How collective contracts and works councils reduce the gender wage gap

"The gender wage gap in Germany is smaller in firms covered by collective contracts or having a works council, partly because these institutions are associated with lower unobserved productivity differences and less wage discrimination, partly because they compress the distribution of wage residuals." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))Lohnunterschied, Männer, Frauen, geschlechtsspezifische Faktoren, Tarifvertrag - Auswirkungen, Betriebsrat - Auswirkungen, Lohndifferenzierung, Lohndiskriminierung, IAB-Linked-Employer-Employee-Datensatz

Analyzing the changing gender wage gap based on multiply imputed right censored wages

"In order to analyze the gender wage gap with the German IAB-employment sample we have to solve the problem of censored wages at the upper limit of the social security system. We treat this problem as a missing data problem. We regard the missingness mechanism as not missing at random (NMAR, according to Little and Rubin, 1987, 2002) as well as missing by design. The censored wages are multiply imputed by draws of a random variable from a truncated distribution. The multiple imputation is based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique. We complete the dataset with this technique in order to apply a Juhn-Murphy-Pierce-decomposition. As the main sources for the narrowing gender wage gap from 1991 to 2001 we identify an improvement of women's position within the wage distribution." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))Lohnunterschied, Lohnhöhe, geschlechtsspezifische Faktoren, IAB-Beschäftigtenstichprobe, Datenaufbereitung, Datenanalyse, angewandte Statistik, Imputationsverfahren

Wage subsidies for needy job-seekers and their effect on individual labour market outcomes after the German reforms

"In Germany, since 2005 needy job-seekers without access to earnings-related and insurance-paid 'unemployment benefit I' are entitled to means-tested and tax-funded 'unemployment benefit II'. Several active labour market programmes support the integration of these needy job-seekers into the labour market. Our paper estimates the average effect of targeted wage subsidies - paid to employers for a limited period of time - on the subsequent labour market prospects of participating needy job-seekers. We apply propensity score matching to compare participants with a group of similar non-participants. The results show that wage subsidies had in fact large and significant favourable effects: 20 months after taking up a subsidised job, the share of persons in regular employment is nearly 40 percentage points higher across participants. Estimated effects on the shares not unemployed and the share no longer receiving 'unemployment benefit II' are slightly smaller." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))Arbeitslosengeld II-Empfänger, Eingliederungszuschuss - Erfolgskontrolle, Arbeitsmarktchancen

Measuring overeducation with earnings frontiers and multiply imputed censored income data

"In this paper, we remove one serious drawback of the IAB employment sample impeding its applicability to the estimation of earnings frontiers: the censoring of the income data, by multiple imputation. Then, we estimate individual potential income with stochastic earnings frontiers, and we measure overeducation as the ratio between actual income and potential income. It is shown that the measurement of overeducation by this income ratio is a valuable addition to the overeducation literature because the well-established objective or subjective overeducation measures focus on some ordinal matching aspects and ignore the metric income and efficiency aspects of overeducation." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))Überqualifikation - Messung, Einkommen, Einkommenshöhe, IAB-Beschäftigtenstichprobe, Stichprobenfehler, Datenaufbereitung, Datenanalyse, Schätzung, Imputationsverfahren

Wage Subsidies for Needy Job-Seekers and Their Effect on Individual Labour Market Outcomes after the German Reforms

Our paper estimates the average effect of wage subsidies – paid to employers for a limited period of time – on the labour market prospects of needy job-seekers without access to insurance-paid 'unemployment benefit I'. The results show that wage subsidies had large and significant favourable effects: 20 months after taking up a subsidised job, the share of persons in regular employment is nearly 40 percentage points higher across participants. On the whole, groups with particular placement difficulties benefit comparatively more from subsidisation.wage subsidies, unemployment benefits II for needy job-seekers, evaluation of active labour market programmes, propensity score matching

They are even larger! More (on) puzzling labor market volatilities

"This paper shows that the German labor market is more volatile than the US labor market at the business cycle frequency. Specifically, the volatility of the cyclical component of several labor market variables (e.g., the job-finding rate, the labor market tightness and vacancies) divided by the volatility of labor productivity is roughly twice as large as in the United States. We derive and simulate a simple model to explain this seemingly puzzling result. This new model provides explanations for this phenomenon, in particular the longer job tenure in Germany." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))Arbeitsmarktindikatoren - internationaler Vergleich, Beschäftigungsschwankung, offene Stellen, Arbeitsproduktivität, Konjunkturabhängigkeit, Betriebszugehörigkeit, Beschäftigungsdauer, Arbeitslosenquote, labour turnover, Kündigung - Quote, Lohnhöhe, institutionelle Faktoren, Lohnfindung, matching - Quote, Produktivitätsentwicklung, USA, Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Wage Cyclicality under Different Regimes of Industrial Relations

Since there is scant evidence on the role of industrial relations in wage cyclicality, this paper analyzes the effect of collective wage contracts and of works councils on real wage growth. Using linked employer-employee data for western Germany, we find that works councils affect wage growth only in combination with collective bargaining. Wage adjustments to positive and negative economic shocks are not always symmetric. Only under sectoral bargaining there is a (nearly symmetric) reaction to rising and falling unemployment. In contrast, wage growth in establishments without collective bargaining adjusts only to falling unemployment and is unaffected by rising unemployment.wage cyclicality, wage bargaining, works council, Germany

The linked employer-employee dataset of the IAB (LIAB)

"The linked employer-employee dataset of the IAB (LIAB) is created by matching the data of the IAB establishment panel and the process-produced data of the Federal Employment Services (in particular the IAB). The distinctive feature of these data is the combination of information about individuals and details concerning the firms in which these people work. This facilitates a number of new methods of analysis and the first empirical examination of theoretical concepts. This applies not only to economic questions but for all areas of empirical social research. Studies have so far been conducted on subjects in labour economics, personnel economics and sociology. Some versions of the LIAB are accessible via the research data centre (Forschungsdatenzentrum - FDZ) of the Federal Employment Services (Bundesagentur für Arbeit - BA) at the IAB." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))IAB-Linked-Employer-Employee-Datensatz, prozessproduzierte Daten, personenbezogene Daten, Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung, Datengewinnung, Datenorganisation, Datenaufbereitung

Wage structure and labour mobility in the West German private sector 1993-2000

"Since the early 90's the West German firms have to deal with sharp changes of economic environment: the German Unification, the emerging competitors in the east European countries and the deregulation of several labour market institutions. We analyse the wage structure, the wage changes and the labour mobility during this period using the linked employer-employee dataset from the Institute for Employment Research for the years 1993, 1995 and 2000. The dataset allows us to investigate especially the wage structure within firms and the exit and entry rates of workers at firm level. The main finding is that both wage inequality within and between firms and workers mobility was rising during the 90's. This development is mainly driven by the dynamics of high wage workers and high wage firms. The rising variance of wages can only partly be explained by a change in the occupational composition of firms. A decomposition of the variance of wages shows that the importance of the firm-specific variation increases, whereas that of human capital variation decreases." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))Lohnstruktur, Lohnentwicklung, Arbeitskräftemobilität, IAB-Linked-Employer-Employee-Datensatz, Arbeitsplatzwechsel, Lohnunterschied, Lohndifferenzierung, privater Sektor, Privatwirtschaft, Westdeutschland, Bundesrepublik Deutschland