The paper introduces a model of enterprise formation in a unionized economy with labor protection and wage bargaining. Enterprise formation is subject to future market risk and is shaped by labor market institutions in the post-entry stage. The predictions of the model are tested in...

This paper examines how collective bargaining through unions and workplace co-determination through works councils shape labour market imperfections and how labour market imperfections matter for employer wage premia. Based on representative German plant data for the years 1999-2016, we document...

International comparisons of labour market institutions and their transfer across boundaries have gained in importance. The paper deals with the question of the best way to proceed in making such comparisons. At the same time the question of the possibilities and limits to institutional transfer...

It is widely argued that Europe's unified monetary policy calls for the international coordination at the fiscal level. We survey the issues involved with such coordination of fiscal policy as a demand management tool and we use a simple model to investigate the circumstances under which...

"Race-to-the-bottom" deregulation is to be expected when markets operate across the borders of countries that independently choose and enforce labor policies. Less obviously, in pre-crisis EMU reforms of labor market policies were uneven and related to international imbalances. That pattern is...

What determines the structure of labour market institutions? This paper argues that common explanations based on rent sharing are incomplete; unions, job protection, and egalitarian pay structures may have as much to do with social insurance of otherwise uninsurable risks as with rent sharing and...