Union structure and incentives for innovation

Wage‐Setting Institutions and R&D Collaboration Networks

“…However, the finding that the intensity of R&D collaborations should be positively correlated with union bargaining power is empirically troubling because the stylised facts surveyed earlier suggest the opposite -across industrialised countries, inter-firm R&D collaborations have become hugely more prevalent as labour markets have been deregulated and unions weakened. 4 Second, our paper contributes to the literature on unionisation and innovation. In contrast to our model, most existing studies of trade unions and R&D concentrate on how the presence of unions affects the R&D incentives of individual (isolated) firms.…”

Labor Unionization Structure, Innovation, and Welfare

“…However, if the industrywide labour union can charge different wages to different firms, the incentive for innovation is higher under firm-specific labour unions. In a model with R&D competition, Calabuig and Gonzalez-Maestre (2002) show that the incentive for a labour-saving innovation is higher under firm-specific labour unions for non-drastic innovations, while the incentive for innovation can be higher under an industry-wide labour union for drastic innovation. Manasakis and Petrakis (2009) show that, under non-cooperative R&D, the incentive for a labour-saving innovation is higher under firm-specific labour unions if knowledge spillover is high, but the incentive for innovation is always higher under firm-specific labour unions under cooperative R&D. They also show that welfare is higher under firm-specific unions than under an industry-wide labour union.…”

Unionization structure, licensing and innovation

“…4 Second, it contributes to the literature showing the effects of the unionization structure on innovation. While the earlier works 5 have shown the impact of union bargaining power on the incentives for innovation under decentralized unions, recently, Calabuig and Gonzalez-Maestre (2002) and Haucap and Wey (2004) show the (ambiguous) effects of different unionization structure on innovation in R&D competition and patent race models. The main intuition behind their results is related to the different types of constraints under different unionization structures, which affect the hold-up problems.…”