Although there is a large literature on the economic effects of minimum wages on labour market outcomes (especially employment), there is hardly any evidence on their impact on firm performance. This is surprising: minimum wages appear to have a significant impact on wages, but only a limited...

This article presents a study of the determinants of pay settlements in a sample of Spanish and British establishments. We find that variables such as establishment size and age, foreign ownership, labour costs, the existence of internal labour markets, a strategic approach to human resource...

This paper presents the first empirical evidence on the effect of the threat of unionisation on the use of a predominantly non-union type of employment, i.e. temporary employment. The identification strategy exploits an exogenous variation in union threat induced in the UK by new legislation...

This paper estimates the impact of registering for taxes on firm profits in Bolivia, the countrywith the highest levels of informality in Latin America. A new survey of micro and small firmsenables us to control for a rich set of measures of owner ability and business motivations thatcan affect...

Although works councils are a core element of the German system of industrial relations, there is little reliable information on their incidence and coverage. This paper uses data from the nationally representative IAB establishment panel to fill this gap. We examine the frequency of works...

In the demographic change, a prolongation of individual employment and thus of beginning a new employment in later stages of the work life is of growing importance. On the base of microeconomic data (establishment panel of the IAB), this paper analyses firms' characteristics correlating with...

We estimate wage and job tenure functions that include individual and firm effects capturing time-invariant unobserved worker and firm heterogeneity using German linked employer-employee data (LIAB data set). We find that both types of heterogeneity are correlated to the observed characteristics...

This paper estimates a structural model of the employment decision of the firm. Our establishment level data displays an extreme degree of rigidity in that employment levels are largely constant throughout our sample. This can be due to the fact that establishments face large shocks but also...

Using unique personnel data from one Russian firm for the years 1997 to 2002 we study the size, development and determinants of the gender earnings gap in an internal labor market during late transition. The gap is sizable but declines strongly over the entire period. Gender earnings...

At the firm level, revenue and costs are well measured but prices and quantities are not. This paper shows that because of these data limitations estimates of returns to scale at the firm level are for the revenue function, not production function. Given this observation, the paper argues that,...