IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/syd/wpaper/2123-7567.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Rethinking Labor Supply: Contract Theory and Unions

Author

Listed:
  • Oswald, A.
  • Walker, I

Abstract

This paper suggests a new approach to the economics of labour supply. Conventional econometric studies conclude, with rare exceptions, that the response of men's hours to increases in wages is small and negative. Yet policy-makers in many countries have argued that incentive effects are large and have set low marginal tax rates accordingly. The evidence in this paper, from a sample of more than twenty-three thousand UK male employees, suggests that, for non-unionized labour markets, the labour supply wage elasticity is considerably large than the existing literature has suggested. The UK offers and unusually valuable test-bed for male labour supply modelling because it has a simple flat rate tax across the majority of the income distribution and offers two natural experiments that circumvent the simultaneity problems that have dogged the literature.

Suggested Citation

  • Oswald, A. & Walker, I, 1994. "Rethinking Labor Supply: Contract Theory and Unions," Working Papers 207, University of Sydney, School of Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:syd:wpaper:2123/7567
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/7567
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Adriana Cassoni, 1999. "Labour demand in Uruguay before and after re-unionisation," Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) 0199, Department of Economics - dECON.
    2. Ehing, Daniel, 2013. "Unter- und Überbeschäftigung in Deutschland: Eine Analyse wesentlicher Einflussfaktoren auf die Unterbeschäftigung in Teilzeit," FZG Discussion Papers 53, University of Freiburg, Research Center for Generational Contracts (FZG).
    3. Adriana Cassoni, 1997. "A brief survey on the role of trade unions in labour market," Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) 0697, Department of Economics - dECON.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:syd:wpaper:2123/7567. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Vanessa Holcombe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deusyau.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.