Jose Enrique Galdon-Sanchez

Competitive Pressure and Labor Productivity: World Iron-Ore Markets in the 1980's

Does the extent of competitive pressure industries face influence their productivity? We study a natural experiment conducted in the iron ore industry as a result of the collapse in world steel production in the early 1980s. For iron ore producers, whose only market is the steel industry, this collapse was an exogenous shock. The drop in steel production differed dramatically by region: it fell by about a third in the Atlantic Basin but only very little in the Pacific Basin. Given that the cost of transporting iron ore is very high relative to its mine value, Atlantic iron ore producers faced a much greater increase in competitive pressure than did Pacific iron ore producers. In response to the crisis, most Atlantic iron ore producers doubled their labor productivity; Pacific iron ore producers experienced few productivity gains. ; This article originally appeared in the American Economic Review. (c) American Economic Association. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Dismissal conflicts and unemployment

Firing costs are often blamed for unemployment. In this paper, we investigate this widespread belief theoretically. Firing costs are introduced in a efficiency wage model to capture their effects on employment through wages. In addition, dismissal conflicts are modelled explicitly and their cost is derived. These two elements are included and linked. Modelling firing costs in a context where worker effort is not perfectly observable implies that a double moral hazard problem could arise. Whenever firms face a redundancy, they tend to use disciplinary dismissals in order to avoid paying firing costs. Similarly, workers will then tend to deny any disciplinary case to get a party will be imperfect given the information problem. This implies that disciplinary dismissals will not be costless. Firing costs in turn will have a negative effect on aggregate employment because they modify the rent that has to be paid to workers to prevent shirking. We also find that the solution to the problem does not necessarily imply the elimination of firing costs.

Exchange Rate Volatility and Economic Performance in Peru: A Firm Level Analysis

This paper analyzes the impact of the exchange rate volatility on the performance of the Peruvian economy using financial information from 163 non-financial listed firms. We find evidence that, for firms holding dollar-denominated debt, investment decisions are negatively affected by real exchange rate depreciation. The reasons behind this result are: (i) the high degree of liability dollarization and currency mismatch that create the conditions for a balance sheet effect and a financial stress in the aftermath of a currency depreciation, (ii) the strong bank-lending channel that follows and reinforces the balance sheet effect, (iii) the domestic demand shrinkage that affects severely the firms sales, and (iv) the relatively small and poorly diversified export sector.

Exchange Rate and Inflation Dynamics in Dollarized Economies

In this paper we build a model of a dollarized economy with imperfect financial markets to analyze and qualify the common view that countries with higher dollarization exhibit higher pass-through. We show that the classic inflationary effects of a real depreciation -higher internal demand and imported inflation- can be offset or diminished in a dollarized economy by higher financial costs and a balance-sheet effect. Thus, pass-through coefficients could be smaller or even negative in economies with a high degree of dollarization. We test the implications of the model using a panel of a hundred-plus countries with differing degrees of dollarization. The results confirm that pass-through coefficients are higher in more dollarized economies, but they also show that large depreciations tend to generate a negative impact on the pass-through coefficient, this impact being higher the higher the level of dollarization of the economy. Additionally, the exchange rate regime is shown to matter, in that countries with fixed exchange rates suffer larger balance-sheet effects of depreciations.

Is Seniority-Based Pay Used as a Motivation Device? Evidence from Plant Level Data

In this paper we use data from industrial plants to investigate if seniority-based pay is used as a motivational device for production workers. Alternatively, seniority-based pay could simply be a wage setting rule not necessarily related to the provision of incentives. Unlike previous papers, we use a direct measure of seniority-based pay as well as measures of monitoring devices and piece-rates. We find that firms that offer seniority-based pay are less likely to offer explicit incentives. They are also less likely to invest in monitoring devices. We also find that firms that offer seniority-based pay are more likely to engage in other human resource management policies that result in long employment relationships. Overall these results suggest that seniority-based pay is indeed used as a motivation device.

Multinational companies and high-performance work practices in the Spanish manufacturing industry

In this paper we use data from industrial plants to establish whether there are differences in the adoption of high-performance work practices (HPWPs) between subsidiaries of multinational firms and indigenous firms. We use a unique data set that consists of a sample of manufacturing establishments located in Spain. We consider 14 HPWPs and find that multinational firms adopt HPWPs more intensively than non-multinationals. We also find that the country of origin of the multinational firm is not so important.

Understanding the Relationship between Financial Development and Monetary Policy

In this paper we summarize the results of a broad exploratory empirical analysis where we relate the level of financial development with the effectiveness of monetary policy. The analysis is based on a panel of countries for which we calculate measures both of financial development and of monetary policy effectiveness. We look for statistically significant relationships between the indicators of financial development, the effectiveness coefficients, and other macroeconomic characteristics by estimating dynamic panels and performing a cluster analysis. We present our results in the form of a list of stylized facts that we consider deserve further attention.

Collective Bargaining Under Complete Information

In this paper, we build and structurally estimate a complete information bargaining model of collective negotiation for Spain. For large firms, the assumption of complete information seems a sensible one, and it matches the collective bargaining environment better than the one provided by private information models. The specification of the model with players having different discount factors allows us to measure their relative bargaining power, a recurrent question in the theory of bargaining. We find that both entrepreneurs and workers have high discount factors, and no evidence that entrepreneurs have bigger bargaining power as usually assumed.

The Process of Wage Adjustment: An Analysis Using Establishment-Level Data

This article uses data from Spanish manufacturing plants to analyze the determinants of the importance attributed to several criteria when wages are adjusted. More specifically, the criteria taken into account in the study are the cost of living, the wages of the firm in relation to its competitors, the fulfillment of collective agreements at sector level, the need to recruit and retain employees, the performance of the organization, and the industrial relations climate. The results show that the structural characteristics of the establishment, some human resource management practices, as well as the wage-setting arrangements and the influence of trade unions, play a role in explaining wage adjustments.

The determinants of pay settlements: the influence of the national context

This article studies the influence of national context and collective bargaining on the factors taken into account when adjusting wages. Using data from Spanish and British manufacturing establishments, we examine the relative importance of the cost of living, the ability to recruit or retain employees, the financial performance of the organisation and the industrial relations climate on wage adjustments of manual workers at the establishment level. Our findings show that there are significant differences on the importance given to these factors in both countries. In part, these are related to differences in the incidence of collective bargaining.