Based on the assumption that industrial relations influence labour market outcomes, the thesis examines first, the characteristics and the evolution of bargaining structures and procedures in the Greek system of industrial relations, second, the governmental policies aimed at wage and employment regulation, and third, the extent to which, in the context of developments in industrial relations as well as in the context of incomes policy, there was room for relative wage flexibility in the Greek manufacturing sector. The main conclusion of the thesis is that, despite the extensive and continuous regulation of wage determination procedures by successive governments, changes in industrial relations which occurred after 1975 and were marked by decentralised, fragmented and informal collective bargaining, were accompanied by flexibility in relative wages. The sources of this flexibility, which is largely noncompetitive, are related to industry-specific productivity gains as well as to industry-specific rates of strike activity. Moreover, the rise of decentralised, fragmented and informal collective bargaining influenced the effectiveness of the norm-based and the indexation incomes policies as far as variation in the inter-industry wage structure in the Greek manufacturing sector is concerned.

The thesis consists of thee parts. Part one considers firm-union bargain over wages and working conditions (effort). It studies in a partial equilibrium setting, the theoretical relationship between the scope of firm-union bargains and the outcome in terms of wages, employment and effort. In particular, the outcome of a bargain over wages and effort is contrasted with the outcome of a pure wage bargain. A main result is that both effort and wages are lower when effort requirements are negotiable (rather than being determined by the employer). The analysis yields implications for the impact of unions on productivity, and gives an explanation to cross-industry differences in union mark-up on wages. In the second part I study labour contracts under temporarily asymmetric information. Under the assumption that workers are more heavily credit rationed than firms, the standard model of testing and self-selection in the labour market is extended in several directions. First, it is shown that ex post inefficient termination may be used as a self-selection device. This is a new explanation for up-or-out contracts in occupations where workers' productivity is revealed slowly. Second, when risk neutral workers can be of more than two different productivities, only the best worker should be overpaid. Finally, when productivity is non-verifiable, large firms may have an advantage in hiring more able workers. The issue of discrimination in the labour market is addressed in the last part. A model in which firms have incomplete information about workers at the hiring stage is shown to entail discrimination as the unique stable equilibrium outcome, even if no agents have a taste for discrimination. Discriminated groups (e.g., blacks, women) earn lower wages, endure longer unemployment spells, and must satisfy stricter requirements in order to obtain work. The model also offers a new explanation for duration dependence in exit rates from unemployment.

Since the second world war, there have been enormous changes in Britain's production and employment patterns. Two possible explanations for this phenomenon are technical progress and demand shifts. We set out an industry model with imperfect competition to assess their roles. In many ways, the effects of technical progress and demand shifts are intertwined. Technical changes which lead to new products or higher quality of output will obviously increase demand and employment. On the other hand, technical progress in the form of productivity gains have an ambiguous effect in employment terms. This is one of the questions we address. In our model, we demonstrate that the impact of productivity gains on employment depend chiefly on the demand elasticity and the extent to which higher productive efficiency is passed on in lower prices. This implies that an understanding of "insider" power in wage setting is essential for evaluating these effects. In the long run, however, competition ensures that these "insider" effects are washed out and the long term effect of technical change depends chiefly on the demand elasticity. Under plausible assumptions and empirical estimates, we find these effects to be positive. On the role of demand shifts, we note that these influences depend on the demand elasticity and the slope of the industry supply curve. Empirical estimates are obtained for these factors. Ultimately, the overall effects depend on the size of the demand shifts themselves which we suspect to be substantial. We distinguish between secular changes in demand and its cyclical counterpart. Cyclical demand could have been adversely affected by persistently large deviations from purchasing power parity and the differential pace of product improvement and development relative to competing countries. Secular demand could have fallen due to a lower world income elasticity of demand for British industrial products. Given the huge rise of unemployment in the last two decades, we assess its impact on the health of workers. After controlling for age, sex, duration of unemployment, regional characteristics, macro-economic and secular factors, we find that unemployment shocks have significant impacts on mortality rates. The pattern of such impacts is rather complex and may explain why contrasting results have been obtained by different investigators.

