German law guaranteeing works councils is not a datum. The thrust of legislation has changed significantly on a number of occasions since 1920. The most recent legal change in the form of the Works Constitution Reform Act marks a controversial swing in favor of works council formation and...

Using a large panel data set we investigate whether works councils act as sand or grease in the operation of German firms. Stochastic production frontier analysis indicates that establishments with and without a works council do not exhibit significant differences in efficiency.

I use a question about works council relations from the 2006 wave of the IAB Establishment panel to analyze the heterogeneous effects of works councils on productivity, wages, and profits. The results indicate that the effects differ significantly between works council relationship types in a...

This paper is focused on couple households where the wife is the main earner. The economic literature on this subject is particularly scant. According to our estimates, the wife was the main earner in one of every six couple households in France in 2002, including wife-sole-earner households....

This paper focuses on the time allocation of spouses and the impact of economic variables. We present a stylized model of the time allocation of spouses to illustrate the expected impact of wages and non-labour income. The empirical model simultaneously specifies three time-use choices – paid...

This paper analyzes the time allocation of Italian spouses to paid work, childcare and household work. The literature suggests that Italian husbands contribute the least to unpaid household work, relative to other European countries, while Italian women have the lowest market employment rates....