Using panel data for West Germany and Great Britain, we show that there are striking differences in overtime work and overtime compensation in the two countries in the 1990s. Our estimates reveal that the observed overtime patterns affect both the evolution of the monthly labour earnings...

In the 1990s overtime incidence in Great Britain and West Germany is quite similar, while the average amount of hours of overtime for full-time male workers with overtime in Great Britain is roughly twice those in Germany for all years. We observe striking differences between the two countries...

This study examines the relationship between individual risk aversion and reservation wages using a novel set of direct measures of individual risk attitudes from the German Socio- Economic Panel (SOEP). We find that risk aversion has a significantly negative impact on the level of reservation...

In the absence of closed-shops and discriminatory wage policies, union membership can be explained by the existence of social norms. We describe a model, incorporating institutional features of the German labour market, which explicitly allows for social custom effects in the determination of...

type="main" xml:lang="en" <p>A stylized fact of empirical work on the relationship of wages and unemployment using macro data for European countries is a combination of strong autocorrelation of wages and a significant negative long-run relationship of wages and unemployment. However, this view is...</p>

In Germany, there is no trade union membership wage premium, while the membership fee amounts to 1% of the gross wage. Therefore, prima facie, there are strong incentives to free-ride on the benefits of trade unionism. We establish empirical evidence for a private gain from trade union...