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The article explores the challenges faced by disadvantaged individuals in the labor market and presents the empowerment model as a distinctive approach to justice. It discusses the virtues of equalizing bargaining power and promoting egalitarianism by addressing inequalities based on gender, race, disability, and social class. The article acknowledges practical limits to achieving equal bargaining power but suggests that governments should consider individuals' own views and preferences. It also discusses the goods of work model and argues that the empowerment model is more practical and effective in guiding policy decisions. The article emphasizes the importance of considering global and environmental challenges in discussions of justice in the labor market. [Extracted from the article]

One of the core objectives of unions is to raise the wages of the lowest paid. Utilizing a panel of individual‐matched employee–employer data covering the Norwegian private sector in the period 2000–2014, I investigate how workplace union density is related to individual low‐pay risk. By exploiting changes in tax deductions for union members in Norway as a source of exogenous variation, a negative effect of increased union density on low‐pay risk is identified within jobs. The results further suggest that the effect of local bargaining power on individual low‐pay probability is larger among immigrants than among natives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Misclassification of employees as independent contractors is widespread. This article aims to make two contributions. My first goal is to sharpen the explanation of why misclassifications persist; I argue that three well‐known problems – the indeterminacy of employee status tests, the barriers to self‐enforcement, and the inequality of bargaining power – together combine to give employers de facto power to set the default legal status. Putting the burden on the worker to initiate legal proceedings and challenge their classification as an independent contractor is the ultimate reason for persistent misclassifications. The second and main contribution is to propose a solution that relies on new AI capabilities. Thanks to technological advancements it is now possible to require employers to seek pre‐authorisation before engaging with someone as an independent contractor. The authorisation would be granted (or refused) by a state‐run automated system, based on an AI prediction about the law. Both parties would still be able to bring the case before a court of law; but the power to set the default legal status would be taken away from employers. The article considers the difficulties with relying on AI predictions, and argues that those difficulties can be addressed, proposing a model that can be justified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the organizational consequences of corporate ESG and its underlying mechanisms is essential for corporate management to develop sustainable strategies, and it is a topic of growing interest in academia. This study, utilizing a sample of Chinese A‐share listed firms from 2010 to 2019, examines the impact of corporate ESG profiles on customer structure. We demonstrate that superior ESG profiles (primarily the social and governance aspects) contribute to reducing customer concentration. This effect is achieved by enhancing firm reputation and employee efficiency, thereby increasing market competitiveness and market share. This effect is more pronounced in firms that invest heavily in advertising and have employees committed to long‐term goals. Furthermore, we discover that ESG‐driven changes in customer concentration led to additional organizational outcomes, including enhanced bargaining power over customers, improved financial performance, and reduced operational risk. In conclusion, our evidence suggests that ESG significantly shapes a firm's customer structure and, consequently, its operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greater women's bargaining power and decision‐making within a household have been shown to increase investments in human capital. This study links women's participation in decision‐making in dairy production with household investment in girls and boys in health, nutrition, and education. We survey households in the urbanizing region of Bangalore, India. We utilize a multinomial treatment effects model to analyze the individual and household factors that are associated with women's participation in sole or joint decision‐making. We then assess how the type of decision‐making influences a household's investments. The results first show that female decision‐making households are more disadvantaged on average than other types of decision‐making households. Second, we observe that female decision‐makers for dairy production are more likely to have more children and earn a higher income than their husbands. Third, the main findings show that households in which women engage in joint decision‐making have higher levels of investment across all categories for girls. Conversely, investments decrease in education and nutrition for both girls and boys when the wife is the sole decision‐maker. Lastly, investments are enhanced further for girls when households can sell milk at a higher price. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why have most Latin American countries – traditionally pro‐Atlantic and staunch defenders of non‐intervention – remained conspicuously neutral during the Ukraine War? We argue that in an increasingly bipolar context, fence‐sitting produces clear strategic gains through partner‐diversification and bargaining power. However, this strategy becomes riskier with polarisation and, at a certain point, these risks may upset benefits. We formalise this argument and examine the foreign policy trajectories of several Latin American countries in the context of the Ukraine War to illustrate how their room for diplomatic flexibility has shrunk with polarisation. As a corollary, we think of scenarios where the costs of fence‐sitting can outweigh its advantages, forcing the region to align. