• DOI:10.1093/ACPROF:OSO/9780199599431.003.0008
• Corpus ID: 151003459

Collective skill systems, wage bargaining, and labor market stratification

@inproceedings{Busemeyer2012CollectiveSS,
  title={Collective skill systems, wage bargaining, and labor market stratification},
  author={Marius R. Busemeyer and Tor Iversen},
  year={2012}
}

• Marius R. Busemeyer, T. Iversen
• Published 2012
• Economics

The study of labor market stratification, in particular income inequality, is at the core of comparative political economy, and it has gained even more attention with the recent rise in labor market inequality. Scholarship in the last couple of decades has provided important insights into the political and institutional determinants of these changes as well as differences in inequality across countries (e.g., Iversen, 1999; Wallerstein, 1999; Moene and Wallerstein, 2001, 2003; Pontusson et al., 2002; Bradley et al., 2003; Rueda, 2008). Besides the influence of left partisanship and strong unions, the centralization of wage bargaining has been identified in this literature as a crucial variable mitigating wage inequality (Wallerstein, 1999). Yet, it is hard to explain wage setting in isolation from the forces that shape the demand and supply of different types of labor. In the economic literature, skill-biased technological change is regarded as a key driver of demand for trained workers, which helps explain the rise in wage dispersion since the 1980s (Acemoglu, 2002; Machin and Van Reenen, 2007; Goldin and Katz, 2008). On the supply side, scholars have become interested in the role of educational institutions, in particular vocational training. In addition to some explorative empirical analyses, Estevez-Abe et al. (2001) provide an initial theoretical argument about why the prevalence of occupational skills, which raises the qualification of those at the bottom of the income distribution, should be associated with less inequality. Bradley et al. (2003) provide a more systematic test of the role of vocational training as a determinant of inequality, but they do not find a significant effect. This non-finding, as we will show OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 6/9/2011, SPi