IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxecpp/v66y2014i4p983-1005..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The effect of private versus public ownership on labour earnings

Author

Listed:
  • Paulo Bastos
  • Natália P. Monteiro
  • Odd Rune Straume

Abstract

We examine the impact of privatization on wage formation in unionized labour markets. Using longitudinal worker-firm data for Portugal spanning the period 1991–2007, we find that privatization significantly increases the actual paid wage and show that this effect occurs via two different channels. First, privatization tends to increase the wage floor negotiated via collective bargaining. Second, privately owned firms tend to pay larger mark-ups on the union wage floor. These effects are heterogeneous across bargaining regimes and worker groups, with pay rises occurring only under more decentralized bargaining settings, and accruing predominantly to newcomers to the firm and highly educated workers.

Suggested Citation

  • Paulo Bastos & Natália P. Monteiro & Odd Rune Straume, 2014. "The effect of private versus public ownership on labour earnings," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 66(4), pages 983-1005.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:66:y:2014:i:4:p:983-1005.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpu017
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    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. Paulo Bastos & Natália Pimenta Monteiro & Odd Rune Straume, 2012. "Privatization and corporate restructuring," NIPE Working Papers 10/2012, NIPE - Universidade do Minho.
    2. Ebo Botchway & Kofi Fred Asiedu, 2020. "Ownership type and earnings gap decomposition: Evidence from the Ghanaian labor market," African Development Review, African Development Bank, vol. 32(4), pages 619-631, December.
    3. Jørn Rattsø & Hildegunn E Stokke, 2022. "Public sector wage compression and wage inequality: Gender and geographic heterogeneity," Working Paper Series 19522, Department of Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D21 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Theory
    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
    • J51 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining - - - Trade Unions: Objectives, Structure, and Effects
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets

    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:oup:oxecpp:v:66:y:2014:i:4:p:983-1005.. 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oep .

    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.