Pacts for Employment and Competitiveness as a Role Model? Their Effects on Firm Performance

Arbeitspapier

Pacts for employment and competitiveness are an integral component of the ongoing process of decentralization of collective bargaining in Germany, a phenomenon that has been hailed as key to that nation's economic resurgence. Yet little is known about the effects of pacts on firm performance. The evidence largely pertains to employment and is decidedly mixed. The present paper investigates the association between pacts and a wider set of outcomes – wages, employment, investment, productivity, innovation, and survivability – in a RDD framework where the controls comprise establishments that negotiated over pacts but failed to reach agreement on their implementation. An extensive set of simulations are run to test for robustness of the key findings of the model. There is no evidence of pacts negatively impacting any of the selected measures of establishment performance. Indeed, the positive effects reported for wages, productivity, and innovation are sustained in simulations.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 9323

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis ; Labor Contracts ; Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining: General ; Labor-Management Relations; Industrial Jurisprudence
• Subject: firm performance ; concession bargaining ; opening clauses decentralization ; pacts for employment and competitiveness ; regression discontinuity design ; Germany

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Addison, John T. ; Teixeira, Paulino ; Evers, Katalin ; Bellmann, Lutz
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2015

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/120972
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET