IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/fep/journl/v13y2000i2p89-115.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Wage formation by majority voting and the incentive effects of pensions and taxation

Author

Listed:
  • Jukka Lassila

    (The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy, Finland)

Abstract

We study median voter wage-setting and its dependence on pensions and taxation in a centralized monopoly union framework using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model with overlapping generations structure. We show that the higher is the earnings-related PAYG pension benefit level, the lower is the wage the voter chooses, for two reasons. Firstly, if the voter claims high current wages his lifetime wage income falls, which will lead to lower pensions, and the advantages of lower pension contributions go to future working generations. Secondly, the median voter has to pay higher contributions both because the current wage bill falls and because current pensions may increase due to indexation. Both these generational effects lead the median voter to choose lower wages, which leads to higher employment. When we compare median voter wage setting with labour markets where wages adjust to equate supply and demand, the difference is bigger when the incentives to work are stronger in the market equilibrium, and gets smaller when the incentives are weaker. When e.g. the pension benefits and the corresponding payroll tax are increased, the voting equilibrium wage level approaches the market equilibrium wage. Similar results are obtained with respect to labour and consumption taxes.

Suggested Citation

  • Jukka Lassila, 2000. "Wage formation by majority voting and the incentive effects of pensions and taxation," Finnish Economic Papers, Finnish Economic Association, vol. 13(2), pages 89-115, Autumn.
    • Handle: RePEc:fep:journl:v:13:y:2000:i:2:p:89-115
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.taloustieteellinenyhdistys.fi/images/stories/fep/f2000_2b.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Paul A. Samuelson, 1958. "An Exact Consumption-Loan Model of Interest with or without the Social Contrivance of Money," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 66(6), pages 467-467.
    2. Jensen, Svend Erik Hougaard & Bo Nielsen, Soren & Pedersen, Lars Haagen & Sorensen, Peter Birch, 1996. "Tax policy, housing and the labour market: An intertemporal simulation approach," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 13(3), pages 355-382, July.
    3. Costas Azariadis & Vincenzo Galasso, 1996. "Discretion, rules and volatility," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 78(May), pages 65-74.
    4. Atkinson, A B & Sandmo, A, 1980. "Welfare Implications of the Taxation of Savings," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 90(359), pages 529-549, September.
    5. Broer, D. P. & Westerhout, E. W. M. T., 1993. "Taxation in an intertemporal general equilibrium model of a small open economy," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 10(1), pages 64-80, January.
    6. Douglas H. Blair & David L. Crawford, 1984. "Labor Union Objectives and Collective Bargaining," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 99(3), pages 547-566.
    7. Blanchard, Olivier Jean & Kiyotaki, Nobuhiro, 1987. "Monopolistic Competition and the Effects of Aggregate Demand," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 77(4), pages 647-666, September.
    8. Broer, D. Peter & Lassila, Jukka, . "Pension Policies and Public Debt in Dynamic CGE Models," ETLA A, The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy, number 23, June.
    9. Martin Feldstein, 1998. "Privatizing Social Security," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number feld98-1.
    10. Koskela, Erkki & Schob, Ronnie, 1999. "Does the composition of wage and payroll taxes matter under Nash bargaining?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 64(3), pages 343-349, September.
    11. Valkonen, Tarmo, 1995. "Corporate and Capital Income Tax Reform in a Numerical Overlapping Generations Model: The Case of Finland," Discussion Papers 543, The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy.
    12. Koskela, Erkki & Vilmunen, Jouko, 1996. "Tax progression is good for employment in popular models of trade union behaviour," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 3(1), pages 65-80, August.
    13. Kenneth R. Beauchemin, 1998. "Intergenerational Politics, Fiscal Policy and Productivity," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 1(4), pages 835-858, October.
    14. Holm, Pasi & Honkapohja, Seppo & Koskela, Erkki, 1994. "A monopoly-union model of wage determination with capital and taxes: An empirical application to the Finnish manufacturing," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 38(2), pages 285-303, February.
    15. Andrew Oswald & Ian Walker, 1993. "Labour supply, contract theory and unions," IFS Working Papers W93/21, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    16. repec:bla:ecorec:v:66:y:1990:i:193:p:81-92 is not listed on IDEAS
    17. Lassila, Jukka & Valkonen, Tarmo, 1995. "Policy Credibility in Numerical Overlapping Generations Models," Discussion Papers 545, The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy.
    18. Atkinson, A. B. & Stiglitz, J. E., 1976. "The design of tax structure: Direct versus indirect taxation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 6(1-2), pages 55-75.
    19. repec:bla:scandj:v:92:y:1990:i:1:p:81-98 is not listed on IDEAS
    20. Keuschnigg, Christian & Kohler, Wilhelm, 1994. "Modeling Intertemporal General Equilibrium: An Application to Austrian Commercial Policy," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 19(1), pages 131-164.
