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 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...

This paper is an analysis of the impact of different bargaining regimes on firm-specific wages and wage dispersion. In recent years, firms in Germany favored flexible to collective bargained wages. Opening clauses were introduced to combine collective bargaining and flexible adaptation of e.g....

Collective wage agreements still play an important role in the German wage bargaining system. However, there is a critical debate in Germany whether collective agreements deliver the flexibility needed by firms to adjust to the needs of international competition and technological change. In...

Tarifvertragliche Öffnungs- und Härtefallklauseln, die es Betrieben ermöglichen, von den Standards der Flächentarifverträge abzuweichen, haben in den vergangenen 15 Jahren starke Verbreitung gefunden. Die ökonomische Idee eines einheitlichen Branchentarifvertrags ist für einige...

The prevalence of opening clauses in collective bargaining agreements may indicate a tendency to a higher decentralised wage settlement. Increasing competition on international product markets is assumed to be one reason for wage-setting decentralisation, whereas theoretical explanations focus...

Collective bargaining agreements still play an important role in the German wage setting system. Both existing theoretical and empirical studies find that collective bargaining leads to higher wages compared to individually agreed ones. However, the impact of collective bargaining on the wage...

A large number of articles have analysed 'the one constant' in the economic effects of trade unions, namely that union bargaining reduces employment growth by two to four percentage points per year. Evidence is, however, mostly related to Anglo-Saxon countries. We investigate whether a different...

This paper establishes a link between the extent of collective bargaining and the degree of productivity dispersion within an industry. In a unionised oligopoly model we show that for only small differences in productivity levels. a sector-union can design a collective wage contract that covers...