Trade unions tend to reduce the dispersion of wages among their members. Skilled workers may therefore have an incentive to separate from an encompassing union and organize into a separate craft union. This paper examines a theoretical model to gain insight into the structure of trade unions at a firm. We show that imperfect competition in the product market may drive skilled and unskilled work...

In this paper, we empirically evaluate two views on the relation between product market competition and conditional accounting conservatism. One view is that intense product market competition increases bankruptcy risk and consequently, exacerbates shareholder-bondholder conflict of interest and enhances the likelihood of litigation. In response, both bondholders and auditors demand a higher le...

This paper establishes a causal effect of product market competition on various characteristics of organizational design. Using a unique panel dataset on firm hierarchies of large U.S. firms (1986-1999) and a quasi-natural experiment (trade liberalization), we find that increasing competition leads firms to flatten their hierarchies, i.e., (i) firms reduce the number of positions between the CE...

This paper proposes a model of efficiency wage with endogenous workers flows in interaction with imperfect competition on the product markets. Subject to economy-wide shocks, firms hire and fire workers thus generating a certain turnover. We show that the intensity of this turnover negatively affects workers’ incentives and induces higher efficiency wage premia. Increased competition pushes rea...

Mexico has engaged in many trade agreements that have left unaffected internal competition, being one of the most trade-opened countries in the world is also one of the most restrictive regarding product market competition. For developing countries, this is a field to study that still need to be undertaken. This paper relates informality in the Mexican labor markets outcomes with market competi...

Most firms face some form of competition in product markets. The degree of competition a firm faces feeds back into its cash flows and affects the values of the securities it issues. We demonstrate that, through its effects on stock prices, product market competition affects the prices of options on equity naturally and leads to an inverse relationship between equity returns and volatility, gen...

I show that as long as the stock market has perfect foresight, profits are distributed as dividends, and incentives are paid more than once or are deferred, stock-related compensation packages are strong incentives for managers to support tacit collusive agreements in repeated oligopolies. The stock market anticipates the losses from punishment phases and discounts them on stock prices, reducin...

This paper examines the influence that product market competition has on the use of incentive payment schemes. We use data from a large representative cross-section survey which allows us to control for other influences. We show that the degree of product market competition that an establishment faces has a significantly positive effect on the likelihood that it will use a performance-related p...

All remaining errors are of course my own. Comments welcome.

This article analyzes the effect of product-market competition on managerial incentives. In contrast to Hart (1983a), I show that competition may actually exacerbate the incentive problem. The difference in results derives from our different assumptions about managerial preferences. The importance of assumptions about preferences suggests that we do not yet understand the precise mechanism thro...