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...

Union representation has been in strong decline in most OECD countries with potentially important consequences for wages. What drives this decline? We try to answer this question by developing and implementing a detailed decomposition approach based on Fairlie (2005). Using linked...

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...

It is commonplace in the debate on Germany’s labor market problems to argue that high unemployment and low wage dispersion are related. This paper analyses the relationship between unemployment and residual wage dispersion for individuals with comparable attributes. In the conventional...

We analyze the short-run impact of the introduction of the new statutory minimum wage in Germany on further training at the workplace level. Applying difference-in-difference methods to data from the IAB Establishment Panel, we do not find a reduction in the training incidence but a slight...