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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.

Traditional political economy models of taxation fail to explain why there is so little redistribution of wealth despite significant wealth inequalites. This is for two reasons: (1) The median voter approach cannot deal with a multidimensional policy-space and (2) wealth taxation affects well-organized and homogenous interest groups so that lobbying affects policy outcomes. In this paper the interaction of factor price bargaining and delegated tax-lobbying is studied. Two agents engage in lobbying: managers of large firms and trade union leaders. Low wealth taxation is the natural consequence of income maxmimization on the side of interest group leaders if (1) managers are in a position to appropriate part of the firms' revenues for themselves and (2) union members cannot monitor the lobbying activities of union leaders.

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.

This paper provides a model that can account for the almost uniform staggering of wage contracts in some countries as well as for the markedly nonuniform staggering in others. In the model, short and long contracts as well as long contracts concluded in different periods are strategic substitutes, which provides a powerful rationale for staggering. We show that for realistic parameter values, there is a continuum of possible equilibria with various degrees of staggering of long contracts. If the contracting cost is not too large, then the lowest possible degree of staggering decreases with the contracting cost and increases with monetary uncertainty.