    21. Renström, Thomas I. & Roszbach, Kasper, 1995. "Trade unions, employee share ownership and wage setting: A supply-side approach to the share economy," SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 65, Stockholm School of Economics.
    22. Alison Booth, 2012. "The Economic Behavior of Trade Unions," CEPR Discussion Papers 670, Centre for Economic Policy Research, Research School of Economics, Australian National University.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jukka Lassila & Tarmo Valkonen, 2001. "Pension Prefunding, Ageing, and Demographic Uncertainty," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 8(4), pages 573-593, August.
    2. Lassila, Jukka & Valkonen, Tarmo, 2001. "Ageing, Demographic Risks, and Pension Reform," Discussion Papers 765, The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Lassila, Jukka, . "Essays on Taxes and Wage Formation," ETLA A, The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy, number 32, June.
    2. Lassila, Jukka, 2002. "Wage Formation by Majority Voting and the Incentive Effects of Pensions and Taxation," Discussion Papers 636, The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy.
    3. Hirte, Georg, 2001. "Pension Policies for an Aging Society," Beiträge zur Finanzwissenschaft, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, edition 1, volume 14, number urn:isbn:9783161475399, September.
    4. Daniel Cardona & Fernando Sánchez-Losada, 2004. "The Unemployment Benefit System: a Redistributive or an Insurance Institution?," DEA Working Papers 8, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Departament d'Economía Aplicada.
    5. Stiglitz, Joseph E., 2018. "Pareto efficient taxation and expenditures: Pre- and re-distribution," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 162(C), pages 101-119.
    6. Pia Rattenhuber, 2012. "Marginal Taxes: A Good or a Bad for Wages?: The Incidence of the Structure of Income and Labor Taxes on Wages," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 1193, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    7. Torben M. Andersen, 2020. "Taxation of capital income in overlapping generations economies," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 22(5), pages 1245-1261, September.
    8. Fehr, Hans, 1999. "Welfare Effects of Dynamic Tax Reforms," Beiträge zur Finanzwissenschaft, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, edition 1, volume 5, number urn:isbn:9783161470165, September.
    9. Valkonen, Tarmo, 2000. "Shifting the tax burden from labour to capital in general equilibrium," Discussion Papers 702, The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy.
    10. Axel Börsch‐Supan & Alexander Ludwig & Joachim Winter, 2006. "Ageing, Pension Reform and Capital Flows: A Multi‐Country Simulation Model," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 73(292), pages 625-658, November.
    11. Firouz Gahvari & Luca Micheletto, 2019. "Heterogeneity, monetary policy, Mirrleesian taxes, and the Friedman rule," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 67(4), pages 983-1018, June.
    12. repec:dgr:rugccs:200409 is not listed on IDEAS
    13. Erkki Koskela & Ronnie Schöb, 2012. "Tax Progression under Collective Wage Bargaining and Individual Effort Determination," Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 51(3), pages 749-771, July.
    14. Spencer Bastani & Sören Blomquist & Luca Micheletto, 2013. "The Welfare Gains Of Age‐Related Optimal Income Taxation," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 54, pages 1219-1249, November.
    15. Blackorby, Charles & Brett, Craig, 2004. "Capital Taxation In A Simple Finite-Horizon Olg Model," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 709, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    16. Carlos Garriga, 2019. "Optimal Fiscal Policy in Overlapping Generations Models," Public Finance Review, , vol. 47(1), pages 3-31, January.
    17. Martin Weiss, 2009. "Higher Tax Rates on Labor? Evidence from German Panel Data," FinanzArchiv: Public Finance Analysis, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 65(1), pages 73-92, March.
    18. José Ramón García & José Vicente Ríos, 2004. "Effects Of Tax Reforms In A Shirking Model With Union Bargaining," Working Papers. Serie AD 2004-42, Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie).
    19. Saez, Emmanuel & Stantcheva, Stefanie, 2018. "A simpler theory of optimal capital taxation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 162(C), pages 120-142.
    20. Andrew Mason & Ronald Lee & An-Chi Tung & Mun-Sim Lai & Tim Miller, 2009. "Population Aging and Intergenerational Transfers: Introducing Age into National Accounts," NBER Chapters, in: Developments in the Economics of Aging, pages 89-122, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    21. Auerbach, Alan J. & Hines, James Jr., 2002. "Taxation and economic efficiency," Handbook of Public Economics, in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 21, pages 1347-1421, Elsevier.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J51 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining - - - Trade Unions: Objectives, Structure, and Effects
    • H55 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Social Security and Public Pensions
    • D58 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - Computable and Other Applied General Equilibrium Models

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fep:journl:v:13:y:2000:i:2:p:89-115. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Editorial Secretary (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/talouea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.