The authors present a new treatment of macroeconomics. Its key characteristic is the use of wage bargaining and price-setting under imperfect competition, making product and labour market assumptions closer to the real world.

Why were European economies able to pursue the simultaneous commitment to full employment and welfare state expansion during the first decades of the postwar period and why did this virtuous relationship break down during recent decades? This book provides an answer to this question, by highlighting the critical importance of a political exchange between unions and governments, premised on wage moderation in exchange for the expansion of social services and transfers. The strategies pursued by these actors in these political exchanges are influenced by existing wage bargaining institutions, the character of monetary policy and by the level and composition of social policy transfers. The book demonstrates that the gradual growth in the fiscal burden has undermined the effectiveness of this political exchange, lowering the ability of unions' wage policies to affect employment outcomes.

The introduction of a search and bargaining model to assess the welfare effects of minimum wage changes and to determine an “optimal” minimum wage. In The Minimum Wage and Labor Market Outcomes, Christopher Flinn argues that in assessing the effects of the minimum wage (in the United States and elsewhere), a behavioral framework is invaluable for guiding empirical work and the interpretation of results. Flinn develops a job search and wage bargaining model that is capable of generating labor market outcomes consistent with observed wage and unemployment duration distributions, and also can account for observed changes in employment rates and wages after a minimum wage change. Flinn uses previous studies from the minimum wage literature to demonstrate how his model can be used to rationalize and synthesize the diverse results found in widely varying institutional contexts. He also shows how observed wage distributions from before and after a minimum wage change can be used to determine if the change was welfare-improving. More ambitiously, and perhaps controversially, Flinn proposes the construction and formal estimation of the model using commonly available data; model estimates then enable the researcher to determine directly the welfare effects of observed minimum wage changes. This model can be used to conduct counterfactual policy experiments—even to determine “optimal” minimum wages under a variety of welfare metrics. The development of the model and the econometric theory underlying its estimation are carefully presented so as to enable readers unfamiliar with the econometrics of point process models and dynamic optimization in continuous time to follow the arguments. Although most of the book focuses on the case where only the unemployed search for jobs in a homogeneous labor market environment, later chapters introduce on-the-job search into the model, and explore its implications for minimum wage policy. The book also contains a chapter describing how individual heterogeneity can be introduced into the search, matching, and bargaining framework.

When a job-seeker and an employer meet, find a prospective surplus, and bargain over the wage, conditions in the outside labor market, including especially unemployment, may be irrelevant. The job-seeker's threat point in the bargain is to delay bargaining, not to terminate bargaining and resume search at other employers. Similarly, the employer's threat point is to delay bargaining, not to terminate it. Consequently, the outcome of the bargain depends on the relative costs of delay to the parties, not on the results of irrational threats to disclaim any bargain. In a model of the labor market that otherwise adopts all of the features of the standard Mortensen-Pissarides model, unemployment is much more sensitive to changes in productivity than in the standard model, because feedback through the wage is absent. We also present models where the wage bargain is in partial contact with conditions in the labor market.

This book addresses collective bargaining in an intertemporal monetary macroeconomy of the aggregate supply–aggregate demand (AS–AD) type with overlapping generations of consumers and with a public sector. The results are presented in a unified framework with a commodity market that clears competitively. By analyzing the implications of three variants of collective bargaining – efficient bargaining in a uniform and a segmented labor market and “right-to-manage” wage bargaining – it identifies the quantity of money, price expectations, union power, and union size as the determinants of temporary equilibria. In the three scenarios, it characterizes and compares the temporary equilibria using both analytical and numerical techniques, with an emphasis on allocations, welfare, and efficiency. It also discusses the dynamic evolution under rational expectations and its steady states in nominal and real terms. Lastly, it demonstrates conditions for stability regarding a balanced monetary expansion of the economy.