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper underscores the need to reconsider the ontological separation between processes of production and reproduction in the context of agrarian‐urban interlinkages. It synthesizes 'value theory of inclusion' with a notion of 'unfair bargaining power' to offer a new understanding of processes of agrarian change in the context of Pakistan. Expansion of the agrarian–urban frontier, one of the defining characteristics of the contemporary agrarian change in Pakistan, constitutes a crucial yet undertheorized site of value extraction. The paper shows that contemporary processes of capital accumulation rely on the swift conversion of agricultural land into commercial real estate, manifested in the form of gated housing enclaves. This process, on the one hand, accelerates the devalourization of small‐farm‐based production, and on the other hand, it allows affluent residents of gated housing enclaves to extract gendered surplus labour in the form of domestic workers from the growing pool of 'classes of labour'. In short, the expansion of agrarian–urban frontier is predicated on devalourization of agrarian livelihoods and exploitation of women's labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on crisis have brought to fore the necessity of studying the gendered impact of such events. Covid‐19 too has shown how gender relations play a role in the political economy of crisis, relief and response as well as recovery. This article focusses on the experiences of paid domestic workers in India who are among the most invisible and marginalized of India's informal workers and largely excluded from labor discourse and employment legislation. With Covid‐19, the precariousness characterizing the sector has also been further exposed and exacerbated, with vast numbers of workers now facing significant challenges to livelihood, as well as several new/additional pressures and risks, both at work and at home. In this article, we examine these Covid‐related challenges, drawing on interviews conducted with domestic workers, NGO practitioners, and labor rights' activists in Delhi and Kolkata between April and August 2020. We show how, during the national lockdown, many domestic workers in these cities experienced increased insecurity related to jobs and housing, as well as an increased control and surveillance at home. Furthermore, with the partial easing of lockdown and the associated 'return' to work, many experienced reduced bargaining power at work, increasingly blurred roles, and heavier workloads. Workers also experienced more overt forms of avoidance behavior, linked to ideas of caste/class and more recent notions of 'hygiene'/'distancing'. In detailing these experiences and contextualizing them within a much longer history of invisibilization and marginalization facing workers engaged in social reproduction, we draw attention to what we call the 'precarious continuities' in paid domestic work. We argue that the crisis allows for a lens to widen the theoretical understanding around social reproduction as a form of underpaid and devalued labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With one‐fifth of the UK labour force employed in the public sector, public sector pay and its interaction with private sector pay is an important driver of the macroeconomy. Using new data on sector‐level earnings and sector–industry‐level pay settlements, this paper addresses the fundamental question of which sector leads and which follows in terms of earnings determination. We find that in the long run, public sector wages adjust to wages set in the private sector, maintaining a consistent relationship. We further find that there can be significant wage spillovers from the public sector to the private sector in the short run. These tend to be more pronounced for private sector industries that are domestically facing, characterized by low worker bargaining power, or reliant on public sector inputs. This paper's findings have important implications for macroeconomic policy that aims to balance inflationary forces and fiscal funding pressures. This paper is part of the Economica 100 Series. Economica, the LSE "house journal" is now 100 years old. To commemorate this achievement, we are publishing 100 papers by former students, as well as current and former faculty. Peter Dolton is a senior Fellow at the CEP, LSE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In regional trade agreements (RTAs), member countries choose a common rule of origin (RoO) for each product. This study examines the factors that influence RoOs in four ASEAN‐plus‐one RTAs, which are agreements between ASEAN and four individual countries. One unique feature is that ASEAN as a whole negotiates with a plus‐one country, which may dilute the interests of individual ASEAN countries at large. Our findings are summarised as follows. First, the more restrictive RoOs are set in the products where plus‐one countries are less competitive against most ASEAN countries. Second, the more restrictive RoOs are likely to be imposed in products that plus‐one countries protect with higher most favoured nation tariffs. These two results reflect the bargaining power among a plus‐on country and ASEAN countries and indicate that plus‐one's preference influences RoOs more strongly. Third, we find contrasting results between intermediate and final products. RoOs are likely to be less restrictive in intermediate products and more restrictive in final products when plus‐one countries have higher export competitiveness or when the majority of ASEAN countries have higher MFN tariffs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the effect of affiliation with a large business group on a firm's trade credit policy while controlling for the effects of its financial health and bargaining power in the Korean setting. Group affiliation may influence trade credit finance through the internal capital market mechanism and/or the extra bargaining power mechanism. In our empirical analyses, we focus on identifying the more dominant mechanism for determining trade credit demand (TCD) and supply (TCS). First, we provide a set of empirical findings showing that a firm's affiliation with a large business group increases the