The wage compression between 1968 and 1981 was driven by changes in the distribution of returns, but between 1981 and 2000, the change in the distribution of returns was neutral with respect to inequality.

Keywords: quantile regression; wage compression; unionization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2009-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-his, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - revised version published in: Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 2011, 64(5), 1039-1057

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp4246.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Unionization and the Evolution of the Wage Distribution in Sweden: 1968 to 2000 (2011)
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:iza:izadps:dp4246

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().