This paper formally explores the joint roles played, on the one side, by the regulation of wages and, on the other side, by the existence of a “backyard” (or home) technology exploited by the unemployed people, in a standard neoclassical OLG growth model. The main findings are the following: 1) the introduction of a “binding” regulated wage fosters the capital accumulation and lead to a higher long term capital stock (and thus to higher output and welfare as well) in comparison with a competitive wage economy, provided that both the labour productivity at “home” and the capital weight in the firms technology are sufficiently high; 2) however, if the regulated wage is set at a too high level, the capital accumulation will be inferior to that of the competitive wage economy. These results, so far escaped closer scrutiny by economic growth literature, shed a new light on the effects of the regulation of wages and may have interesting policy implications.
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Paper provided by Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche (DSE), University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy in its series Discussion Papers with number
2008/74.
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