firm's TCD but decreases its TCS. These findings support the extra bargaining power mechanism argument. Second, we provide another set of empirical findings that group‐wise financial distress has weak positive impacts on a group affiliate's TCD and TCS. These findings support the internal capital market mechanism argument. Overall, we provide evidence that large business groups in Korea function uniquely in that the extra bargaining power mechanism greatly dominates the internal capital market mechanism when determining a group affiliate's trade credit transactions. We also provide evidence of the internal capital market mechanism functioning when an entire business group faces severe financial difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generalist chief executive officers (CEOs) have accumulated transferrable general skills by working in multiple firms or industries. Recent decades have witnessed an increasing demand for generalist CEOs, which has resulted in a favorable job market for them. Favorable outside job opportunities reduce generalist CEOs' career concerns and increase their agency problems and risk‐taking incentives. We examine the relation between generalist CEOs and conditional conservatism. On the one hand, conditional conservatism could be positively associated with generalist CEOs because debtholders and shareholders often demand conservatism to alleviate heightened agency problems. On the other hand, a negative association could obtain because generalist CEOs can (1) create better information environments for firms, reduce information asymmetry and lessen stakeholders' demand for conservatism and (2) have greater bargaining power and reduce the supply of conservatism. We document a positive association between generalist CEOs and conditional conservatism and show that the relationship is more pronounced in firms with a higher demand for conservatism. Our results are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bargaining between husband and wife is reflective of the power dynamics in marriage. Women's access to resources and power through bargaining is integral to their empowerment, particularly in the Global South, where more traditional patriarchal family cultures prevail. This review summarizes the key theories concerning marital bargaining and evaluates the recent developments in research on marital bargaining by exploring patterns, determinants, and consequences of bargaining over power and resources among couples in the Global South. Several future research directions are proposed: examining the long‐term implications of the Covid‐19 pandemic on women's agency, employing a more comparative approach, and navigating marital bargaining from a broader family context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese firms simultaneously have high levels of loans and cash holdings. Through listed firms on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges, we establish a negative link between cash holdings and a firm's loan bargaining power, especially in regions with less bank competition, through a firm's passive response to bank requests rather than its voluntary excess cash reserves. Furthermore, state ownership, collateral, economic contribution, and reduced information asymmetry may effectively strengthen firm bargaining power and moderate the link. However, better marketisation strengthens the link. The banking sector may need to improve its efficiency through better credit rationing in future reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a bilateral monopoly where a linear input price is determined by Nash bargaining. We show, with an increasing marginal cost of input production, that vertical integration reduces consumer surplus and welfare compared with bilateral monopoly if the bargaining power of the input supplier is low. This result is important for competition policies as it questions the common wisdom suggesting vertical integration increases welfare by eliminating the problem of double marginalization. Overproduction under bilateral monopoly compared with vertical integration is the reason for our result. Interestingly, consumer surplus and welfare can be higher under a linear input price compared with a two‐part tariff input price. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article emphasizes the role of brand strategies, as placement in regional niche strategies for manufacturers, to impact retailer–manufacturer relations in the grocery retail sector. Due to joint purchases of initially unrelated products within a shopping cart, transaction cost‐induced complementarities between those products arise. Given unique retailer data, we infer complementarities arising from a specific product to a shopping cart of products. Using a Nash‐in‐Nash framework, we are able to show that the impact on the bargaining position for the manufacturer vis‐à‐vis a retailer is substantial and helps to increase the potential of gaining a larger slice of the profit pie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is an introduction to a collection of research articles on various policy topics. The articles cover a range of subjects, including the impact of minimum quality regulations on childcare labor, the effects of right-to-work laws on work schedules, the impact of safe haven laws on infant mortality, the effectiveness of newcomer programs for English learners, the effects of parental benefits on disadvantaged households, administrative burdens faced by homeless individuals, the impact of self-service bans on gasoline prices, the relationship between fiscal transfers and entrepreneurship, the influence of government performance signals on citizen satisfaction, the implementation of cash transfer programs for low-income mothers, and the public policy surrounding professional sports stadiums. The articles provide evidence-based insights into these topics and highlight the need for policymakers to carefully consider the unintended consequences of their decisions. [Extracted from the article]

