Corporatism or competition? labour contracts, institutions and wage structures in international comparison

Abstract

The authors present important research showing that corporatist institutions generate smaller non-competitive wage differentials than a decentralized system. A theoretical explanation is developed based on the hold-up problem in investments, arguing that corporatist institutions solve the problem by specifying ex ante nominal contracts that remove the necessity of ex post bargaining over the surplus of an employment relationship. The authors also argue that such institutions allow sufficient flexibility to accommodate aggregate shocks, even more so than decentralized systems. Corporatism or Competition? is the first book to bring together the mass of research on comparative wage differences, wage movements and employment behaviour in different countries with different institutional frameworks, in an organized and coherent fashion.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 203 citations exist upstream.