Wage posting or wage bargaining? : evidence from the employers’ side

Using a representative establishment dataset, this paper is the first to analyze the incidence of wage posting and wage bargaining in the matching pro-cess from the employer’s side. We show that both modes of wage determination coexist in the German labor market, with about two-thirds of hirings being charac-terized by wage posting. Wage posting dominates in the public sector, in larger firms, in firms covered by collective agreements, and in part-time and fixed-term contracts. Job-seekers who are unemployed, out of the labor force or just finished their apprenticeship are also less likely to get a chance of negotiating. Wage bar-gaining is more likely for more-educated applicants and in jobs with special requirements as well as in tight regional labor markets.