The effect of collective bargaining on innovation has long been in dispute. At the level of theory, the hold-up problem has been used to justify positive as well as negative effects of unionism. At the empirical level, although some would consider the North American evidence as cut and dried,...

This paper investigates trends in collective bargaining and worker representation in the German private sector from 2000 to 2008. It seeks to update and widen earlier analyses pointing to a decline in collective bargaining, while providing more information on the dual system as a whole. Using...

This paper assesses the decline in collective bargaining coverage in Germany. Using repeat cross-section and longitudinal data from the IAB Establishment Panel, it indicates the overwhelming importance of behavioral as opposed to compositional change in this process. Further, in the first use of...

Given observation-pairs (xi ,yi ), i = 1,...,n , taken to be independent observations of the random pair (X ,Y), we sometimes want to form a nonparametric estimate of m(x) = E(Y/ X = x). Let YE have the empirical distribution of the yi , and let (XS ,YS ) have the kernel-smoothed distribution of...

Do seemingly large minimum-wage increases in an environment of deep recession produce clearer evidence of disemployment than is often observed in the modern minimum wage literature? This paper uses three data sets to examine the employment effects of the most recent increases in the U.S. minimum...

Recent studies have pointed to the association between declining collective bargaining coverage and rising overall wage inequality. This association holds more or less across-the-board, at least for broad swathes of recent history. That said, the exact contribution of deununionization is a...

Recent attempts to incorporate spatial heterogeneity in minimum-wage employment models have been attacked for using overly simplistic trend controls, and for neglecting the potential impact on employment growth. We investigate whether such considerations call into question our earlier findings...

Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 indicate that between 1996 and 2010 females on average lost some of the promotion momentum they had achieved at the beginning of mid-career, although they outperformed males in this regard. For both genders economic downturn has...

Low-skilled workers enjoy a large wage advantage in German works council establishments. Since job tenure is also longer for these workers, one explanation might be rent-seeking. If the premium is a compensating wage differential (or a return to unmeasured ability), it should not lead to higher...

Industrial relations are in flux in many nations, perhaps most notably in Germany and Britain. That said, comparatively little is known in any detail of the changing pattern of the institutions of collective bargaining and worker representation in Germany and still less in both countries about...