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This research aimed to explore and support the reason-based decision making processes of experts and novices in a complex and uncertain domain: resolving labour disputes. Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) has investigated the role of expertise in complex and uncertain domains that are often time pressured. NDM models typically focus on fast decisions while explaining the reasoning processes behind slower decisions less well. There is much research on expertise, experts' reasoning on complex problems is less well understood. Therefore this research aimed to look at experts' reasoning in slower, reason-based decisions. The first empirical chapter examined how complex labour judgements were made by testing a Mental Model Theory (MMT) of probabilistic reasoning. This was followed by a second empirical chapter, in which participants' (fabour officers) thought processes were elicited using a think aloud protocol. Based on these findings, the thesis then progressed to develop a reasoning aid to support reasoning followed by an evaluation of any changes in reasoning processes and outcomes in the third empirical chapter. The final empirical chapter validated the efficiency of the reasoning aid. Six scenarios were developed to replicate typical labour cases and used in studies to assess reasoning processes on a realistic task. Participants for each study numbered 42, 22, 28 and 82 respectively. The data for Study 1 and 4 were analysed quantitatively. and the verbal protocols for Study 2 and 3 were analysed qualitatively. Verbal protocols were recorded and transcribed, then transcripts were coded based on participants' reasoning processes. Differences between experienced and less-experienced officers were also tested. Study 1 provided mixed evidence of reasoning according to MMT, finding that experienced and less-experienced officers were not significantly different. In Study 2 the data were analysed using six higher-order codes proposed by Toulmin et al. (1979) and each protocol was drawn into an argument map. This showed that experienced officers drew more accurate conclusions, omitted less evidence and offered more justifications than less-experienced officers. The reasoning aid used in Study 3 improved less-experience officers' reasoning such that conclusion accuracy was the same as that of experienced officers. However, Study 4 revealed that, while the reasoning aid had no impact on the reasoning processes, the level of experience had a significant effect. This research provides a good description of participants' reason-based decision making. Toulmin's argument analysis approach provides a unique contribution to understanding reasoning in this realistic and complex task. Although, the reasoning aid reduces the differences between experienced and less-experienced officers, experience still plays a crucial role in ensuring correct outcomes.

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This thesis investigates the social process of collective conciliation in Nigeria. The dominant approaches to understanding Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and collective conciliation have adopted a relatively narrow approach, considering ADR in terms of authority, knowledge and the formal institutionally constituted roles of the key actors. This thesis offers a broader understanding that allows the examination of the ‘social process’ of collective conciliation. It considers the collective forms of interaction that take place between trade unions and management, with the assistance of an independent third party, during the resolution of collective employment disputes, hence revealing how this is shaped and conditioned by a broader set of institutional, political and organisational arrangements. This approach pays attention to a much wider set of relational factors that shape collective conciliation, with three particular sets of factors: information-sharing and communication between the parties; regulations, legislation and the politically contingent actions of state actors; and the historically evolving relations between trade unions and management, which are played out in specific disputes in the workplace being considered in detail. This thesis presents a study of collective conciliation in Nigeria; it builds upon interviews with key stakeholders and offers an analysis of three specific case studies of conciliation to shed new light on the social process of collective conciliation. The study highlights the key role of the Nigerian state and the Ministry of Labour in shaping employment relations and collective conciliation processes and end results, through a mixture of formal policies and legislation, a dominant elitist and conservative ideology, and politically motivated appointments to key labour relations ministerial roles. These have had a profound effect on the perception by trade unions and management of the impartiality of the dispute resolution process. The study also highlights how the collective forms of interaction that take place among trade unions and management during negotiations influence the manner in which they share information with each other. It reveals the perception of the actors and confirms their willingness to negotiate compromise and attain resolution. Overall, this study offers a fuller, more nuanced approach to the study of collective conciliation by highlighting the significance of communication and information sharing, union and management relations and the role of the state in relation to conciliation processes and outcomes.

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This thesis consists of three chapters that fall under the broad banner of contract theory, applied to topics in behavioral and development economics. Empirically, labor contracts that financially penalize failure induce higher effort provision than economically identical contracts presented as paying a bonus for success. This is puzzling, as penalties are infrequently used in practice. The most obvious explanation is selection: loss averse agents are unwilling to accept such contracts. In the first chapter, I formalize and experimentally test this intuition. Surprisingly, I find that workers were 25 percent more likely to accept penalty contracts, with no evidence of adverse selection. Penalty contracts also increased performance on the job by 0.2 standard deviations. Finally, I outline extensions to the basic theory that are consistent with the main results. The second chapter analyzes the effect of market structure in microfinance on borrower welfare and the types of contracts used. We find that market power can have severe implications for borrower welfare, while despite information frictions, competition delivers similar borrower welfare to non-profit lending. We also find that for-profit lenders are less likely to use joint liability than non-profits, which is consistent with some empirical stylized facts suggesting a decline in use of joint liability. We simulate the model to evaluate quantitatively the importance of market structure for borrower welfare. The third chapter contrasts individual liability lending with and without groups to joint liability lending, motivated by an apparent shift away from joint liability lending. We show under what conditions individual liability can deliver welfare improvements over joint liability, conditions that depend on the joint income distribution and social capital. We then show that lower transaction costs that mechanically favor group lending may also encourage the creation of social capital. Finally, we again simulate the model to quantify our welfare conclusions.

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