The Cyclicality of Effective Wages within Employer-Employee Matches: Evidence from German Panel Data

Silke Anger

No 34, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Abstract: Using individual based micro-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), I analyze the cyclicality of real wages for male workers within employer-employee matches over the period 1984-2004, and compare different wage measures: the standard hourly wage rate, hourly wage earnings including overtime and bonus payments, and the effective wage, which takes into account not only paid overtime, but also unpaid working hours. None of the hourly wage measures is shown to exhibit cyclicality except for the group of salaried workers with unpaid overtime. Their effective wages react strongly to changes in unemployment in a procyclical way. Despite acyclical wage rates, salaried workers without unpaid hours but with income from extra payments, such as bonuses, experienced procyclical earnings movements. Monthly earnings were also procyclical for hourly paid workers who received overtime payments. The procyclicality of earnings revealed for Germany is of comparable size with the one in the U.S.

Keywords: Wage cyclicality; effective wages; unpaid overtime; bonus payments; firm stayers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E32 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 p.
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.62871.de/diw_sp0034.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Cyclicality of Effective Wages within Employer-Employee Matches: Evidence from German Panel Data (2007)
Working Paper: The cyclicality of effective wages within employer-employee matches: evidence from German panel data (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp34

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().