Maddalena Ronchi
- 3 May 2017
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 2051Details
- Abstract
- The paper aims at investigating to what extent wage negotiation setups have shaped up firms’ response to the Great Recession, taking a firm-level cross-country perspective. We contribute to the literature by building a new micro-distributed database which merges data related to wage bargaining institutions (Wage Dynamic Network, WDN) with data on firm productivity and other relevant firm characteristics (CompNet). We use the database to study how firms reacted to the Great Recession in terms of variation in profits, wages, and employment. The paper shows that, in line with the theoretical predictions, centralized bargaining systems – as opposed to decentralized/firm level based ones – were accompanied by stronger downward wage rigidity, as well as cuts in employment and profits.
- JEL Code
- J30 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs→General
J50 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Labor?Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining→General
D22 : Microeconomics→Production and Organizations→Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis
D61 : Microeconomics→Welfare Economics→Allocative Efficiency, Cost?Benefit Analysis - Network
- Competitiveness Research Network