Since the mid-1990s the German system of collective bargaining with its traditional dominance of sector-level agreements has been faced by a process of creeping erosion. While the bargaining coverage has shown a steady decline, a far-reaching decentralisation has increasingly undermined the...

A considerable number of studies have examined the relationship between corporate governance (CG) structures and corporate performance (e.g., Yermack, 1996; Gompers et al., 2003; Beiner et al., 2006; Renders et al., 2010; Ntim et al., 2012; Kumar & Zattoni 2013; Griffin, et al., 2014). In contrast, despite its...

The paper studies the major institutional changes that are at the root of the increase in the west European unemployment rate in the last quartercentury from below 3 percent to 11 percent. The institutional characteristics of wage bargaining, the tax wedge and the legal rules hamper the...

We examine the extent to which taxes on corporate income are directly shifted onto the workforce. We use data on 55,082 companies located in nine European countries over the period 1996-2003. We identify this direct shifting through cross-company variation in tax liabilities, conditional on...