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"In a characteristically combative treatment, Jirjahn (2008a) argues that Addison and Teixeira’s (2006) finding of a negative relationship between works council presence and employment growth is a chimera produced by the way in which establishment size is measured. We reject his assertion of misspecification for two reasons; the second of which undoubtedly contributed to leading Jirjahn astray. And while Jirjahn’s treatment is of interest in its own right, he does a poor job of portraying our overall analysis. Thus, he neglects our treatment of survival bias while ignoring our presentation of a dynamic labor demand model. Elsewhere he seems to grudgingly support the former (Jirjahn 2008b), and implicitly to accept our findings pertaining to employment adjustment (where we report that works councils do not slow the tortuous pace of employment adjustment in Germany). At root, the thrust of his treatment is adversarial and his position on the economic effects of works councils over-optimistic. But the main lesson of Jirjahn’s critique is that more work is required of all of us in this area. Issues raised by the present exchange, apart from the need for a wider set of covariates and longer time frame, include the selection of firms into collective bargaining and works councils and out of the system, and the consequences for the raw point estimates. Pending this work, it would be idle to overstate the robustness of the extant results. We hinted at this in our own treatment in comparing cross-sectional results with dynamic panel estimates." (author's abstract), "Jirjahn (2008a) argumentiert, dass der Befund von Addison und Teixera (2006), nach dem ein negativer Zusammenhangs zwischen der Existenz von Betriebsräten und dem Beschäftigungswachstum vorliege, ein methodisches Artefakt sei, welches aus der Art der Messung der Betriebsgröße resultiere. Wir widersprechen dieser These mit zwei zentralen Argumenten. Obwohl Jirjahns Argumentation für sich genommen interessant ist, spiegelt sie unsere Analyse insgesamt nicht vollständig wider, weil unsere Behandlung des „survival bias“ vernachlässigt und unsere Präsentation eines dynamischen Arbeitsnachfragemodells nicht zur Kenntnis genommen wird. Die Hauptbotschaft von Jirjahns Kritik ist, dass mehr Forschung notwendig ist, u.a. mit mehr Kontrollvariablen, längeren Zeithorizonten und zur Selektion der Unternehmen, in denen ein Betriebsrat gegründet oder wiederabgeschafft wird. Bis hierzu weitere Ergebnisse vorliegen, muss die Robustheit der schon vorliegenden Ergebnisse vorsichtig bewertet werden." (Autorenreferat)

Do apparently large minimum wage increases in an environment of straightened economic circumstances produce clearer evidence of disemployment effects than is typically reported in the new economics of the minimum wage? The present paper augments the sparse literature covering the very latest increases in the U.S. minimum wage, using three different data sets and the principal estimation strategies for handling geographically-disparate trends. Despite the seemingly more favorable milieu for identifying displacement effects, and although our treatment calls into question one well-received estimation strategy, our preferred specification generally fails to support a finding of negative employment effects. That is to say, minimum-wage workers are apparently concentrated in sectors of the economy for which the labor demand response to statutory wage hikes is minimal. Popular concern with a "recessionary multiplier" thus seems overdone.

The authors investigate the employment consequences of minimum wage regulation in 16 OECD countries, 1970-2008. Their treatment is motivated by Neumark and Wascher's (2004) seminal cross-country study. Apart from the longer time interval examined, a major departure is the authors' focus on prime-age females, a group often neglected in the minimum wage literature. Another is their deployment of time-varying policy and institutional regressors. The average effects they report are consistent with minimum wages causing material employment losses among the target group. Their secondary finding is that minimum wage increases are more associated with (reduced) participation rates than with elevated joblessness. Further, although the authors find common ground with Neumark and Wascher as regards the role of some individual labor market institutions and policies, they do not observe the same patterns in the institutional data. Specifically, prime-age females do not exhibit stronger employment losses in countries with the least regulated markets.

"Modern trade unions act in two arenas: the state and politics on the one hand, and the labour market and collective bargaining on the other. The relative importance of their economic and political activities differs between countries and world regions, as well as historically and between types of unions. So do the way and the extent to which union action in the two arenas is coordinated. The dominant kind of trade union as it emerged from the second postwar settlement after 1945 no longer claimed a right or reserved the option to overthrow the governmnt of the state through a political strike. In this they paid tribute to the superior legitimacy of free elections as compared to 'direct action' of the organized working class. Today more or less explicit constitutional law makes it illegal for unions - within the limits of usually complex legal rules - to strike in the context of disputes with employers and in pursuit of collective agreements on wages and working conditions." (excerpt)

Die Gründung und das Überleben neuer Unternehmen sind von individuellen, regionalen und sektoralen Faktoren abhängig. Die ökonometrische Analyse dieser Zusammenhänge mit Hilfe multidimensionaler Ansätze setzt die Verfügbarkeit stark regional und sektoral disaggregierter Daten voraus, die in einer entsprechend langen Zeitreihe vorliegen müssen. Anhand der Betriebsdatei der Beschäftigtenstatistik der Bundesagentur für Arbeit und des IAB Betriebspanels analysiert die vorliegende Arbeit Gründungen und deren Überleben in Westdeutschland von 1983 bis 2002. Langlebige, innovative Unternehmensgründungen spielen im Marktselektionsprozess eine herausragende Rolle und sind ein wichtiger Impulsgeber für das Wirtschaftswachstum. Das Gründungsgeschehen variiert beträchtlich zwischen Regionen und Branchen. Nur ein Bruchteil der Gründungen einer Gründungskohorte überlebt langfristig. Die Überlebenswahrscheinlichkeit neu gegründeter Unternehmen wird neben der Verfügbarkeit von finanziellen Ressourcen und Wissen insbesondere durch das regionale und sektorale Umfeld beeinflusst.

