{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.022919179734620022, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0024125452352231603, 'mean_word_length': 4.882978723404255, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Collective bargaining and wage dispersion

The level at which collective contracts are negotiated and formally signed is crucial in determining both the overall level and the dispersion of wages. In this paper we distinguish between single-employer bargaining (SEB) and multi-employer bargaining (MEB), and we analyse the way in which they interact to study the effects on wage dispersion. An important distinction is made between two different situations: that in which bargaining is multi-level in the sense that the same group of workers can be covered by SEB and MEB at the same time, and that in which the two type of contracts are mutually exclusive, i.e. when each group of workers is covered either by MEB or by SEB. These different institutional settings allow us to analyse the impact of SEB on wage inequality conditional on other factors, including interactions of bargaining institutions with each other. The aim of this paper is to gain additional empirical evidence in order to further our understanding of the impact of the type of bargaining on wage dispersion. The study is carried out using the European Survey of Earning Structure (ESES), which is a large dataset containing detailed, matched employer-employee information for the year 1995. The countries analysed are Italy, Belgium, Spain and UK. The empirical results show that where bargaining is multi-level (Italy and Belgium), in general wage dispersion is not higher for workers covered by SEB than for those covered only by MEB. However, even when MEB and SEB are mutually exclusive (Spain and UK), only in the UK MEB contributes significantly to narrowing the wage distribution.