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Title: A Two-Sector Effort-Regulation Model with Implications for Wage Developments of the 1980s
Description: A simple two-sector effort-regulation model, which assumes that the cost of job loss responds to labor's bargaining power and which acknowledges influences of institutional change, import penetration and shifting employment, can account for the declining real wages for non-supervisory workers in goods sector industries in the 1980s.
PID: grinnell:11678

Title: Explaining the Rising Wage-Productivity Gap on the 1980s: Effects of Declining Employment and Unionization
Description: This paper investigates causes of the dramatic increase in the wage-productivity gap—the divergence between the growth rates of aggregate productivity and real wages - in the post-1981 period. Using a two-step estimation procedure which incorporates three-digit industry wage regression coefficients into an aggregate wage growth identity equation, it finds that employment decline within unionized industries explains 18% of the post-1981 increase in the gap and that declining union ability to raise wages may explain as much as another 25%. Imports, on the other hand, do not appear to explain the gap independently of employment effects.
PID: grinnell:11680

Title: Fair Wages, Worker Motivation and Implicit Bargaining Power in Segmented Labor Markets
Description: This paper addresses implicit bargaining power within employment relationships using a versatile model of labor market segmentation that combines labor discipline, performance pay, insider power, and fair wage principles. In the primary sector, fair wage comparisons, firm-specific human capital, and less perfect monitoring engender bilateral bargaining power, yielding high compensation, sometimes including a bonus. Secondary-sector employers exert unilateral bargaining power, via credible dismissal threats with no replacement costs, and offer no bonuses. Differential determinates of implicit bargaining power can potentially explain various phenomena, including nominal wage rigidity, union wage differentials, job-specific wage differentials, and gender or race-based wage differentials.
PID: grinnell:11682

Title: Union Bargaining Power in an Efficiency Wage Environment
Description: The operation of labor markets differs fundamentally from that of other markets because the commodity traded, hours of labor time, cannot be separated from human beings. Efficiency wage models, and effort-regulation (or shirking) models in particular address the issue of individual motivation by explicitly considering the influence of the wage on the worker's decision concerning the level of effort exerted. This paper offers a theoretical argument that a cost-based conception of union bargaining power is compatible with an effort-regulation/contested exchange framework.
PID: grinnell:11679