In order to reduce unemployment, it is often recommended that industry-level wage bargaining in Germany should be replaced by a more decentralized system. This paper provides a critical assessment of the current wage bargaining institutions and reexamines the case for a more decentralized...

Industrial relations are in flux in many nations, perhaps most notably in Germany and Britain. That said, comparatively little is known in any detail of the changing pattern of the institutions of collective bargaining and worker representation in Germany and still less in both countries about...

This paper investigates trends in collective bargaining and worker representation in Germany from 2000 to 2008. It seeks to update and widen earlier analyses pointing to a decline in collective bargaining, while providing more information on the dual system as a whole. Using data from the IAB...

It is sometimes claimed that the coverage of collective bargaining in Germany is considerably understated because of orientation, a process whereby uncovered firms profess to shadow the wages set under sectoral bargaining. Yet importantly, at a time when collective bargaining proper has been in...

Collective bargaining agreements have been said to decrease deployment since the work of Calmfors and Driffill (1988). We investigate empirically whether opening clauses, flexible elements that have been introduced to reduce the decline in coverage, can indeed minimise this effect and increase...

We investigate the labor market effects of immigration in Denmark, Germany and the UK, three countries which are characterized by considerable differences in labor market institutions and welfare states. Institutions such as collective bargaining, minimum wages, employment protection and...