The paper investigates the nexus between labor and financial markets, focusing on the interaction between labor union behavior in setting wages, firms' investment strategy and asset prices. The way unions set wage claims after observing firm's financial performance increases the volatility of firms' returns and the riskiness of corporate ownership. To remunerate this higher volatility and stronger risk, firms' equities have to grant high return. This mechanism is able to offer an explanation of for the "equity puzzle", that is it can explain the difference between equity returns and the risk free rate. It is a welcome result that the simulated excess return is about the empirical estimate and this result is obtained with a logarithmic specification of the shareholders preferences.
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Paper provided by School of Economics and Management, University of Aarhus in its series Economics Working Papers with number
2007-05.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution J23 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Demand
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