There has been a great deal of research on trade unions and wage contracts in recent year, but there has been relatively little work on the determinants of contract length. This is unusual given that the duration of union contracts has varied substantially in post-war industrial economies both across time and across countries(see Dunlop J. and Bok D. (1970), Christofides L. N. and Wilton D. A. (1983), Ehrenberg Danziger and San (1984), Christofides L. N. (1985), Cecchetti (1987) and Bils M. (1987). This paper reviews the existing literature on contract duration and presents a simple explanation of optimal contract length for a wage setting trade union in a dynamic, uncertain environment. It is argued that optimal contract duration depends on a basic welfare trade-off between the benefits of wage precommitment and the costs of reduced ex-post wage flexibility. The cyclical characteristics of contracts in the model arguably provide an explanation for actual contractual cycles quite different from some alternative current models. The model may also be used to provide certain prediction concerning the determinants of contract length.
Download Info
To our knowledge, this item is not available for
download. To find whether it is available, there are three
options:
1. Check below under "Related research" whether another version of this item is available online.
2. Check on the provider's web page
whether it is in fact available.
3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be
available.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Queen's University, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
882.
Did you know? Citation analysis on IDEAS includes online papers that are freely accessible and whose text could be automatically analyzed, currently about 150000 papers.