 Are working hours a new driver of inequality?Stefanie Gerold and Ulrike Stein No 203-2020, IMK Working Paper from IMK at the Hans Boeckler Foundation, Macroeconomic Policy Institute Abstract: This paper studies the relationship between inequalities in working hours and overall earnings inequality in Germany between 2006 and 2014, and the role of declining collective bargaining coverage. Using data from the German Structure of Earnings Survey (GSES), a variance decomposition of earnings inequality reveals that hours inequality and the covariance between wages and hours become more important over time in determining earnings inequality. Based on unconditional quantile regressions, we show that the presence of collective agreements tends to increase working hours at the bottom of the distribution, and lowers them at the top end of the distribution, while controlling for individual and firm-specific characteristics. These findings imply that union presence is not only able to compress wage inequality, but might reduce earnings inequality through a compression of working hours. Keywords: Inequality; working hours; collective bargaining; decomposition; unconditional quantile regression; RIF regressions; Structure of Earnings Survey (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imk:wpaper:203-2020 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in IMK Working Paper from IMK at the Hans Boeckler Foundation, Macroeconomic Policy Institute Contact information at EDIRC. |
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