Why did the transnational synchronization of wage inflations fail during the first 10 years of the euro? We analyze data from 1999 to 2008 for 12 euro members and estimate increases of nominal unit labor costs both in the overall economy and in manufacturing as dependent variables. While our analysis confirms that differences in economic growth shaped the inflation of labor costs, we add a political-institutional argument to the debate and argue that the designs of the wage regimes had an additional, independent impact. In coordinated labor regimes, increases in nominal unit labor costs tended to fall below the European Central Bank’s inflation target, while in uncoordinated labor regimes, the respective increases tended to exceed the European inflation target. Due to the stickiness of wage-bargaining institutions, the lack of the capacity to synchronize inflation is not likely to disappear in the foreseeable future.

This article appraises the effects of trade liberalization between two industries that have different endowments of skilled labor. Skilled labor is necessary for the production of higher-quality variants of a vertically differentiated good. Skilled labor endowments, therefore, determine the patternof specialization of industries as well as their market structure, both in the final goods market and in the labor market. We analyze how market integration benefits or harms the agents in the industries by delving into the linkages between labor and product markets, and show that bilateral losses from trade can emerge at equilibrium.

L'objet de cet article est d'étudier l'impact de la répartition de la charge des dépenses sociales entre employeurs et employés sur le coût du travail et sur l'emploi. A cet effet, on utilise un modäle de négociations salariales, auquel on intägre une condition d'équilibre budgétaire des comptes sociaux. Il apparaît que l'incidence de la répartition dépend du degré de centralisation des négociations. Ainsi, si les cas polaires de décentralisation totale et de centralisation parfaite permettent de retrouver le résultat usuel de la littérature, à savoir l'absence d'effet de la répartition du financement des dépenses sociales sur l'emploi, la situation de centralisation partielle fait en revanche apparaître un impact de cette répartition. On montre alors qu'une augmentation de la part financée par les cotisations employeurs a un effet favorable sur l'emploi.

We analyze the role of intrafirm bargaining in the large-firm matching model and underline the conditions under which the Pissarides equivalence between this model and the “single-worker” firm's model holds.