Using register data from the IAB employment sample, this paper studies the wage structure in the German labor market throughout the years 1992-2001. Wage dispersion has generally been rising. The increase was more pronounced in East Germany and occurred predominantly in the lower part of the...

Collective bargaining in Germany takes place either at the industry level or at the firm level; collective bargaining coverage is much higher than union density; and not all employees in a covered firm are necessarily covered. This institutional setup suggests to explicitly distinguish union...

Using linked employer-employee data from the German Structure of Earnings Survey 2001,this paper provides a comprehensive picture of the wage structure in three wage-settingregimes prevalent in the German system of industrial relations...

Collective bargaining in Germany takes place either at the industry level or at the firm level; collective bargaining coverage is much higher than union density; and not all employees in a covered firm are necessarily covered. This institutional setup suggests to distinguish explicitly union...

Support of business start-ups is partially motivated by social policy objectives. The paper discusses these social policy objectives on a conceptual and empirical basis. Its focus is on start-ups out of unemployment. Implications for the design and the evaluation of socially motivated start-up...

We investigate the interdependence of debt financing and R&D activities of young firms.Using micro-level data of the KfW/ZEW Start-up Panel, our estimation results show that firmcharacteristics are more important than personal characteristics of the founders for explainingyoung firms’...