We give an overview of the "German model" of industrial relations. We organize our review by focusing on the two pillars of the model: sectoral collective bargaining and firm-level codetermination. Relative to the United States, Germany outsources collective bargaining to the sectoral level,...

It is sometimes claimed that the coverage of collective bargaining in Germany is considerably understated because of orientation, a process whereby uncovered firms profess to shadow the wages set under sectoral bargaining. Yet importantly, at a time when collective bargaining proper has been in...

Can Germany in the 1990s provide a contemporary example of the "uneasy triangle" posited by The Economist in the early 1950s? As the millennium approached, Germany's inflation rate was very low; its unemployment rate unacceptably high; and its system of collective bargaining arguably the...

Although employee-representation systems coexist with a collective-bargaining framework in continental Europe for many years, US labor advocates have looked upon those representations systems with suspicion. The reasons for this suspicion are historical: US employee-representation systems have...

We describe the nature, scope and effects of various non-mandated participatory work practices in Japan, the U.S. and Europe through the lens of complementarity in organizations. Specifically, rather than treating each work practice in isolation, we consider it an element of HIWS (High...

Recent empirical research generally finds evidence of positive economic effects of works councils, for example with regard to productivity and - with some limitations - to profits. This makes it necessary to explain why employers’ associations have reservations against works councils. On the...

We give an overview of the "German model" of industrial relations. We organize our review by focusing on the two pillars of the model: sectoral collective bargaining and firm-level codetermination. Relative to the United States, Germany outsources collective bargaining to the sectoral level,...

Using German establishment data, this study provides the first econometric analysis on the interaction of establishment-level codetermination and foreign owners. Works councils are associated with higher productivity in domestic-owned establishments while they are associated with lower...

This article examines the relationship between works councils and the closure of manufacturing establishments in Germany. The relationship varies according to circumstances and type of establishment. For the subsample of single-establishment firms, the estimates show that works council presence...

The effect of collective bargaining on innovation has long been in dispute. At the level of theory, the hold-up problem has been used to justify positive as well as negative effects of unionism. At the empirical level, although some would consider the North American evidence as cut and dried,...