The paper investigates the evolution of wages and wage inequality in Germany based on samples from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 1984 to 2005. Real gross hourly wages for prime age dependent male workers increased on average by 23 percent between 1984 and 1994 in West Germany and the...

The paper investigates the development of the skill-specific wage and employment structure for male full-time workers in Germany using a large micro data set for the time period 1975 to 1995. There are three main results of the analysis: First, employing two alternative measures for...

This paper uses data from the WSI works council survey in 2003 where detailed information on agreements between employers and employees to secure jobs are available. Firm size and profit effects of company-level agreements are investigated. A major result is that the development of firm size is...

Based on merged data from the IAB-establishment panel survey and the historic files of the employment statistics register, a translog cost system was estimated for six qualification groups (blue- and white-collar workers stratified into unskilled, skilled and highly skilled employees) for West...

The paper analyses the following questions: Does on the job training tie employees to the firm or increase the propensity to change the job? Can significant differences be observed between skill or labor force groups? Are external effects induced by on the job training, namely, does the...

Building on a Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson framework with factor price rigidities, this paper provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between trade, technical progress, and the labor market in West Germany for the period from 1970 until 1990. The analysis builds on relative product...

The existence and development of internal labor markets has a strong impact on the structure of wages and employment. The paper discusses three important aspects of internal labor markets. Firstly, segregation due to qualification has been growing between establishments during the last years,...

I extend a two-skill group model by Katz andMurphy (1992) to estimate relative demand and supply for skills as well as wage rigidity in Germany. Using three data sets for Germany, two for Britain and one for the United States, I simulate the change in relative wage rigidity (wage compression) in...

Equilibrium search theory suggests that the wage distribution in a cross section of workers is closely related to labor market transitions and associated wage changes. Accordingly, job-to-job transitions are central in explaining the wage distribution. This paper usese the IAB employment...

This paper investigates the changes in the German wage structure for full-time working males from 1999 to 2006. Our analysis builds on the task-based approach introduced by Autor et al. (2003), as implemented by Spitz-Oener (2006) for Germany, and also accounts for job complexity. We perform a...