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Understanding Wage Floor Setting in Industry-Level Agreements: Evidence from France

Author

Listed:
  • Denis Fougère

    (OSC - Observatoire sociologique du changement (Sciences Po, CNRS) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Erwan Gautier

    (Centre de recherche de la Banque de France - Banque de France, LEMNA - Laboratoire d'économie et de management de Nantes Atlantique - IEMN-IAE Nantes - Institut d'Économie et de Management de Nantes - Institut d'Administration des Entreprises - Nantes - UN - Université de Nantes)

  • Sébastien Roux

    (Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE))

Abstract

This paper examines empirically how industry-level wage floors are set in French industry-level wage agreements and how the national minimum wage (NMW) interacts with industry-level wage bargaining. For this, we use a unique dataset containing about 50,000 occupation-specific wage floors in 365 French industries over the period 2007-2015. We find that the NMW has a significant impact on the seasonality and on the timing of the wage bargaining process. Inflation, past sectoral wage increases and real NMW increases are the main drivers of wage floor adjustments; elasticities of wage floors with respect to these macro variables are 0.6, 0.4 and 0.2 respectively. Wage floor elasticities to inflation and to the NMW both decrease along the wage floor distribution but are still positive for all levels of wage floors.

Suggested Citation

  • Denis Fougère & Erwan Gautier & Sébastien Roux, 2016. "Understanding Wage Floor Setting in Industry-Level Agreements: Evidence from France," Working Papers hal-03459185, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03459185
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03459185
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Giannakopoulos, Nicholas & Laliotis, Ioannis, 2017. "Decentralized Bargaining and the Greek Labour Relations Reform (Law 4024/2011)," MPRA Paper 76513, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Elise Coudin & Sophie Maillard & Maxime Tô, 2018. "Family, Firms and the Gender Wage Gap in France," Working Papers 2018-09, Center for Research in Economics and Statistics.
    3. Guimaraes, Paulo & Martins, Fernando & Portugal, Pedro, 2017. "Upward Nominal Wage Rigidity," IZA Discussion Papers 10510, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Collective bargaining; Wages; Minimum wage;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • 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
    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity

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