Union Bargaining and Intra-Industry Productivity Differentials: Theory and Evidence from Germany

Tobias Brändle () and Florian Baumann

VfS Annual Conference 2013 (Duesseldorf): Competition Policy and Regulation in a Global Economic Order from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: This paper indicates that the extent of collective bargaining coverage in an industry may depend on the differences in firms productivity levels within the industry. Less pronounced differences in productivity levels make it easier to design collective wage contracts that are accepted by a wider range of firms within an industry. Higher dispersion in productivity levels gives rise to the use of firm-level wage agreements reached by unions, while coverage by industry-wide contracts is likely to decrease. We measure correlations between productivity variation and collective bargaining coverage in various industries using German linked-employer-employee data from 2000-2008 and find that the share of industry-wide collective bargaining agreements may indeed be negatively correlated with the dispersion of plant productivity within an industry, while the opposite might hold true for firm-level contracts.

JEL-codes: D22 J51 L16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/79852/1/VfS_2013_pid_379.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:vfsc13:79852

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2013 (Duesseldorf): Competition Policy and Regulation in a Global Economic Order from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().