نقش اتحادیه ها در مدل رشد درونی همراه با سرمایه های انسانی

In this paper we study the relationship between unions and growth in a two-sector overlapping generations model with altruism and human capital. This relationship depends on the interaction between the technology in the sector that produces human capital and the degree of unionization of the economy. On the other hand, the operativeness of the bequest motive is increasing with the degree of unionization of the economy.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between growth and the role of unions in a two-sector overlapping generations (OLG) model with altruistic agents where endogenous growth is driven by the accumulation of human capital. We believe unionization can play an important role in the parent's decision of education of their offspring. As noted by di Nardo et al. (1996), de-unionization is one of the main factors in explaining the rise in wage inequality in the US from 1979 to 1988. In the case of men, the 39% decline in the unionization rate played a significant role in explaining the collapse of the middle of the distribution of wages. The contribution of de-unionization to the declining middle of the distribution of men's wages translates into a 14% change in the standard deviation of log wages, being the magnitude of this effect comparable to the results of both Card (1996) and Freeman (1993). The positive effect of parental income on school enrollment of their children is documented in many microeconometric studies and intercountry comparisons, as that of Mincer (1995). That is, the empirical evidence shows that de-unionization can lower the median wage, which in turn affects negatively parental income and thus school enrollment and investment in education. There are two branches of the literature to which our paper relates. The first one combines altruism and endogenous growth based on human capital accumulation as, for example, Glomm and Ravikumar (1992). These authors present an OLG model where each parent has a bequest motive and values the quality of education passed on to the offspring. Eckstein and Zilcha (1994) develop a model where the human capital of the children is determined by the percentage of the leisure time that parents devote to their offspring. Zhang (1996) emphasizes the importance of the units of goods invested by the parent, the units of the parent's time spent, and the human capital of the parent on the human capital of the child. The second branch of the literature addresses specifically the problem of unemployment in the context of growth models in unionized economies, but without taking altruism into account.1,2Bean and Pissarides (1993) develop a search model where matching frictions create unemployment. They find out that the relationship between growth and the relative bargaining power of workers is ambiguous, being the reason that the shift in income from entrepreneurs to workers could be compensated by an increase in savings, and therefore in the growth rate. The same result is achieved by de la Croix and Licandro (1995) in a model with irreversible decisions; they conclude that a raise in union power produces crowding-out of physical capital, but at the same time it raises the firm's value, and the physical capital as well. This paper departs from these two approaches in the following sense. We develop a two-sector OLG model with intergenerational altruism and unions, where endogenous growth is generated by human capital accumulation in an educational sector. A crucial feature of the two-sector economy the existence of heterogeneous agents, since working in different sectors may imply earning a different wage.3 The presence of altruism, in the sense that parents of a given generation will get utility from the utility of their offspring as the dynastic utility in Barro (1974), allows us to shed light on the role of unions on the operativeness of the bequest motive.4 This framework allows two possible situations: in the first one, the production of human capital is given by a linear technology on human capital as in Uzawa (1965) or Lucas (1988) and thus, there is no physical capital in the educational sector. For this reason, we can analyze two economies: in the first one, the walrasian case, we face a competitive economy without unions, whereas in the second one there are unions in the sector that produces consumption goods. We find that the rate of growth is higher in the unionized economy than in the walrasian one, and this holds no matter the operativeness of the bequest motive. Higher wages in the unionized sector have two effects: to increase the demand for physical capital and to decrease the quantity of labor hired in this sector. Unemployed labor in the consumption goods sector causes wages to decrease in the educational sector and thus higher returns from human capital investment. The amount of labor hired increases implying a higher production of human capital and, hence, a higher rate of growth. It is also worth to emphasize that the level of altruism that makes the physical bequest motive to be or not operative is bigger in the walrasian economy than in the unionized economy. This means that when there are unions parents are more willing to leave physical bequests and then compensate for the different wages the offspring may earn. In contrast with the first situation, in the second one physical capital enters the production function for human capital accumulation as an input. This allows four possible cases: in the first one, the walrasian case, we face a competitive economy without unions, very much in contrast with