published in: International Economic Review, 2008, 48 (3), 943-972
In search of a macroeconomic theory of wage determination, the agnostic reader should be puzzled by the apparent contradiction between two influential theories. On one hand, in the standard search-matching theory with wage bargaining, hiring cost and constant returns of labor, the bargaining power of employees allows them to get rents and gives rise either to over-employment or to under-employment compared with the first-best. On the other hand, in Stole and Zwiebel’s theory of intrafirm bargaining with no hiring cost and decreasing returns of labor, the bargaining power of employees does not allow them to get rent and always gives rise to over-employment. In this paper, we try to reconcile the approaches. A simple matching model with large firms and diminishing marginal productivity of labor allows us to show that the two limit cases described above yield a mix of robust and non robust results: In the most general case, employees get rents and there is more frequently over-employment compared to the efficient allocation than in the standard search-matching model.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.