Miners' Wages in Post-War Britain: An Application of a Model of Trade Union Behavior

Abstract

The paper studies the determination of wages in the British coal industry. A utility¿maximising model of a trade union is used to represent the behaviour of the National Union of Mineworkers. A non- linear structural model is derived and is estimated by Full Information Maximum Likelihood. The results are quite encouraging: there is support for a neo-classical demand curve for miners¿ labour, and a significant estimate of workers` relative risk aversion