Unemployment, Market Structure and Growth (Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, 530)

In his Ph. D. thesis, Rudiger Wapler analyses the causes of the persistently high unemployment rates especially in continental Europe. Particular emphasis is placed on imperfect labour and product markets on the one hand, and on the numerous links between unemployment, innovations and growth on the other. Hence, Rudiger Wapler provides an important contribution towards a better understanding of both the development of labour markets as well as the dynamics of growth. To aid readers with only little prior knowledge of labour markets, the book presents the most common theories of unemployment: (1) trade-union models in which union bargaining power leads to wages above their market-clearing level, (2) efficiency-wage models in which employers voluntarily pay higher wages in order to motivate or discipline their workers or to reduce the job­ turnover rate, as well as (3) matching models in which unemployment is caused by the continuous turnover of jobs and workers. In addition, emphasis is placed on the fact that labour needs to be treated as heterogeneous, a fact often neg­ lected in the literature. Subsequently, these labour-market foundations are integrated with modern theories of innovations and growth, making the ap­ proach much more relevant and plausible. Without doubt, the generalisations of the models performed by Rudiger Wapler show that there are limits to such formal analysis. Due to the increasing number of interdependencies, it is doubtful whether even more complex models provide additional (usable) insights.

The recent labour-market performance varies greatly between the United States and continental Europe on the one hand, and between the low- and high-skilled on the other. This book starts by presenting up-to-date empirical evidence on these stylised facts and on the importance of the intensity of product-market competition for the labour market. It then integrates models of union wage bargaining, efficiency wages and matching with modern analyses of imperfect competition on product markets. Subsequently, the analysis is extended to include the effects of exogenous and endogenous productivity growth as well as skill-based technological change. This makes it possible to not only explain the influence of product-market competition and growth on aggregate unemployment, but also how they affect the unemployment rates for the low- and high-skilled differently.

Front Matter....Pages I-XXVII Introduction....Pages 1-4 Empirical Evidence....Pages 5-19 Wage Setting and Sector-Specific Unemployment....Pages 21-61 Market Structure and Unemployment....Pages 63-96 Exogenous Growth and Unemployment....Pages 97-111 Market Structure, Innovation-Based Growth and Unemployment....Pages 113-162 Summary and Conclusions....Pages 163-169 Back Matter....Pages 171-209 That unemployment rates in the 1980s and 1990s have been persistently high especially in continental Europe is a well known fact.