Die öffentliche Meinung „gleicher Lohn für gleiche Arbeit“ findet man häufig, wenn die Verdienstmöglichkeiten in Ost- und Westdeutschland thematisiert werden. Nach der Wiedervereinigung erwirkten die Gewerkschaften eine rasche Tariflohnangleichung. Dies geschah auch zum Schutz der...

Seit Mitte der 1990er Jahre verfolgen die Tarifparteien in Deutschland überwiegend eine moderate Lohnpolitik. Diese hat die Lohnstückkostenposition verbessert und die internationale Wettbewerbsfähigkeit gesteigert. Gleichzeitig unterstützte die Lohnpolitik im Zusammenspiel mit den...

In a sharp break with past German research, some recent estimates have suggested that plants with work councils have 25 to 30 per cent higher productivity than their works-councilfree counterparts. Such findings can only serve to buttress the strong theoretical and policy interest in the German...

In a survey published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations, Frege (2002) evaluates research on the German works council from the perspective of several disciplines, including economics. Ultimately, she concludes that economic analysis of the works council has reached a ?dead end?. The...

Using quantile regressions and a rich cross section data set for German manufacturing plants, this paper reports that the impact of works councils on labor productivity varies along the conditional distribution of value added per employee. It emerges that the positive and statistically...

Theory suggests that firms confront a hold-up problem in dealing with workplace unionism: unions will appropriate a portion of the quasi rents stemming from long-lived capital. As a result, firms may be expected to limit their exposure to rent seeking by reducing investments, among other things....

In this paper we describe the hypothesis of effort-based career opportunities as a situation in which profit maximizing firms create incentives for employees to work longer hours than the bargained ones, by making career prospects dependent on working hours. When effortbased career opportunities...

Using a large panel data set we investigate whether works councils act as sand or grease in the operation of German firms. Stochastic production frontier analysis indicates that establishments with and without a works council do not exhibit significant differences in efficiency.

Although works councils are a core element of the German system of industrial relations, there is little reliable information on their incidence and coverage. This paper uses data from the nationally representative IAB establishment panel to fill this gap. We examine the frequency of works...

This paper makes three contributions to the literature on the effects of collective bargaining on the performance of German establishments. We include the analysis of firms' efficiency and we model productivity and efficiency simultaneously. Confronted with 25 % observations with missing values,...