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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...