This paper evaluates the possible consequences of the forthcoming European and Monetary Union on wage behaviour. It will be shown that EMU does not influence wage policy directly, but rather indirectly through its implications on other areas of economic policy, predominantly on monetary policy....

External recruiting at least weakly improves the quality of the pool of applicants, but the incentive implications are less clear. Using a contest model, this paper investigates the pure incentive effects of external recruiting. Our results show that if workers are heterogeneous, the opening of...

While minimum wage is widely debated at both academic and political levels, little attention has been dedicated to documenting and assessing the implementation of and compliance with minimum wage policies. This paper begins to fill this research gap by identifying and qualitatively assessing a...

Minimum wage policy supported by a strong social policy is an efficient mechanism against poverty and income erosion of the poorest households. Minimum wage is one of the instruments which can control wage dispersion and in this way reduce income inequality. It can also help to prevent a general...

Macroeconomically oriented wage policies had largely gone out of fashion. Instead, the prevailing view was that wage setting is just another market process comparable to market processes in goods markets. However, these theoretical approaches ignore some fundamental aspects of wage setting. For...

Gaps in competitiveness, rooted in economic as well as in political factors, characterise postwar European economic history. The eurozone experience showed the emergence of large current account imbalances. The peculiar mixture of financial markets integration and national cycles in wages and...