Unions play a crucial role in determining wages and employment outcomes. However, union bargaining power may also have important effects on non‐pecuniary working conditions. We study the effects of right‐to‐work laws, which removed agency shop protection and weakened union powers on long hours and non‐standard work schedules that may adversely affect workers' health and safety. We exploit variation in the timing of enactment across U.S. states and compare workers in bordering counties across adopting states and states that did not adopt the laws yet. Using the stacked approach to difference‐in‐differences estimates proposed by Cengiz et al. (2019), we find evidence that right‐to‐work laws increased the share of workers working long hours by 6%, while there is little evidence of an impact on hourly wages. The effects on long hours are larger in more unionized sectors (i.e., construction, manufacturing, and transportation). While the likelihood of working non‐standard hours increases for particular sectors (education and public administration), there is no evidence of a significant increase in the overall sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the European Structure of Earnings Survey to describe the evolution of collective bargaining coverage in European countries during 2002–2018 and how this affected the pay premium associated with being covered. Pay premia are an outcome of negotiations, reflecting the bargaining power on behalf of employees as well as the system of coverage, separately for the public and private sector. Descriptively, we show a decline in collective bargaining coverage linked to a general reduction in the pay differences. This hides much variation though. In a multivariate analysis of changes over time, we show that centrally bargained agreements are associated with larger pay premia if more people are covered and in countries and sectors with stronger trade unions. As this power declines over time, so do wage premia. At higher rates of coverage, there can be a spillover effect where wages for all workers increase, thereby reducing the premia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How might good work – skilled, autonomous work which affords workers opportunities for meaningful social cooperation in decent conditions – be made available to all? I evaluate five commonly advanced strategies: an unregulated labor market, egalitarian redistribution of resources, state regulation, collective bargaining, and workplace democracy. Each, I argue, has significant limitations. An unregulated labor market ignores workers' unduly weak bargaining power vis‐à‐vis employers. Egalitarian redistribution alone fails to solve this problem due to distinctive and endemic imperfections of labor markets. Direct state regulation is insufficiently context‐sensitive and insufficiently dynamic in the face of technological and other developments. Collective bargaining gives workers only indirect and sometimes costly influence over their working conditions. And workplace democracy leaves workers vulnerable to collective action problems induced by competition between firms. I argue, however, that these strategies can be complemented in a promising way by 'syndicalist economic democracy': direct worker participation in the government of the economy, largely specific to particular occupations or economic sectors but above the level of the individual workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An overwhelming body of evidence supports a negative relationship between women's empowerment and fertility. In this paper, we evaluate whether this relationship holds in a setting with a high degree of son preference and limited access to abortion services by focusing on rural India. We exploit the reforms to the Hindu Succession Act that improved female empowerment by mandating equal inheritance rights for women to assess the reform's impact on women's fertility. Using NFHS‐3 data and a difference‐in‐differences estimation, our results show that women who benefitted from the reform had more children than their counterparts. We attribute this increase in fertility to women's ability to use the stopping rule to achieve son preference. Finally, women impacted by the reform had a higher proportion of sons for a given family size, indicating stronger inherent son preference among treated women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the welfare impact of expanding the negotiation agenda of an international agreement between asymmetric countries (e.g., including specific negotiations over environmental regulations or labor standards in a conventional trade agreement) and demonstrates why such proposed expansions are contentious. A main result is that agenda expansions that provide more bargaining flexibility will increase the efficiency of the agreement but can result in a less equitable agreement that hurts the country that is at a bargaining disadvantage. Similarly, we demonstrate that decreases in bargaining game asymmetry can also make the disadvantaged country worse‐off even as it increases global welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While focusing on residual control rights, the property rights theory of the firm overlooks that the legal protection of each party's input shapes its ex post bargaining power. To evaluate this issue, we assume that the property rights on the inputs are selected by a legislator to maximize full investment and, conditional on this goal being reached, minimize inefficient deviations to intermediate investment profiles. Our model delivers three key novel implications. First, the strength of a party's property rights is related negatively to the strength of its residual control rights and determines entirely its ex ante incentives to invest. Second, the legislator tends to protect a firm less when its default payoff under its preferred ownership structure is larger and when its contribution to the relationship is the greatest. Finally, the extent of integration falls weakly with the default payoffs and displays an inverted U‐shaped link with the intensity of the downstream firm's investment activity. Crucially, these predictions are consistent with the relationships between proxies for the strength of the downstream firms' property rights and firms' presence in the value chain, and measures of asset specificity and R&D intensity for 119 countries