the last one, where we find unions in each sector; there are two other similar, intermediate cases, with unions in one sector and none in the other (partially unionized economies). We show that the rate of growth is higher in the walrasian case than in the completely unionized economy when bequests are operative. The reason is that higher wages in both sectors in the fully unionized economy cause the total demand for labor to decrease, creating unemployment. The resulting fall in production more than offsets the increase in wages. However, the same conclusion might be reversed comparing the walrasian case to the partially unionized economies, that is, a partially unionized economy may grow faster than a walrasian economy, irrespectively of the operativeness of the bequest motive. Higher wages in the unionized sector cause the demand for labor to decrease, but there is no unemployment because lower wages in the non-unionized sector increase the demand for labor. The overall effect on the rate of growth is then ambiguous. In the context of the second situation, the level of altruism that makes the physical bequest motive to be or not operative is decreasing with the unionization degree of the economy, being zero in the completely unionized economy, which means that when there are unions in both sectors, individuals always give bequests to their offsprings. Discriminating among the possible cases is a rather difficult, if not impossible, task. While several studies confirm the importance of physical bequests in the economy (see Kotlikoff and Summers, 1981 and Kotlikoff and Summers, 1986; McGarry and Schoeni, 1995), the work in Mulligan and Sala-i-Martin (1993) provides support for using physical capital as a productive input in the educational sector, even though this sector can be considered to be relatively more intensive in human capital. Concerning the degree of unionization of the economy, Flanagan (1999) remarks the existence of non-unionized sectors, which would constitute an argument for the case of partially unionized economies. But when we focus on the educational sector, the question becomes a more controversial and a particularized country study case. Thus, although unionization seems higher in the educational sector, in US, teachers' salaries in private schools equaled on average 64% of teachers' salaries in public education in 1993–1994 (see Cohen-Zada and Justman, 2000); Zweimüller and Barth (1994) find that the research and educational sector pay below average; Marquette (1996) shows that there are no significant differences between unionized and non-unionized faculty; and Kesselring (1991) shows that unionized faculty earn lower salaries. Another important point is that education is usually publicly provided. Once again each country becomes a particularized case (see James, 1993). Thus, while there exists a large share of private schooling in Netherlands (see Gradstein and Justman, 1999), teachers working in private or parochial school in US was 14% in 1986 (see Stinebrickner, 1998). In the next section we present the basic model. Linear technology in the educational sector is discussed in Section 3, whereas Section 4 studies the introduction of physical capital in this sector. Section 5 concludes. All proofs can be found in the Appendix A.

In this paper we study the relationship between growth and the role of unions in a two-sector OLG model with altruistic agents where endogenous growth is generated by human capital accumulation in the educational sector. This framework allows two possible situations: in the first one, the production of human capital is given by a linear technology on human capital and thus, there is no physical capital in the educational sector. For this reason, we can analyze two economies: in the first one, the walrasian case, we face a competitive economy without unions, whereas in the second one there are unions in the sector that produces consumption goods. We find that the rate of growth is higher in the unionized economy than in the walrasian one, and this holds no matter the operativeness of the bequest motive. It is also worth to emphasize that the level of altruism that makes the physical bequest motive to be or not operative is bigger in the walrasian economy than in the unionized economy. This means that when there are unions parents are more willing to leave physical bequests and then compensate for the different wages the offspring may earn. In contrast with the first situation, in the second one physical capital enters the production function for human capital accumulation as an input. This allows four possible cases: in the first one, the walrasian case, we face a competitive economy without unions, very much in contrast with the last one, where we find unions in each sector; there are two other similar, intermediate cases, with unions in one sector and none in the other (partially unionized economies). We show that the rate of growth is higher in the walrasian case than in the completely unionized economy when bequests are operative. However, the same conclusion might be reversed comparing the walrasian case to the partially unionized economies, that is, a partially unionized economy may grow faster than a walrasian economy, irrespectively of the operativeness of the bequest motive. In this context, the level of altruism that makes the physical bequest motive to be operative or not is decreasing with the unionization degree of the economy, being zero in the completely unionized economy, which means that when there are unions in both sectors, individuals always give bequests to their offsprings.