Immigration, Trade and Wages in Germany

This paper examines the effects of several macroeconomic variables such as GDP, imports, unemployment, immigration and emigration on the real wages and salaries of German laborers. Annual data for 49 years has been used to estimate twelve different regressions, trying to capture the effect of these variables on the real wages and salaries in Germany while considering the unification of West-East Germany with a dummy variable. The results are intriguing, and contradicting with most of the earlier literature. The paper concludes that wages are unresponsive to the macroeconomics changes most of the time while salaries are more sensitive to macroeconomic changes. The paper also contributes to the literature by investigating the effects of macroeconomic variables on the salary and wage changes of different gender groups.