Labor market participation rates of West German females have risen during the last decades, whereas participation rates of males have declined or remained stable. Nevertheless, differences in aggregate gender specific participation rates remain. The purpose of this paper is to compare life cycle...

Since the late 1970s, wage inequality has increased strongly both in the U.S. and Germany but the trends have been different. Wage inequality increased along the entire wage distribution during the 1980s in the U.S. and since the mid 1990s in Germany. There is evidence for wage polarization in...

This paper investigates the changes in the German wage structure for full-time working males from 1999 to 2006. Our analysis builds on the task-based approach introduced by Autor et al. (2003), as implemented by Spitz-Oener (2006) for Germany, and also accounts for job complexity. We perform a...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the structure of earnings in West Germany across skill groups and industries. Our analysis is based on data from the German.Socioeconomic Panel for the period 1984 to-1994. We estimate quantile regressions, both for the entire sample period and for...

Using a representative establishment data set for Germany, we show that more than 40 percent of plants covered by collective agreements pay wages above the level stipulated in the agreement, which gives rise to a wage cushion between the levels of actual and contractual wages. Cross-sectional...