observed over the 2006–18 period. This paper is part of the Economica 100 Series. Economica, the LSE "house journal" is now 100 years old. To commemorate this achievement, we are publishing 100 papers by former students, as well as current and former faculty. Carmine Guerriero completed his MSc at the LSE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To analyze the influence of network externality (NE) and bargaining power of retailers on the quality‐improvement decisions of the manufacturer, evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) of retailers' marketing objectives, and profits of retailers and the manufacturer, we developed an evolutionary game model of supply chain composed of a monopoly manufacturer and one population of retailers under NE. We found that the retailers' ESS is influenced by both NE and product quality‐improvement levels. With the improvement of NE or product quality‐improvement levels, the marketing objectives of retailers will experience three evolutionary stable states: profit maximization, coexistence of profit maximization and revenue maximization, and revenue maximization. The product quality‐improvement levels and retailers' profits do not necessarily improve with the increase of NE, which depend on the retailers' ESS, but the manufacturer's profits always benefit from NE. When retailers' bargaining power reaches a certain level, it can influence the ESS of retailers' marketing objectives. Interestingly, the retailers' bargaining power does not necessarily enhance their own profits; it is related to the ESS of retailers' marketing objectives but consistently reduces the manufacturer's profits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agri‐food cooperatives allow farmers to improve their competitiveness and bargaining power. However, the specificities of their organizational form, in which owners are decision makers, suppliers, and clients, open the door to conflicts of interest. Members' opportunism comes in the aftermath of this and adversely affects cooperatives' performance. Hence, knowing the antecedents of these undesirable opportunistic behaviors is an important management concern. This study analyzes the factors that promote cooperative members opportunism by exploring the differences between memberships of first‐tier cooperatives and second‐tier cooperatives. To this end, an ordinary least squares linear regression model with interaction terms was estimated. The results show that in the case of first‐tier cooperatives, environmental uncertainty, members' heterogeneity, and the cooperative's market orientation increase members' opportunism, while members' dependence on the cooperative, long‐term orientation of the relationship, and members' market orientation reduce it. For second‐tier cooperatives, our results reveal that cooperative market orientation increases members' opportunism, while members' market orientation reduces it. Moreover, we find that members' dependence on cooperatives, long‐term orientation, and environmental uncertainty have different effects on opportunism in each type of membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the determinants of wealth inequality, measured as the share of wealth owned by the top 1 percent wealthiest individuals. We find that labor's bargaining power is a significant and important determinant of top wealth shares. Using a semi‐structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model for the period 1970–2019, we estimate that shocks to labor's bargaining power explain 32 percent, 8 percent and 32 percent of the variation around the long‐term trend in wealth inequality in the UK, USA and France, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study a novel database of intellectual property (IP) licensing agreements sourced from filings made by publicly listed corporations, a large fraction of which firms (initially) disclose with redacted terms. In contrast to the benchmark that IP quality alone determines the pricing of IP, we argue that bargaining power between licensing counterparties plays a critical role in explaining several patterns in observed royalty rates. Licensors with differentiated technology and high market power charge higher royalty rates, while larger‐than‐rival licensees pay lower royalty rates. Licensors command premium royalty rates for contract exclusivity, especially in competitive markets. Finally, we employ this framework and setting to understand the pricing implications of nondisclosure: licensors redact payment terms when they transact at lower royalty rates, consistent with preserving bargaining power for future negotiations. Our findings offer a new explanation for innovator secrecy and have several practical takeaways for transfer pricing and patent litigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the implications of different contractual forms in a market with an incumbent upstream monopolist and free downstream entry. We show that traditional conclusions regarding the desirability of linear contracts radically change when entry in the downstream market is endogenous rather than exogenous. By triggering more entry than two‐part tariffs, wholesale price contracts can generate higher aggregate output, consumer surplus, and welfare. In light of this, the upstream monopolist may prefer to trade with wholesale price contracts as well as to give up part of its bargaining power when it is high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a framework where entrants must make sunk investment decisions with uncertain returns and have private demand information, we show that the relationship between innovation and exit value is non‐monotone and features an inverted U‐shaped pattern. Consumer surplus is maximised at the lowest exit value that incentivises the investment. These insights are applied to optimal merger policy. An entrant is more willing to innovate to be acquired afterwards, even if it has no bargaining power. This innovation‐for‐buyout effect implies that an entrant is less likely to leave the market under a lenient than a strict merger policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents new quantitative evidence of the sources of efficiency