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...

"This paper investigates the effects of labour market institutions on wage persistence among young European workers at the beginning of their careers. We use ECHP data from 1995 to 2001 for 13 EU countries and estimate a three-level random intercept probit model that allows for unobserved...