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In a social custom model of union membership with wage bargaining, higher levels of company taxes lower wages while having uncertain employment effects. A higher marginal income tax rate increases employment. Changes solely in the level of income taxation, retaining marginal rates, have ambiguous wage and employment consequences. Endogenising union membership therefore does not alter the effects of tax changes in comparison to a right-to-manage model with exogenously fixed level of density.

Ogawa et al. (2006) analyze capital tax competition in a fixed-wage approach and show that the original results of Zodrow and Mieszkowski (1986) are not preserved in the presence of unemployment. In the present paper we challenge this view and investigate capital tax competition for some arbitrary institutional setting of the labor market. We find that if the labor market is characterized by some efficient bargaining solution, the results of Zodrow and Mieszkowski (1986) are preserved.

Common wisdom holds that the introduction of a non-binding minimum wage is irrelevant for actual wages and employment. Empirical and experimental research, however, has shown that the introduction of a minimum wage can raise even those wages that were already above the new minimum wage. In this paper, we analyze how these findings can be explained by theoretical wage bargaining models between unions and firms. While the Nash bargaining solution is unaffected by minimum wages below initially bargained wages, we show that such minimum wages can drive up wages - and be harmful to employment - when bargaining follows the Kalai-Smorodinsky solution.