benefits from deregulation. We estimate the heterogeneous effects of plant divestitures on fuel procurement costs during the restructuring of the U.S. electricity industry. Guided by economic theory, we focus on three mechanisms and find that restructuring reduced fuel procurement costs for firms that (i) were not subject to earlier incentive‐regulation programs, (ii) had relatively strong bargaining power as coal purchasers after restructuring, and (iii) were locked in with disadvantaged coal contracts prior to restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine when the owners negotiate union bargaining and delegate production to managers, showing that an increasing degree of cross ownership exacerbates the conflicting interests between the owners and consumers. If the bargaining power of the union is weak, the owners will choose to bargain with the union and delegate to managers simultaneously. Otherwise, the owners will bargain with the union first and then set delegate incentives to managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the role of bargaining as a barrier to migration in the equilibrium of a two‐region world with imperfectly competitive labour markets. Equilibrium migration is jointly determined by relative labour market bargaining powers, productivity and costs of migration. If migrants complement host factors, higher migration generally benefits both source and host economies. An enhancement of the bargaining power of typically weak migrant workers in host regions improves welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distinctive features of the on‐demand work platforms made it theoretically improbable for workers to organize and for collective forms of protest to emerge. Their business model and work arrangements spatially isolate and socially individualize workers, subjectivizing them as competing micro‐enterprises rather than co‐workers. However, faced with the flood of the platforms on a global scale, collective actions of platform workers surged like a backwash, especially in the ride‐hailing and food delivery sectors, during the last decade. Observers witnessed a great variety in the combination of actors involved and repertoire of actions mobilized worldwide. Despite this diversity, some common global trends can be sketched out. Through a literature review focused on Europe, Latin America, North America and Asia, this article shows that workers struggle globally to build a collective actor, through an original combination of new and old forms of protest. They ought to compensate for their weak marketplace bargaining power by leveraging their discursive, associational, coalitional and workplace bargaining powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The multi‐microgrids operation can greatly improve the proportion of renewable energy integration and power reliability of rural microgrids through energy trading between adjacent microgrids. Therefore, this paper proposes an optimization method for the low‐carbon economic operation of rural microgrids which contain wind power, photovoltaic, biogas, and other common rural renewable energy sources. Using the asymmetric Nash bargaining model which can form the non‐linear energy mapping function to quantify the bargaining power of each microgrid to establish the multi‐microgrids energy trading model, and the non‐convex trading optimization problem is equivalently transformed into two convex optimization subproblems, subproblem 1 is microgrids alliance costs containing the emission costs, and subproblem 2 is cooperative benefits distribution. Then, the accelerated Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) method is used to solve subproblem 1 and subproblem 2, respectively, and the privacy of transaction information is also protected. The results show that: compared with the single‐microgrid operation, the combined operation of rural multi‐microgrids with biogas can greatly improve the renewable energy consumption rate, reduce carbon emission, and improve the profit income of the alliance and each microgrid. Meanwhile, the accelerated ADMM algorithm used can greatly improve the solution speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores whether customers' stock price crash risk affects their suppliers' investment efficiency. Using a supply‐chain sample of Chinese A‐share listed firms from 2009 to 2020, we find that suppliers' investment inefficiency is positively associated with their customers' stock price crash risk. Moreover, the impact of customers' stock price crash risk is more pronounced for suppliers with lower investment efficiency, weaker bargaining power, weaker innovation capability, and fewer investment opportunities. Our results suggest that information asymmetry along supply chains deteriorates the investment decision making of upstream firms from the perspective of capital market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how credit information sharing affects corporate trade credit financing. Utilising the difference‐in‐differences method, we find a significant reduction in trade credit for infra‐marginal bank borrowers following the introduction of the Chinese National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (NECIPS). To reveal the mechanisms underlying the reduction in trade credit, we show that the NECIPS alleviates information asymmetry and increases formal finance access. This financing substitution effect is magnified by weak bargaining power in product markets. Our findings complement the literature on the determinants of trade credit and underscore the indispensable role of the public credit registry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although existing studies have suggested that men's leave‐taking positively affects children's development and their involvement in childcare and household chores in the long run, the underlying mechanism remains unclear. To shed light on this ambiguity, this study develops a dynamic collective household model and analyses household decisions on parental leave‐sharing between spouses, resource allocation, home production, and labour supply. We demonstrate that gender equality in bargaining positions within families before