The Rise and Fall of Centralized Wage Bargaining
研究了1950年代初至1980年代初北欧国家集中工资谈判的兴起与衰落，提出其兴起是对失业福利溢出效应的回应，而衰落源于设备特定技术进步和技能互补性导致的工人生产率差距扩大。
Abstract During the three decades spanning the early 1950s to the early 1980s, the wage‐setting process in most Northern European countries was dominated by centralized bargaining (i.e., peak‐level labor and employer associations set wages nationwide). In the early 1980s, centralized wage bargaining began to collapse. In this paper, we assess a novel explanation for both the initial establishment of a centralized wage‐setting process, and its subsequent collapse. According to our theory, centralized wage bargaining was set up as a response to the spillovers created by the unemployment benefit program. Its collapse was the result of the increase in the productivity gap across workers, brought about by equipment‐specific technological progress and equipment–skill complementarity.