"The prevalence of opening clauses in collective bargaining agreements may indicate a tendency towards more decentralised wage setting. Increasing competition on international product markets is assumed to be one reason for the decentralisation of collective bargaining. Current theoretical...

"Given the recent financial crisis, the German labour market performs relatively well. This has not been the case until recent years: collective bargaining and the rigid system of wage setting have been often cited as one of the reasons for Germany's high structural unemployment. Contrary, a...

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...

The introduction of opening causes in collective wage agreements allowing firms to deviate from their collective bargaining agreements has become widely accepted for the last fifteen years. With respect to the flexibility agreed through collective bargaining, the distinctions between single...

"Given the recent financial crisis, the German labour market performs relatively well. This has not been the case until recent years: collective bargaining and the rigid system of wage setting have been often cited as one of the reasons for Germany's high structural unemployment. Contrary, a...

This paper analyses the impact of opening clauses in German collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) on job flows. Opening clauses should provide firms with more flexibility in economic crises. Therefore, firms operating under a CBA with opening clauses are expected to have lower job turnover, in...