leave‐taking is crucial in explaining the positive impacts of men's leave‐taking. Specifically, if women's intrahousehold bargaining power before taking parental leave is sufficiently low, their husbands are unlikely to take leave, and women's positions may deteriorate after leave. Consequently, households may allocate fewer resources to children, and men may not actively participate in childcare and household chores. Our model suggests that implementing parental leave policies for both genders may not be sufficient; simultaneous measures to increase women's bargaining power are necessary to encourage men to take parental leave and maximize the policies' benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For effective supply chain management, firms should focus on the relationship with their immediate stakeholders in the supply chain, namely, suppliers (upstream) and customers (downstream). This study investigates the impact of customer and supplier concentration as well as business strategy on sustainable financial growth, using financial data of 2021 Chinese non‐financial firms listed from 2006 to 2020. Additionally, it explores the moderating effect of business strategy on the relationship between customer and supplier concentration and sustainable financial growth. We find that higher customer and supplier concentration weakens the bargaining power of Chinese firms, which reduces their financial growth. However, an appropriate business strategy can help such firms achieve sustainable financial growth. We find that an aggressive business strategy moderates the negative impact of supplier concentration, while a defensive business strategy moderates the negative impact of customer concentration on financial growth. Finally, our results for the direct impact of customer and supplier concentration as well as business strategy hold for state‐owned and non‐state‐owned firms. However, we find differences regarding the moderating impact of business strategy between state‐owned and non‐state‐owned firms. Our results are robust to time and industry fixed effects, alternate proxies of financial growth and regression techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I consider an environment in which an entrepreneur generates information about the quality of his project prior to contracting with an investor. The investor faces a moral‐hazard problem since the entrepreneur may divert the funding for private consumption. I find that the efficient amount of information is generated if and only if the bargaining power of the entrepreneur is high enough. I interpret this result in terms of investors' tightness, competitiveness, and generosity measures. I also show that the investor prefers not to have all the bargaining power when the project costs are high enough. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between power, governance and value creation/capture is a central concern in global value chain (GVC) research. In the context of calls to develop a more expansive view of power in GVCs, we argue for retaining a focus on bargaining power, but shifting the conceptualization of bargaining power from the dyad to the network. We advance two arguments. First, we elaborate an exchange theoretic model in which skew of value capture is a function of the degree of power asymmetry inherent in the ratio of buyers to suppliers. Second, we explain how this model can be expanded to consider the role of external factors, such as the institutional and normative contexts in which exchange occurs. Rather than see these factors as contending forms of power, we treat them as forces that can affect value skew by either attenuating the bargaining power of lead firms or by moderating the distributional effects of power asymmetries between exchange partners. We conclude that an exchange theoretic approach to bargaining power in GVCs provides a parsimonious framework for explaining how inter‐firm governance shapes the distribution of value capture in global production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central concern over global value chains (GVCs) is whether the integration of national firms into GVCs exacerbates income inequality within countries. However, despite decades of research, the distributional consequences of GVCs remain unclear in the empirical literature. Drawing on panel data from 96 countries between 1980 and 2013, we examine the effects of GVC integration on market income inequality and whether national labour regulations moderate these effects. We find integration increases inequality in the global North and South. More importantly, we find labour regulations amplify the inequality effects of integration in Southern countries by expanding the size of the informal sector while suppressing these effects in Northern countries by promoting unionization. This suggests institutional power from national labour regulations may enhance the bargaining power of labour in the North through increasing collective resources while disempowering labour in the South through reinforcing labour market segmentation between formal and informal sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a rich sample of firms in 14 EU countries from 2000 to 2016, we confirm increases in productivity dispersion, wage dispersion and superstar firms. Beyond reaffirming an incomplete pass‐through from productivity to wages, we present novel empirical evidence of an even weaker pass‐through in industries dominated by superstar firms. This effect is observed in both the lower and upper parts of the productivity and wage distributions, and is stronger for tradable (versus non‐tradable) sectors and markets with low (versus high) collective bargaining power. These findings point to different mechanisms, consistent with theoretical work and various underlying structural changes in the economy. This paper is part of the Economica 100 Series. Economica, the LSE "house journal" is now 100 years old. To commemorate this achievement, we are publishing 100 papers by former students, as well as current and former faculty. Angelos Theodorakopoulos graduated from the LSE with an MSc in 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effect of unionization