Product market integration and wage bargaining institutions

• We model wage bargaining institutions in an international Cournot oligopoly.
• We study the effects of product market integration on the wage centralisation degree.
• More integration leads to decentralisation when the domestic market is large enough.
• More integration leads to centralisation when the foreign market is large enough.

This paper studies the effects of product market integration on wage bargaining institutions. By considering an international Cournot–Nash oligopoly with unionised home firms and non-unionised foreign firms producing substitute goods, the paper shows that the relative size of the home and foreign markets matters for the effects of a bilateral reduction in trade barriers. If the home market size is relatively larger than the foreign market size, a reduction in trade barriers, by lowering the sharable surplus for home firms and unions in the global market, gives unions incentives to choose more decentralised wage bargaining institutions. This industry-level mechanism, however, works in the opposite direction when the foreign market size is sufficiently large, including the “reciprocal dumping” symmetric market size model. In this case, cutting trade barriers raises the global sharable surplus and encourages domestic wage-setters to choose more centralised institutions.