IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/bergec/2011_011.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Product and Labor Market Deregulation in Unionized Oligopoly with Asymmetric Countries

Author

Listed:

Abstract

This paper sets up a general oligopolistic equilibrium trade model for two integrated countries that are similar in all respects except of the prevailing labor market institutions. In one country, the labor market is perfectly competitive, while in the other country labor unions are active in a subset of industries. The differences in labor market institutions are a source of comparative advantage, which crucially impact inter-industry trade and welfare in the open economy. In this setting, we study the trade and welfare implications of labor market deregulation and compare these implications with the consequences of product market deregulation. Thereby, we take into account that labor market reforms are subject to national policy decisions and thus associated with unilateral intervention, while product market deregulation is determined at an international – for instance European – level and thus associated with coordinated intervention in both economies. As a key result, we find that both forms of policy intervention generate a conflict of interest between the two trading partners and that welfare losses materialize for the country with the competitive labor market regime whenever global gains are realized.

Suggested Citation

  • Hartmut, Egger & Meland, Frode, 2011. "Product and Labor Market Deregulation in Unionized Oligopoly with Asymmetric Countries," Working Papers in Economics 11/11, University of Bergen, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:bergec:2011_011
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://ekstern.filer.uib.no/svf/2011/WP11.11.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bruno Amable & Donatella Gatti, 2004. "Product market competition, job security, and aggregate employment," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 56(4), pages 667-686, October.
    2. Hartmut Egger & Peter Egger & James R. Markusen, 2012. "International Welfare And Employment Linkages Arising From Minimum Wages," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 53(3), pages 771-790, August.
    3. Boulhol, Herv, 2009. "Do capital market and trade liberalization trigger labor market deregulation?," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 77(2), pages 223-233, April.
    4. Noel Gaston & Douglas Nelson, 2004. "Structural Change and the Labor‐market Effects of Globalization," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 12(5), pages 769-792, November.
    5. Oslington, Paul, 2002. "Factor market linkages in a global economy," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 76(1), pages 85-93, June.
    6. Udo Kreickemeier & Douglas Nelson, 2017. "Fair Wages, Unemployment, and Technological Change in a Global Economy," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: International Trade and Labor Markets Welfare, Inequality and Unemployment, chapter 8, pages 205-235, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    7. Spector, David, 2004. "Competition and the capital-labor conflict," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 48(1), pages 25-38, February.
    8. Booth, Alison L, 1984. "A Public Choice Model of Trade Union Behaviour and Membership," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 94(376), pages 883-898, December.
    9. Kjell Erik Lommerud & Frode Meland & Lars S¯rgard, 2003. "Unionised Oligopoly, Trade Liberalisation and Location Choice," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 113(490), pages 782-800, October.
    10. Rachel Griffith & Rupert Harrison & Gareth Macartney, 2007. "Product Market Reforms, Labour Market Institutions and Unemployment," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 117(519), pages 142-166, March.
    11. Brander, James A., 1981. "Intra-industry trade in identical commodities," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 11(1), pages 1-14, February.
    12. Paulo Bastos & Udo Kreickemeier, 2017. "Unions, Competition, and International Trade in General Equilibrium," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: International Trade and Labor Markets Welfare, Inequality and Unemployment, chapter 6, pages 143-172, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    13. Oswald, Andrew J, 1985. " The Economic Theory of Trade Unions: An Introductory Survey," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 87(2), pages 160-193.
    14. Davis, Donald R, 1998. "Does European Unemployment Prop Up American Wages? National Labor Markets and Global Trade," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(3), pages 478-494, June.
    15. Ebell, Monique & Haefke, Christian, 2006. "Product Market Regulation and Endogenous Union Formation," IZA Discussion Papers 2222, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    16. Giuseppe Fiori & Giuseppe Nicoletti & Stefano Scarpetta & Fabio Schiantarelli, 2007. "Employment Outcomes and the Interaction Between Product and Labor Market Deregulation: Are They Substitutes or Complements?," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 663, Boston College Department of Economics, revised 08 Aug 2008.
    17. Winfried Koeniger & Julien Prat, 2007. "Employment Protection, Product Market Regulation and Firm Selection," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 117(521), pages 302-332, June.
    18. Hervé Boulhol, 2009. "Do capital market and trade liberalization trigger labor market deregulation?," Post-Print hal-03015053, HAL.
    19. Huizinga, Harry, 1993. " International Market Integration and Union Wage Bargaining," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 95(2), pages 249-255.
    20. Richard A. Brecher, 1974. "Minimum Wage Rates and the Pure Theory of International Trade," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 88(1), pages 98-116.
    21. Oecd, 2009. "Employment and Social Protection," OECD Journal on Development, OECD Publishing, vol. 9(4), pages 7-54.
    22. Naylor, Robin, 1998. "International trade and economic integration when labour markets are generally unionised," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 42(7), pages 1251-1267, July.
