"This paper evaluates the impact on temporary agency workers' job satisfaction of a reform that considerably changed regulations covering the temporary help service sector in Germany. We isolate the causal effect of this reform by combining a difference- in-difference and matching approach and...

"Labour market reforms that are designed to stimulate labour supply at the lower end of the wage distribution can never be precisely restricted to affect only the target group. Spillovers to and feedback from other segments of the labour market are unavoidable and may counteract the direct...

"Collective wage contracts impose restrictions on wage-setting. We utilize German linked employer-employee data for blue-collar worker to compute the dispersion of wages and wage components within and across firms under three different wage-setting regimes: Establishments applying sectoral...

"The authors use German linked employer-employee data for the years 1990, 1995 and 2001 to analyze, which dimensions of wage setting differ across three wage-setting regimes: Establishments applying sectoral collective contracts, establishments with firm-level contracts and uncovered...

"The paper analyses the relationship between individual tenure and the application of collective contracts at the firm level, using a multi-level model and a German linked employer-employee data set for the years 1990, 1995 and 2001. The main result is that elapsed tenure is longer in firms...

"This paper analyzes the impact of the skill composition of migration flows on the host country's labor market in a specific factors two-sector model with heterogeneous labor (low-, medium-, and highly-skilled) and price- and wage-setting behavior. The low- and medium-skilled labor markets are...

"Unions are often stigmatized as being a source of inefficiency due to higher collective bargaining outcomes. This is in stark contrast with the descriptive evidence presented in this paper. Larger firms choose to export and are also more likely to adopt collective bargaining. We rationalize...

"The gender wage gap in Germany is smaller in firms covered by collective contracts or having a works council, partly because these institutions are associated with lower unobserved productivity differences and less wage discrimination, partly because they compress the distribution of wage...

"We test the theoretical claim that coordination and centralisation in wage setting reduce strike activity by estimating nonlinear regression models using a dataset of 17 OECD countries for the period 1972-2000. We find moderating effects of coordination on strike activity but the effects are...

"Worker movements played a crucial role in making workplaces safer. Workplace safety is costly for firms but increases labour supply. A laissez-faire approach leaving safety of workplaces unknown is suboptimal. Safety standards set by better-informed trade unions are output and welfare...