This study provides empirical evidence for the economic rationality of wage rigidities. Theoretically wage rigidities can result from contracts, implicit contracts, from efficiency wages and from insider-outsider behaviour. Based on a survey of 801 firms strong support has been found for...

We argue that in labor markets with central wage bargaining wage flexibility varies systematically across the wage distribution: local wage flexibility is more relevant for the upper part of the wage distribution, and flexibility of wages negotiated under central wage bargaining affects the...

This paper examines critically the system of industry-level wage bargaining in Germany. More specifically, it shows that the importance of industry-level wage bargaining declines in Germany and that one major reason for this development is the highly restrictive institutional framework. However,...

Different stochastic simulation methods are used in order to check the robustness of the outcome of policy simulations with a macroeconometric model. A macroeconometric disequilibriummodel of the West German economy is used to analyze a reform proposal for the tax system. The model was estimated...

Despite the importance for socio-economic outcomes, there is an ongoing debate about the stability of personality traits over the life cycle. By disentangling age, period and cohort influences on personality traits, this paper adds to the existing empirical contributions, which often focus on...

The decision to contact a physician and the decision, how often to contact a physician, are based on different decision makers. We introduce a negative binominal distributed hurdle model that specifies the two stages of the decision process as different stochastic processes, and takes also care...

The German apprenticeship training system is generally acknowledged to solve the youth unemployment problem prevalent in many European countries by providing on-the-job training that often leads into subsequent regular employment within the training firms. Little attention has been paid to those...

In the face of complex budget constraints the assumption of rationally acting individuals having complete knowledge of the tax system is a theoretical borderline. The specific issues examined in this study are (i) to what extent do consumers (here married women) perceive their true marginal tax...