This paper studies the price and employment response of firms to the introduction of a nation-wide minimum wage in Germany. In line with previous studies, the estimated employment effect is only modestly negative and statistically insignificant. In contrast, affected firms increased prices much...

This paper studies the price and employment response of firms to the introduction of a nation-wide minimum wage in Germany. Widely throughout the economy, affected firms responded by rapidly and frequently increasing prices without cutting employment. These decisions are strongly interrelated:...

Does the creative destruction induced by unions entail increased social security uptake? Creative destruction implies the closures of less productive workplaces, and if the regional benefits from this process is not large enough, the displacements caused by workplace closures cause increased...

Variable Pay Systems or Pay for performance suppose variable additional components to regular wages connected, for example, with the evolution of the firm objectives or with the evolution of the individual features and productivity. These forms of variable remuneration have had a growing...

The large increase in computer use has raised the question whether people have to be taught computer skills before entering the labour market. Using data from the 1997 Skills Survey of the Employed British Workforce, we argue that neither the increase in computer use nor the fact that...

This paper introduces a newly constructed Theil index of between-sectoral manufacturing wage inequality and empirically tests whether the measure can serve as a basis for more general statements about the evolution of broader concepts of inequality, as argued by the authors of the University of...

Since the late 1970s, wage inequality has increased strongly both in the U.S. and Germany but the trends have been different. Wage inequality increased along the entire wage distribution during the 1980s in the U.S. and since the mid 1990s in Germany. There is evidence for wage polarization in...

The economics profession has made considerable progress in understanding the increase in wage inequality in the U.S. and the UK over the past several decades, but currently lacks a consensus on why inequality did not increase, or increased much less, in (continental) Europe over the same time...