Using a linked employer-employee data set, this paper analyses the relationship between firm profitability and wages. Particular emphasis is given to the question of whether the sensitivity of wages to firm-specific rents varies with collective bargaining coverage. To address this issue, we...

This paper studies the importance of employer-specific determinants in escaping low earnings in Germany. To address the initial conditions problem and the endogeneity of employer retention, we model (intra-firm) low-pay transitions using a multivariate Probit model that accounts for selection...

The impact of environmental innovations on firm performance is ambiguous. On the one hand, regulatory-driven environmental innovation may impose additional costs to firms and lower their profits. On the other hand, eco-innovators could profit from lower uncertainty in innovation due to...

Using a large-scale linked-employer-employee data set from western Germany, this paper presents new evidence on the wage premium of collective bargaining contracts. In contrast to previous studies, we seek to assess the extent to which differences in wages between workers in covered and...

We analyze the effectiveness of publicly financed training and retraining programs in east Germany as measured by their effects on individual re-employment probabilities after training. These are estimated by discrete hazard rate models on the basis of individual-level panel data. We account for...

Using combined data from the German Pension Insurance and the Federal Employment Agency (BASiD), this study proposes different procedures for imputing the pre-unification education variable in the BASiD data. To do so, we exploit information on education-related periods that are creditable for...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate whether labour mobility is likely to act as a sufficient adjustment mechanism in the face of asymmetric shocks in Euroland. To this end, we estimate the elasticity of migration with respect to changes in unemployment and income on the basis of regional...

In this paper, we study how wage mobility in the low-wage sector has changed in western Germany between 1984 and 2004. Using German individual register data, we document a clear upward trend in the persistence of low-wage employment for both men and women. Next to compositional shifts of the...

This paper investigates whether and in what sense the west German wage structure has been "rigid" in the 1990s. To test the hypothesis that a rigid wage structure has been responsible for rising low-skilled unemployment, I propose a methodology which makes less restrictive identifying...

The Internet is receiving increasing attention as a medium for technology transfer between public research and the enterprise sector. Based on a survey of public research units in natural sciences and engineering in Germany, we analyse the determinants of firm contacts established via the...