Efficiency wages and union–firm bargaining

This paper combines the efficiency wage and union–firm bargaining approaches to wage determination to produce a unified model that leads to higher wages, confirming an original insight of Summers (Am. Econom. Rev. 78 (1988) 383). Increases in monopoly power on the goods market also have a stronger impact on wages when there are efficiency wage effects, but the proportional effect of bargaining and market power on the wage is independent of the proportional effect of efficiency wages. We also find that efficiency wage effects alter the form of the labour demand curve to make it backward bending.