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...

Using a representative establishment data set for Germany, we show that more than 40 percent of plants covered by collective agreements pay wages above the level stipulated in the agreement, which gives rise to a wage cushion between the levels of actual and contractual wages. Cross-sectional...

The wage curve identified by Blanchflower and Oswald (1994) postulates that the wage level is a decreasing function of the regional unemployment rate. In testing this hypothesis, most empirical studies have not taken into account that differences in the institutional framework may have an impact...

Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel are used to examine the roles of individual heterogeneity and job match quality in generating commonly observed wage-tenure profiles. The evidence presented in the paper indicates that once those factors are reflected in the estimations, the returns to...

This paper presents preliminary results from an empirical analysis of the individual and macroeconomic deter-minants of reservation wages, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The longitudinal aspect of the dataset provides an interesting perspective on the dynamics of reservation...