    23. Danielle Venn, 2009. "Legislation, Collective Bargaining and Enforcement: Updating the OECD Employment Protection Indicators," OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers 89, OECD Publishing.
    24. Jürgen Meckl, 2006. "Does European Unemployment Prop Up American Wages? National Labor Markets and Global Trade: Comment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(5), pages 1924-1930, December.
    25. Hervé Boulhol, 2009. "Do capital market and trade liberalization trigger labor market deregulation?," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) hal-03015053, HAL.
    26. Johnson, George E, 1985. " The Economic Theory of Trade Unions-An Introductory Survey: Comment," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 87(2), pages 194-196.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Catia Montagna & Antonella Nocco, 2015. "(De)Unionization, Trade Liberalization and Selection," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 66(1), pages 91-122, February.
    2. Colacicco, Rudy, 2012. "Strategic Trade Policy in General Oligopolistic Equilibrium," MPRA Paper 38118, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Colacicco, Rudy, 2012. "The "Average" Within-Sector Firm Heterogeneity in General Oligopolistic Equilibrium," MPRA Paper 40212, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hartmut Egger & Frode Meland & Hans-Jörg Schmerer, 2015. "Differences in the degree of unionization as a source of comparative advantage in open economies," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 48(1), pages 245-272, February.
    2. Egger, Hartmut & Etzel, Daniel, 2012. "The impact of trade on employment, welfare, and income distribution in unionized general oligopolistic equilibrium," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 56(6), pages 1119-1135.
    3. Sabien Dobbelaere & Mark Vancauteren, 2014. "Market imperfections, skills and total factor productivity : Firm-level evidence on Belgium and the Netherlands," Working Paper Research 267, National Bank of Belgium.
    4. Dobbelaere, Sabien & Kiyota, Kozo & Mairesse, Jacques, 2015. "Product and labor market imperfections and scale economies: Micro-evidence on France, Japan and the Netherlands," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(2), pages 290-322.
    5. Tapio Palokangas, 2020. "Public policy, footloose capital, and union influence," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 28(4), pages 976-991, September.
    6. Hartmut Egger & Daniel Etzel, 2012. "Union Wage Setting and International Trade," IAAEU Discussion Papers 201209, Institute of Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU).
    7. Domenico Buccella, 2011. "Labor unions and economic integration: A review," Económica, Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, vol. 0, pages 25-89, January-D.
    8. Hartmut Egger & Peter Egger & James R. Markusen, 2012. "International Welfare And Employment Linkages Arising From Minimum Wages," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 53(3), pages 771-790, August.
    9. Sabien Dobbelaere & Rodolfo Lauterbach & Jacques Mairesse, 2016. "Micro-evidence on product and labor market regime differences between Chile and France," International Journal of Manpower, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 37(2), pages 229-252, May.
    10. Michael Koch, 2016. "Skills, Tasks and the Scarcity of Talent in a Global Economy," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(3), pages 536-563, August.
    11. Lars Calmfors & Giancarlo Corsetti & Michael P. Devereux & Gilles Saint-Paul & Hans-Werner Sinn & Jan-Egbert Sturm & Xavier Vives, 2008. "Chapter 3: The effect of globalisation on Western European jobs: curse or blessing?," EEAG Report on the European Economy, CESifo, vol. 0, pages 71-104, February.
    12. Palokangas, Tapio K., 2017. "Labor Market Regulation, International Trade and Footloose Capital," IZA Discussion Papers 10468, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    13. Seidel, Tobias, 2010. "International competition and employment," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 107(2), pages 214-216, May.
    14. Boulhol, Hervé, 2011. "Unemployment and relative labor market institutions between trading partners," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 83(1), pages 83-91, January.
    15. Schmerer, Hans-Jörg, 2012. "FDI, skill-specific unemployment, and institutional spillover effects," Economics Discussion Papers 2012-2, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    16. Braun Sebastian, 2010. "Foreign Competition, Multinational Firms, and One-Sided Wage Rigidity," Global Economy Journal, De Gruyter, vol. 10(2), pages 1-30, May.
    17. Carsten Eckel & Hartmut Egger, 2017. "The Dilemma of Labor Unions: Local Objectives vs Global Bargaining," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 25(3), pages 534-566, August.
    18. Koskela, Erkki & Stenbacka, Rune, 2012. "The relationship between product market competition and unemployment with profit sharing," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(3), pages 291-297.
    19. Bastos, Paulo & Kreickemeier, Udo & Wright, Peter, 2009. "Oligopoly, open shop unions and trade liberalisation," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 27(6), pages 679-686, November.
    20. Lommerud, Kjell Erik & Meland, Frode & Straume, Odd Rune, 2012. "North–South technology transfer in unionised multinationals," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 99(2), pages 385-395.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    General oligopolistic equilibrium; Labor unions; Comparative advantage Product and labor market deregulation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F12 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Models of Trade with Imperfect Competition and Scale Economies; Fragmentation
    • F16 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade and Labor Market Interactions
    • J51 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining - - - Trade Unions: Objectives, Structure, and Effects

    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:hhs:bergec:2011_011. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc 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 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: Kjell Erik Lommerud (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iouibno.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.