Employment, Wages, and Unionism in a Model of the Aggregate Labor Market in Britain / John H. Pencavel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pencavel, John H.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w3030.

NBER working paper series no. w3030

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 1989.

Summary:

Two propositions figure prominently in explanations for Britain's comparatively low growth in employment: first, the wage-setting mechanism is insufficiently responsive to the growth of unemployment and, second, there exists a well-defined negative causal relationship from wages to employment with the features of a conventional labor demand function. Using aggregate annual observations from 1953 to 1979, find the evidence for a conventional labor demand curve to be fragile and find little support for the notion that trade union objectives are unaffected by unemployment as some versions of the "insider-outsider" hypothesis would maintain. In general, the empirical results in this paper emphasize that confident inferences about Britain's employment record cannot be drawn from aggregate data.

Notes:

Print version record

July 1989.