According to the German disability law, or Schwerbehindertengesetz, either six percent of all jobs in an establishment must be occupied by disabled employees or the firm has to pay a penalty of DM 200 per month for every job under consideration. This note reports results from the first...

Das Schwerbehindertengesetz verpflichtete in seiner bis 30.9.2000 gültigen Fassung alle Arbeitgeber ab 16 Beschäftigten, sechs Prozent der Arbeitsplätze mit Schwerbehinderten zu besetzen, ansonsten war für jeden nicht entsprechend besetzten Arbeitsplatz eine Ausgleichsabgabe von monatlich...

In its 1998 final report, the German Co-determination Commission identified a large and growing sector of the economy in which employees are covered neither by participation on company boards nor through the vehicle of works councils. The Commission argued that the steady erosion of...

In a sharp break with past German research, some recent estimates have suggested that plants with work councils have 25 to 30 per cent higher productivity than their works-councilfree counterparts. Such findings can only serve to buttress the strong theoretical and policy interest in the German...

In a survey published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations, Frege (2002) evaluates research on the German works council from the perspective of several disciplines, including economics. Ultimately, she concludes that economic analysis of the works council has reached a ?dead end?. The...

18 studies using data from 20 highly developed, developing, and less developed countries document that average wages in exporting firms are higher than in non-exporting firms from the same industry and region. The existence of these so-called exporter wage premia is one of the stylized facts...

An empirical analysis of various waves of the ALLBUS social survey shows that union density fell substantially in West Germany from 1980 to 2000. Such a negative trend can be observed for men and women and for different groups of the workforce. Repeated crosssectional analyses suggest that a...

An empirical analysis of various waves of the ALLBUS social survey shows that the level and the structure of unionization has become more and more similar in eastern and western Germany in the period 1992 to 2000. The originally high level of union density in eastern Germany has dropped below...