on US firms' accruals‐based earnings management and future employee compensation expenses by employing a research design that overcomes the inherent endogeneity issue of the relationship between unionization and earnings management. First, by comparing firms that just pass unionization by a small number of votes to those that just barely lose elections, the regression discontinuity design estimations document significant downward accruals earnings management for firms that barely pass unionization, compared to those that barely fail to pass unionization. Second, the association between unionization and earnings management is only significant in US states without right‐to‐work legislation, where unions are more powerful. These findings are consistent with recently unionized firms' incentives to report lower earnings in order to mitigate unions' demands for greater employee compensation. Further, for firms that barely pass unionization, we find that: (1) unions cannot fully "undo" the effects of earnings management, that is, downward managed earnings depress future compensation expenses, and (2) firms cannot fully "undo" the effects of unionization, that is, compensation expenses increase after unionization despite the downward earnings management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses cross‐country firm‐level data to investigate the influence of an open account on import decisions of firms facing financial constraints. In the open account method, buyers pay after shipment. We employ the sector‐location average as an instrumental variable to deal with the endogeneity problem. Our empirical results provide evidence that an open account positively affects import possibility, particularly, in large‐sized financially‐constrained firms. Our findings imply that large‐sized firms possess more bargaining power than small‐ and medium‐sized firms when negotiating payment terms in importing contracts, especially under severe financial constraints. These findings may suggest several vital implications for the import promotion policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the role that recourse plays in the commercial real estate loan contracts of the largest U.S. banks. We find that recourse is valued by lenders as a substitute for conventional equity. At origination, recourse loans have rate spreads that are about 20 basis points lower and loan‐to‐value ratios that are almost 3 percentage points higher than nonrecourse loans. Dynamically, recourse affects loan modification negotiations by providing additional bargaining power to the lender. Recourse loans were half as likely to receive accommodation during the COVID‐19 pandemic, and the modifications that did occur entailed a relatively smaller reduction in payments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effects of resale on bidders' entry decisions, social welfare, and seller's expected revenue in a second‐price auction with two‐dimensional private information on values and participation costs. We establish the existence of symmetric entry equilibrium and identify sufficient conditions under which the equilibrium is unique. We show that when resale is allowed, the low‐cost bidders become more aggressive on entry, while the high‐cost bidders are less likely to enter. Furthermore, our analysis also suggests resale allowance can increase the social welfare under a sufficient condition, which depends on the magnitude of bargaining power, and its effect on expected revenue is ambiguous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms with high selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) cost stickiness may maintain environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance, and customer firms that account for a large proportion of supplier firms' sales (main customers) have considerable bargaining power regarding sales terms. In this study, we examine the effect of SG&A cost stickiness of supplier firms on their ESG performance. We further examine the moderating effect of a customer's bargaining power on the relationship between cost stickiness and ESG performance. The findings reveal that supplier firms with high cost stickiness have higher ESG performance, whereas supplier firms with main customers have lower ESG investments. The influence of main customer firms mitigates the positive relationship between the SG&A cost stickiness and ESG investment of supplier firms. In additional analysis, we obtain consistent conclusions for large firms and firms with high production efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entitlements have become an increasing component of total government spending in the United States over the last six decades. Using a political‐economy model where parties bargain over taxes and entitlements, we argue that such dynamics can be explained by two factors: "unequal growth," where top earners became richer while the income of the bottom 50% stagnated, and budget rules that provide bargaining power to low‐income earners through a "status quo effect." In a model calibrated to the United States, we show that sustained bargaining power by a party representing the poor results in a rising share of entitlements consistent with the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider dynamic processes of coalition formation in which a principal bargains sequentially with a group of agents. This problem is at the core of a variety of applications in economics, including lobbying, exclusive deals, and acquisition of complementary patents. In this context, we study how the allocation of bargaining power between principal and agents affects efficiency and welfare. We show that when the principal's willingness to pay is large relative to agents' payoffs for completion, efficiency requires concentrating bargaining power in the principal. Strengthening the bargaining position of the agents increases inefficient delay and reduces agents' welfare. This occurs in spite of the lack of informational asymmetries or discriminatory offers. When this collective action problem is severe enough, agents are better off when bargaining power is concentrated in the principal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]