Industry wage premia and collective bargaining revisited: evidence from Spain

Abstract

This study examines the general influence of collective bargaining on inter-industry wage differentials drawing on an unique data set on industry minimum wages for Spain. Our novel evidence confirms the untested hypothesis that inter-industry wage premia are driven by industry minimum wages in corporatist countries with centralized collective bargaining systems, but suggests that a compressed inter-industry wage structure needs not to be a feature of such systems.

Notes

¹ Percentage differentials are calculated as 100 × (e  − 1), where is the estimated coefficient for the relevant industry.

² Quantile regression results reveal that very significant inter-industry wage differentials exist as well throughout the wage structure spectrum in both actual and minimum wages and also that their patterns are highly similar in the 10th and 90th percentiles. Detailed results on this concern are not reported due to space restrictions but are available from the authors on request.