This paper presents evidence of both counter-cyclical and secular decline in the union membership wage premiu m in the US and the UK over the last couple of decades. The premium has fallen for most groups of workers, the main exception being public sector workers in the US. By the beginning of...

Collective bargaining in Germany takes place either at the industry level or at the firm level; collective bargaining coverage is much higher than union density; and not all employees in a covered firm are necessarily covered. This institutional setup suggests to explicitly distinguish union...

This paper investigates the increase in wage inequality, the decline in collective bargaining, and the development of the gender wage gap in West Germany between 2001 and 2006. Based on detailed linked employer-employee data, we show that wage inequality is rising strongly – driven not only by...

This paper provides estimates of the union wage gap in Portugal, a nation until recently lacking independent data on union density at firm level. Having estimated nonlinear and linear estimates of the effect of union density on the wage gap, the next stage of the analysis seeks to account for...

Using a microeconomic model and data from the Establishment Panel of the German Institute for Employment Research, we analyze the optimal establishment size against the background of rent-seeking workers and the influence of works councils. The theoretical part shows that establishment size has...

Although coverage of collective bargaining agreements has been declining for decades in most countries, it is still extensive, especially in non-Anglo-Saxon countries. Strong unions may influence firms’ incentives to invest in capital, particularly in sectors where capital investments are sunk...

This mixed-methods study examines factors determining employees‘ desire to reduce worktime. The results of a binary logit regression model, based on data from the Austrian Microcencus 2012, suggest that employees who prefer shorter weekly working hours are older, higher educated and work...

Eine Auswertung von Tarifkonflikten in Deutschland zeigt, dass Spartengewerkschaften eine hohe Konfliktbereitschaft aufweisen. Treten mehrere konfliktfreudige Gewerkschaften bei einem Arbeitgeber in Konkurrenz, kumulieren sich die Konflikthandlungen. Im Extremfall gerät ein Arbeitgeber von...

This paper addresses the design of the machinery of collective bargaining from the perspective of the needs of microeconomic and macroeconomic flexibility. In the former context, greater attention is given over to enterprise flexibility than external adjustment. In the latter context, close...

This paper analyzes the impact of the skill composition of migration flows on the host country's labor market in a specific factors two-sector model with heterogeneous labor (low-, medium-, and highly-skilled) and price- and wage-setting behavior. The low- and medium-skilled labor markets are...