Trade as a Wage Disciplining Device

We estimate how trade openness affects the relationship between wages, labour productivity and foreign wages using sector-level time series for several EU member states. In some countries wages became less responsive to foreign wages as trade costs declined. We show this counter-intuitive result is as expected when wages are set by a monopoly union with a preference for wages relative to employment. Trade liberalisation then leads to more wage discipline by forcing unions to set wages more in line with labour productivity. Foreign wages simultaneously become less relevant. Our results call to rethink how trade liberalisation is affecting unionized labour markets, and offer a possible explanation for the mixed evidence found by some tests for international factor price convergence.unions, globalisation, economic geography, factor price equalisation

Union wage demands with footloose firms.

This paper analyses the wage demands of a sector-level monopoly union facing internationally mobile firms. A simple two-country economic geography model is used to describe how firms relocate in function of international differences in production costs and market size. The union sets wages in function of the firm level labour demand elasticity and the responsiveness of firms to relocate internationally. If countries are sufficiently symmetric lower foreign wages and lower trade costs necessarily lead to lower union wage demands. With asymmetric countries these intuitive properties do not always hold. But even for symmetric countries it holds that small increases in market size or trade costs makes union wages more sensitive to the foreign wage level.

Globalisation, concentration and footloose firms: in search of the main cause of the declining labour share.

Over the last two decades the share of national income which accrues to labour has followed a marked downward trend across a host of industrialised countries. This paper attempts to assess the importance of several potential causes of this phenomenon. We investigate compositional effects, the effect of declining trade costs, changes in the market structure (concentration) and the effect of low-wage competition between countries. Overall, the findings suggest that lower trade costs and factors related to economic integration such as industry concentration, the market power of firms and increased international low-wage competition indeed affect the labour share. However, their effect has been quite limited when compared to changes in the sectoral composition, the effects of technological change, cyclical factors and changes in the prices of intermediary goods.

The researcher-as-dramaturg : lingering in-between theory and practicer or how artistic strategies enrich academic research : a manifesto to switch gear

O que é que a noção de dramaturga pode acrescentar à posição de investigadora? Neste manifesto, exploro o lugar da/o investigador/a-dramaturgo/a como uma abertura metodológica com estratégias de diferentes campos. Proponho a/o investigador/a-dramaturgo/a como reavaliação necessária dos processos no campo da investigação académica

I Breathe, You Breathe, We Breathe: How a daily habitual movement appears as an action and grows into a gesture through listening

In this article I wonder whether the non-breath in-between inhalation and exhalation and inherent to breathing equals what Hannah Arendt calls a space of appearance. Can the non-breath be considered as a place where human plurality and the self emerge (Arendt 2015, 160-163)? Or in other words, can a daily and habitual movement like breathing provide the space for action to appear? Can our breathing act? And if so, do we speak (up) through our breathing? Through listening to the breathing bodies in Grey (Kinga Jaczewska, 2018), Toute une nuit and Rendez-vous d’Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1982 1978) I search for answers to these questions