Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

CiteULike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references - click here to get started.

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Review of Radical Political Economics
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Screpanti, E.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Wages, Employment, and Militancy: A Simple Model and Some Empirical Tests

Ernesto Screpanti

Department of Political Economy, University of Siena, Piazza S. Francisco 1, 53100, Siena, Italy screpanti{at}mailsrv.unisi.it

This paper presents a model and some empirical findings on the wage-conflict curve. The theory is based on the view that two kinds of information asymmetries affect the process of wage fixing: firms have to cope with a moral hazard behavior in the supply of work effort, whilst workers have to face the firms' interest in supplying deformed information on outside job opportunities. Wage fixing is then explained by combining an efficiency wage theory with a bargaining strength theory. The outcome is an equation which makes wage changes in industry depend on the rate of inflation, the rate of change in industrial employment, and the workers' degree of militancy. The equation has been estimated on time series data of five countries (France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States) in the postwar period. The econometric findings show that the rate of inflation and the rate of change in employment exert a decisive influence on wage dynamics in all five countries, whilst the autonomous degree of militancy exerts it in all of them except Germany.

Key Words: Wage rate • Inflation rate • Worker's bargaining power • Industrial employment

Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 32, No. 2, 171-196 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/048661340003200201
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?