Collective bargaining agreements have been said to decrease deployment since the work of Calmfors and Driffill (1988). We investigate empirically whether opening clauses, flexible elements that have been introduced to reduce the decline in coverage, can indeed minimise this effect and increase...

This paper analyses the impact of opening clauses in German collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) on job flows. Opening clauses should provide firms with more flexibility in economic crises. Therefore, firms operating under a CBA with opening clauses are expected to have lower job turnover, in...

We analyse the interaction between different labour market institutions in Germany, a country with a long tradition of strong bargaining partners. A number of studies have established that industry-level bargaining exerts a moderating role on firm-level co-determination: works councils generate...

Unions and collective bargaining play a central role in shaping wages and influencing firms' employment decisions and firm survival, especially in industrialised countries, and where they are traditionally strong. Their impact depends on the institutional role unions (can) play in different...

This paper is an analysis of the impact of different bargaining regimes on firm-specific wages and wage dispersion. In recent years, firms in Germany favored flexible to collective bargained wages. Opening clauses were introduced to combine collective bargaining and flexible adaptation of e.g....

Collective bargaining agreements still play an important role in the German wage setting system. Both existing theoretical and empirical studies find that collective bargaining leads to higher wages compared to individually agreed ones. However, the impact of collective bargaining on the wage...

Collective bargaining agreements still play an important role in the German wage setting system. Both existing theoretical and empirical studies find that collective bargaining leads to higher wages compared to individually agreed ones. However, the impact of collective bargaining on the wage...

The prevalence of opening clauses in collective bargaining agreements may indicate a tendency to a higher decentralised wage settlement. Increasing competition on international product markets is assumed to be one reason for wage-setting decentralisation, whereas theoretical explanations focus...

Collective wage agreements still play an important role in the German wage bargaining system. However, there is a critical debate in Germany whether collective agreements deliver the flexibility needed by firms to adjust to the needs of international competition and technological change. In...

The introduction of opening clauses in collective wage agreements allowing firms to deviate from their collective bargaining agreements has become widely accepted for the last fifteen years. With respect to the flexibility agreed through collective bargaining, the distinctions between single...