This paper measures the productivity impact of management-led participative establishment practices. On the basis of a representative German establishment data set, the IAB establishment panel, the study finds that the presence of team-work, a reduction of hierarchies and autonomous work groups...

We estimate the effects of works councils on productivity, 1997-2000, using the IAB Establishment Panel, a nationally representative German data set. We recoup the works council effect by estimating translog production functions, stochastic frontier production functions, and a model in first...

This paper investigates the relationship between the use of temporary agency work and the user firm's productivity. We hypothesise that modest use enhances numerical flexibility and thus productivity, while excessive use mirrors lowproductivity strategies utilising less social and human capital...

Short-term contracts and exogenous productivity growth are introduced in asimple wage bargaining model. The equilibrium utilities corresponding tomilitant union behaviour are independent of the contract length. The wagedynamics are linear if strike is credible (low wage shares) and...

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...

We present a growth model in which R&D increases productivity, union-firm bargaining determines the distribution of rents and the government can support unions by labour market regulation. We show that if unions are initially very strong, regulation increases only the workers? profit share and...

This paper studies how different unionisation structures affect firm productivity, firm performance, and consumer welfare in a monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous firms and free entry. While centralised bargaining induces tougher selection among hetero- geneous producers and thus...

We process information in a large number of wage contracts, signed over a period of several decades, to generate the long-run history of the real wage for each bargaining pair. We term these hitherto unexamined histories chronologies'. We are able to generate 1574 continuous real wage...

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,...

The effects of unions on productivity and firm performance have been the topic of extensive research. Existing studies have, however, primarily focused on firm-level bargaining and on markets that are characterised by a small and fixed number of identical firms. This paper studies how different...