Trade as a Wage Disciplining Device

We estimate how trade openness affects the relationship between wages, labour productivity and foreign wages using sector-level time series for several EU member states. In some countries wages became less responsive to foreign wages as trade costs declined. We show this counter-intuitive result is as expected when wages are set by a monopoly union with a preference for wages relative to employment. Trade liberalisation then leads to more wage discipline by forcing unions to set wages more in line with labour productivity. Foreign wages simultaneously become less relevant. Our results call to rethink how trade liberalisation is affecting unionized labour markets, and offer a possible explanation for the mixed evidence found by some tests for international factor price convergence.unions, globalisation, economic geography, factor price equalisation

Union wage demands with footloose firms.

This paper analyses the wage demands of a sector-level monopoly union facing internationally mobile firms. A simple two-country economic geography model is used to describe how firms relocate in function of international differences in production costs and market size. The union sets wages in function of the firm level labour demand elasticity and the responsiveness of firms to relocate internationally. If countries are sufficiently symmetric lower foreign wages and lower trade costs necessarily lead to lower union wage demands. With asymmetric countries these intuitive properties do not always hold. But even for symmetric countries it holds that small increases in market size or trade costs makes union wages more sensitive to the foreign wage level.

Globalisation, concentration and footloose firms: in search of the main cause of the declining labour share.

Over the last two decades the share of national income which accrues to labour has followed a marked downward trend across a host of industrialised countries. This paper attempts to assess the importance of several potential causes of this phenomenon. We investigate compositional effects, the effect of declining trade costs, changes in the market structure (concentration) and the effect of low-wage competition between countries. Overall, the findings suggest that lower trade costs and factors related to economic integration such as industry concentration, the market power of firms and increased international low-wage competition indeed affect the labour share. However, their effect has been quite limited when compared to changes in the sectoral composition, the effects of technological change, cyclical factors and changes in the prices of intermediary goods.

The researcher-as-dramaturg : lingering in-between theory and practicer or how artistic strategies enrich academic research : a manifesto to switch gear

O que é que a noção de dramaturga pode acrescentar à posição de investigadora? Neste manifesto, exploro o lugar da/o investigador/a-dramaturgo/a como uma abertura metodológica com estratégias de diferentes campos. Proponho a/o investigador/a-dramaturgo/a como reavaliação necessária dos processos no campo da investigação académica

Migration within the EU: the role of education, wage differences and cultural barriers

There exist marked differences in the educational attainment of immigrants, depending on both the level and distribution of income in the country of origin and destination. This paper estimates an education-specific gravity equation for migration between European countries. Given the lack of data on migration flows by level of education, these are proxied by the difference in resident migrants by nationality and level of education, between the years 2000 and 1990. I find that highly educated individuals are more likely to migrate. They are less sensitive to geographical and cultural distance as barriers to migration, but are not unambiguously more responsive to wage differentials. Controlling for education-specific wage differences between origin and destination removes only part of the observed differences in migration behaviour between education groups.JRC.B.3-Territorial Developmen

Globalisation, concentration and footloose firms: in search of the main cause of the declining labour share

Over the last two decades the share of national income which accrues to labour has followed a marked downward trend across a host of industrialised countries. This paper attempts to assess the importance of several potential causes of this phenomenon. We investigate compositional effects, the effect of declining trade costs, changes in the market structure (concentration) and the effect of low-wage competition between countries. Overall, the findings suggest that lower trade costs and factors related to economic integration such as industry concentration, the market power of firms and increased international low-wage competition indeed affect the labour share. However, their effect has been quite limited when compared to changes in the sectoral composition, the effects of technological change, cyclical factors and changes in the prices of intfirmediary goods

Le rural, un nouveau front de la planification territoriale

National audienc

Error-correction-based cointegration tests for panel data

This article describes a new Stata command called xtwest, which implements the four error-correction-based panel cointegration tests developed by Westerlund (2007). The tests are general enough to allow for a large degree of heterogeneity, both in the long-run cointegrating relationship and in the short-run dynamics, and dependence within as well as across the cross-sectional units