Rent Seeking at Plant Level: An Application of the Card and de la Rica Tenure Test to German Works Councils

John Addison, Paulino Teixeira and Thomas Zwick

No 09-04, Economics Working Papers from Queen's Management School, Queen's University Belfast

Abstract: Low-skilled workers enjoy a large wage advantage in German works council establishments. Since job tenure is also longer for these workers, one explanation might be rent-seeking. If the premium is a compensating wage differential (or a return to unmeasured ability), it should not lead to higher tenure; whereas if it is (partly) rent, lower quits should lead to longer tenure at plants with works councils. Our analysis uses the Card and de la Rica (2006) tenure model, and although the association between skill level and the works council tenure gap is positive it fails to achieve statistical significance in a single equation framework. However, running the tenure equation for separate skill quintiles, we find that those with the highest wage premium have the greatest tenure. As a result, although we cannot be certain that the works council wage mark-up of low-skilled workers is necessarily a non-competitive rent, the observed pattern of job tenure across different skill subsamples is not after all inconsistent with rent-seeking behavior.

Keywords: Tenure; Rent seeking; Works councils; Collective agreements; Wage and tenure gaps; Wage quintiles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J51 J53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://ftp.qub.ac.uk/pub/users/repec/qub/wpaper/MS_WPS_ECO_09_04.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server ftp.qub.ac.uk: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

Related works:
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:qub:wpaper:0904

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Queen's Management School, Queen's University Belfast Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark McGovern ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).