The German model of co-determination (Mitbestimmung) with works councils, in which workers are involved in the management of a company, was a role model for other countries for many years. However, since the 1990s the appeal of works councils has been declining, to the extent that now even...

This paper investigates the sources of the downward nominal wage rigidity in Russia. The empirical analysis is based on the RLMS-HSE household survey from 2004 to 2013. We show that, in spite of weak labor unions in Russia, the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity is high. Moreover, the...

We present the first panel estimates of the productivity effects of the unique German institution of parity, board-level co-determination. Although our data span two severe recessions when labour hoarding costs of co-determination are probably highest, and the panel is too short to capture the...

We provide empirical evidence that female mayors do not affect the expenditure allocation or size of local governments. This result is robust across a variety of regression discontinuity and standard multivariate estimations. We also examine whether elected female candidates have an increased...

Can Germany in the 1990s provide a contemporary example of the "uneasy triangle" posited by The Economist in the early 1950s? As the millennium approached, Germany's inflation rate was very low; its unemployment rate unacceptably high; and its system of collective bargaining arguably the...

At first blush, most advances in labour demand were achieved by the late 1980s. Since then progress might appear to have stalled. We argue to the contrary that significant progress has been made in understanding labour market frictions and imperfections, and in modelling search behaviour and...

Great Lakes iron ore producers had faced no competition from foreign iron ore in the Great Lakes steel market for nearly a century as the 1970s closed. In the early 1980s, as a result of unprecedented developments in the world steel market, Brazilian producers were offering to deliver iron ore...

Using a German employer-employee matched panel data set this paper examines the effects of High Performance Workplace Systems (HPWSs) on labor productivity (defined as sales per worker) and labor efficiency (defined as the inverse of unit labor costs). The estimation results indicate that simple...

The discussion on the causes of the Greek crisis has focused on the twin deficits: the fiscal and current-account deficit. The objective of this paper is to examine how the twin deficits came about implicating structural features of the Greek economy which contributed to the loss in...

This paper examines if workplace and co-worker union status affect employee wellbeing. In contrast to the literature focusing on links between one's own membership status and wellbeing, we focus principally on non-union employees. We find that being in a union workplace and having union...