"According to the German Works Constitution Act, establishments whose workforces exceed certain thresholds have to release a certain number of members of their works councils from their regular work and enable them to work full time as works councillors. Using a full sample of all establishments...

Using quantile regression and a rich cross section data set for German manufacturing plants this paper documents that the impact of plant characteristics on export activities varies along the conditional size distribution of the export/sales ratio.

This paper presents the first empirical test with German establishment level data of a hypothesis derived by Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple in a model that explains the decision of heterogeneous firms to serve foreign markets either trough exports or foreign direct investment: only the more...

"In der bisherigen Diskussion um die Beschäftigungseffekte des weltwirtschaftsinduzierten Strukturwandels in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland wurde der Aspekt vernachlässigt, daß der Arbeitsmarkt segmentiert ist. Theoretische Überlegungen und Ergebnisse empirischer Untersuchungen weisen auf...

"This paper makes an empirical investigation of the effects of the German Disabled Persons Act on employment dynamics using data from the Federal Employment Agency and the IAB Establishment Panel. The data permit an investigation of the second threshold of this law, which in the observation...

"In Germany, there exist around 160 threshold values stating that certain labour laws and regulations apply only in establishments above a critical size (usually defined by the number of employees). As crossing a threshold may result in additional costs for the firm, it is often hypothesized...

"In der bisherigen Diskussion um die Beschäftigungseffekte des weltwirtschaftsinduzierten Strukturwandels in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland wurde der Aspekt vernachlässigt, daß der Arbeitsmarkt segmentiert ist. Theoretische Überlegungen und Ergebnisse empirischer Untersuchungen weisen auf...

Using data from the social survey ALLBUS for West Germany in the period 1980 to 2006, this paper demonstrates that union members are on average older than non-unionized employees. The probability of being unionized shows the inverted U-shaped pattern in age conjectured by Blanchflower (BJIR...

Using quantile regression and a rich cross section data set for German manufacturing plants this paper documents that the impact of plant characteristics on export activities varies along the conditional size distribution of the export/sales ratio.

Using representative data from the German social survey ALLBUS 2002 and the European Social Survey 2002/03, this paper provides the first empirical analysis of trade union never-membership in Germany. We show that between 54 and 59 percent of all employees in Germany have never been members of a...