The rise and fall of centralized wage bargaining
Abstract
During the three decades spanning the early 50’s to the early 80’s, the wagesetting process in most Northern European countries was dominated by centralized bargaining, where peak level labor and employer associations set wages nationwide. In the early 80’s centralized wage bargaining began to collapse. In this paper we assess a novel explanation both for the initial establishment of a centralized wagesetting process, and for its subsequent collapse. According to our theory, centralized wage bargaining was set up as a response to the spillovers created by the unemployment benefit program. Its collapse was the result of the increase in the productivity gap across workers, brought about by equipment-specific technological progress and equipment-skill complementaritDownload Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.Bibliographic Info
Paper provided by Universidad Carlos III, Departamento de Economía in its series Economics Working Papers with number we1129.Length:
Date of creation: Aug 2011
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:cte:werepe:we1129
Contact details of provider:
Postal: C./ Madrid, 126, 28903 Getafe (Madrid)
Phone: +34-91 6249594
Fax: +34-91 6249329
Email:
Web page: http://www.eco.uc3m.es
More information through EDIRC
Related research
Keywords: Wage-Bargaining Arrangements; Unemployment Benefits; Equipment-Specific Technological Progress; Equipment-Skill Complementarity;Find related papers by JEL classification:
- J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
- J41 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Labor Contracts
- J51 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining - - - Trade Unions: Objectives, Structure, and Effects
References
No references listed on IDEASYou can help add them by filling out this form.
Citations
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cte:werepe:we1129For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ().
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

