Published work
Cova, Joshua (2022) ‘Reconsidering the drivers of country-specific recommendations: The Commission’s ideological preferences on wage policies’, European Union Politics
Abstract: As part of the European Semester, the European Commission issues country-specific recommendations for all member states. I contribute to the literature on this political instrument, by considering the determinants of recommendations calling for greater wage moderation and enhanced cost competitiveness. For the most part, research on European economic governance has either understood the European Commission as a politicized and ‘ideological’ institution or as a de-politicized, technocratic actor. My analysis shows that the European Commission’s ideological preferences on labour markets and wage bargaining institutions are more convincing predictors than explanations based on economic indicators. By testing a series of multilevel models, I find that irrespective of developments in competitiveness, countries with stronger social actors are more likely to be recipients of country-specific recommendations calling for wage restraint.
Working papers
1. Uncharted waters: The political determinants of European statutory minimum wage rates in a comparative perspective
Abstract: Minimum wages are becoming an increasingly important policy in Europe’s political and economic landscape. Here, I examine: 1) the determinants of the growing electoral salience of minimum wages and 2) the economic, institutional and party-political drivers of minimum wage increases. By using advances in multilingual text analysis, I show that the electoral salience of minimum wages has grown. This has occurred to the detriment of discussions on alternative policies designed to supplement the income of low-wage workers, such as increasing collective bargaining coverage rates and increasing in-work benefits. Although minimum wages have garnered broad party-political support, I find that partisanship is a marginal driver for the salience of the topic. Through the use of multilevel models, I find no effect for partisanship or the type of wage-setting regime on minimum wage growth: changes to minimum wage rates are mostly tied to changes in economic variables. This finding is in contrast to research in the US political economy and political science literature.
2. Drivers of aggregate demand? Exploring the role of minimum wages in Europe’s growth models
Abstract: The recent politicization of minimum wages needs to be cast against the role that minimum wages play as policy-determined drivers of growth in different political economies. I examine the role of minimum wages in European export-led and domestic demand-led growth models, by examining their relationships to export shares and household expenditures. As minimum wages can affect the overall income distribution, can increase household consumption or decrease export shares, I examine, by using time series analysis, whether a series of deductively-inferred hypotheses derived from the growth model literature hold up to econometric scrutiny. I divide my analysis into an analysis of a panel of export-led growth models and a panel of domestic-demand led growth models and supplement this approach with four country case studies. Overall, I find that my empirical results mostly reflect existing theories about the relative importance of minimum wages and household consumption in different growth models. The results on the relationship between minimum wages and growth trajectories present more mixed results in the case of export shares in goods and services; this warrants further empirical investigations.