This paper uses matched employee-employer LIAB data to provide panel estimates of the structure of labor demand in Germany, 1993-2002, distinguishing between highly skilled, skilled, and unskilled labor and between the manufacturing and service sectors. Reflecting current preoccupations, our demand analysis seeks also to accommodate the impact of technology and trade in addition to wages. The bottom-line interests are to provide elasticities of the demand for unskilled (and other) labor that should assist in short-run policy design and to identify the extent of skill biases or otherwise in trade and technology.

This paper present paper provides the first results for Germany on the impact of works councils and collective agreements on plant closings, using data from the IAB establishment panel. We find evidence of a robust positive association between works council presence and plant closures. The strictures of collective agreements do not seemingly affect closings. By the same token, and contrary to some recent findings on other aspects of establishment performance, the presence of a collective agreement does not attenuate the impact of local workplace representation on closings. Our analysis does nothing to encourage a sanguine view of recent legislation in Germany that facilitates the formation of works councils and strengthens their codetermination powers.

This paper examines the determinants of unemployment duration in a competing risks framework with two destination states, namely, inactivity and employment. The major innovation is our recognition of defective risks. We first use a polynomial hazard function to test for the presence of two-sources of defective risks: search involving a random process of unlucky draws that yields a non-proper duration distribution; and a split-population model in which the decision by some individuals not to consider certain destination states produces a defective distribution. Having established the primacy of the latter model, we refine it using a more flexible piecewise-constant baseline hazard function. This specification broadly confirms our earlier findings but offers a more convincing explanation for positive and zero transition rates out of unemployment. Although we do not reject the null of proportionality, abandoning the proportionality assumption does not materially alter our conclusions.

"... all that [ ] Tenement parcel or Tract of Land [ ] and known by the name of William Cliftons Dwelling Plantation Situate Lying [and being in the County of Fairfax] ... containing four Hundred Acres ..." Laminated, oversize document, 3 red seals (blurred) watermarks (crown over powder horn & GR, & HR). | This land is believed to have been occupied by George Augustine Washington at a later date. | Signed by Ignt. Digges, W. Digges & Jn. Addison. No witnesses. | On reverse, a receipt for money, signed by Wm. & Ignt. Digges & Jn. Addison. | Attested by [G. Wagoner ?], Court clerk, date obscured. | Papers of George Washington - Reel#1

Against the backdrop of its industrial relations architecture, characteristic of the ‘southern European group’ and intimately linked to the recommendations of the Troika, this paper examines four key aspects of Portuguese collective bargaining. First, it provides definitive estimates of private sector union density for that nation. Second, it models the determinants of union density at firm level. Third, it yields estimates of the union wage gap for different ranges of union density. The final issue examined is contract coverage. The received notion that the pronounced reduction in the number of industry-wide agreements and extension ordinances of late is to be equated with a fall in coverage is shown to be a chimera, the number of workers covered by new and existing agreements remaining largely unaffected by the economic crisis. The reduced frequency of new agreements and extensions is instead attributed to downward nominal wage rigidity in low-inflation regimes.

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 firm transitions between these institutions over time. The present paper maps changes in the importance of the key institutions, 1998-2004, and explores the correlates of two-way transitions, using successive waves of the German IAB Establishment Panel and both cross-sectional and panel components of the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey. We identify the workplace correlates of the demise of collective bargaining in Britain and the erosion of sectoral bargaining in Germany, and identify the respective roles of behavioral and compositional change.

This paper presents the first comparative analysis of the decline in collective bargaining in two European countries where that decline has been most pronounced. Using workplace-level data and a common model, we present decompositions of changes in collective bargaining and worker representation in the private sector in Germany and Britain over the period 1998-2004. In both countries within-effects dominate compositional changes as the source of the recent decline in unionism. Overall, the decline in collective bargaining is more pronounced in Britain than in Germany, thus continuing a trend apparent since the 1980s. Although workplace characteristics differ markedly across the two countries, assuming counterfactual values of these characteristics makes little difference to unionization levels. Expressed differently, the German dummy looms large.

This paper depicts and examines the decline in collective bargaining coverage in Germany. Using repeat cross-section and longitudinal data from the IAB Establishment Panel, we show the overwhelming importance of behavioral as opposed to compositional change and, for the first time, document workplace transitions into and out of collective agreeements via survival analysis. We provide estimates of the median duration of coverage, and report that the factors generating entry and exit are distinct and symmetric.

We examine the association between union density and wages in Portugal where just 10 percent of all workers are union members but nine-tenths of them are covered by collective agreements. Using a unique dataset on workers, firms, and collective bargaining agreements, we examine the union density wage gap in total monthly wages and its sources – namely, worker, firm, and job-title or ‘occupational’ heterogeneity – using the Gelbach decomposition. The most important source of the mark-up associated with union density is the firm fixed effect, reflecting the differing wage policies of more and less unionized workplaces, which explains two-thirds of the wage gap. Next in importance is the job-title fixed effect, capturing occupational heterogeneity across industries. It makes up one-third of the gap, the inference being that the unobserved skills of workers contribute at most only trivially to the union density wage gap. In a separate analysis based on disaggregations of the total wage, it is also found that employers can in part offset the impact of the bargaining power of unions on wages through firm-specific wage arrangements in the form of the wage cushion. Finally, union density is shown to be associated with a modest reduction in wage inequality as the union density wage gap is highest among low-wage workers. This result is driven by the job-title fixed effect, low-wage workers benefiting more from being placed in higher paying ‘occupations.’