Governments often make public deals with interest groups, yet the conditions under which these bargains emerge are not well understood. This paper explores these policy contracts in the context of “social pacts”, where governments sign explicit policy agreements with peak level union federations for electoral gain. I develop a theory of pacts and then apply it to an empirical puzzle emerging fr...

Assessing the Impact of Incomes Policy: The Italian Experience The Saint Valentine’s decree (1984) and the ensuing hard fought referendum (1985), which reduced the automatisms of scala mobile, started a process of redefinition of wage fixing in Italy, which culminated with the final abolition of scala mobile (1992) and the approval of Protocollo d’intesa (1993). Since then, following New Corpor...

Due to limited empirical evidence and controversial anecdotes, speculation over the ubiquity and importance of covenants not to compete in the U.S. labor market is rampant. We present an equilibrium framework to account for the existence and incidence of noncompetition agreements. We then populate this framework using data from a new large-scale survey of U.S. workers. The data show that noncom...

Some argue that a high union wage premium and the industrial council system are important causes of inflexibility in the South African labor market. We estimate union premia on the order of 20 percent for African workers and 10 percent for White workers. We also find that African nonunion workers who are covered by industrial council agreements receive a premium of 6-10 percent; the premium is ...

Making agreements on how to behave has been shown to be an evolutionarily viable strategy in one-shot social dilemmas. However, in many situations agreements aim to establish long-term mutually beneficial interactions. Our analytical and numerical results reveal for the first time under which conditions revenge, apology and forgiveness can evolve and deal with mistakes within ongoing agreements...

this paper reviews the relationship between inflation rate and minimum wage in iran’s economy over the 1969-2005. according to the economic literature, there is a narrow relationship between inflation rate and minimum wage. some economists believe in increased inflation due to minimum wage. the other group of economists considers the increased inflation as a cause for increasing minimum wage. t...

Number of companies stopped operations due to Covid-19 Pandemic. Income losses and work termination could not be avoided. The 2023 district minimum wages have been established by the Governor. Workers are benefited from wage increase which is almost 10 (ten) percent. On other hand, burdens employers. Regulation on payment does provide a solution problems remuneration during pandemic. However, l...

OBJECTIVE This paper aims to assess the affordability of a nutritious diet for households earning minimum wage in Nova Scotia (NS) from 2002 to 2012 using an economic simulation that includes food costing and secondary data. METHODS The cost of the National Nutritious Food Basket (NNFB) was assessed with a stratified, random sample of grocery stores in NS during six time periods: 2002, 2004/2...

We aim at investigating to what extent reciprocal considerations, exhibited by employers and employees, should lead to stable gift exchange practices in the labor contract, giving rise to noncompensating wage differentials among industries. We use the concept of Sequential Reciprocity Equilibrium developed by Dufwenberg & Kirchsteiger (1998) to incorporate players’ preferences for reciprocity i...