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Micro-evidence on product and labor market regime differences between Chile and France

Sabien Dobbelaere (Department of Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands AND Tinbergen Institute, Amsterdam, Netherlands AND IZA, Bonn, Germany)
Rodolfo Lauterbach (National Innovation Council for Development (CNID), Santiago, Chile AND Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands)
Jacques Mairesse (CREST (ParisTech-ENSAE), Paris, France AND Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands AND NBER, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States)

International Journal of Manpower

ISSN: 0143-7720

Article publication date: 3 May 2016

241

Abstract

Purpose

Institutions, social norms and the nature of industrial relations vary greatly between Latin American and Western European countries. Such institutional and organizational differences might shape firms’ operational environment in general and the type of competition in product and labor markets in particular. The purpose of this paper is to identify and quantify industry differences in product and labor market imperfections in Chile and France.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors rely on two extensions of Hall’s econometric framework for estimating price-cost margins by nesting three labor market settings (LMS) (perfect competition (PC) or right-to-manage bargaining, efficient bargaining (EB) and monopsony). Using an unbalanced panel of 1,737 firms over the period 1996-2003 in Chile and 14,270 firms over the period 1994-2001 in France, the authors first classify 20 comparable manufacturing industries in six distinct regimes that differ in the type of competition prevailing in product and labor markets. The authors then investigate industry differences in the estimated product and labor market imperfection parameters.

Findings

Consistent with differences in institutions and in the industrial relations system in the two countries, the authors find regime differences across the two countries and cross-country differences in the levels of product and labor market imperfection parameters within regimes.

Originality/value

This study is the first to compare the type and the degree of industry-level product and labor market imperfections inferred from consistent estimation of firm-level production functions in a Latin American and a Western European country. Using firm-level output price indices, the microeconomic production function estimates for Chile are not subject to the omitted output price bias, as is often a major drawback in microeconometric studies of firm behavior.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

JEL Classification — C23, D21, J51, L13

The authors are grateful to the editor and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. The analysis using the French firm-level data was conducted at “Centre de Recherche en Économie et Statistique” (CREST). Lauterbach acknowledges financial support from the Millennium Science Initiative (Project NS 100017 “Centro Intelis”) and CONICYT (Project PAI 781204033).

Citation

Dobbelaere, S., Lauterbach, R. and Mairesse, J. (2016), "Micro-evidence on product and labor market regime differences between Chile and France", International Journal of Manpower, Vol. 37 No. 2, pp. 229-252. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-12-2014-0264

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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