Product Market Reforms, Labour Market Institutions and Unemployment
利用1980-1990年代OECD国家的监管差异，发现产品市场竞争加剧会降低失业率，且在工人议价能力强的国家效果更明显；竞争对实际工资有提升作用，但高议价能力工人获益较少。
We analyze the impact of product market competition on unemployment and wages, and how \nthis depends on labour market institutions. We use differential changes in regulations across \nOECD countries over the 1980s and 1990s to identify the effects of competition. We find that \nincreased product market competition reduces unemployment, and that it does so more in \ncountries with labour market institutions that increase worker bargaining power. The theoretical \nintuition is that both firms with market power and unions with bargaining power are constrained \nin their behaviour by the elasticity of demand in the product market. We also find that the effect \nof increased competition on real wages is beneficial to workers, but less so when they have high \nbargaining power. Intuitively, real wages increase through a drop in the general price level, but \nworkers with bargaining power lose out somewhat from a reduction in the rents that they had \npreviously captured.