Volume 14, Issue 3

This study estimates the employment effects of industry-specific, collectively bargained minimum wages in Germany for two occupations associated with the construction sector. I propose a truly exogenous control group in contrast to the control group design used in the literature. Further, a difference-in-differences-in-differences estimator is presented as a robustness test for occupation-specific and/or industry-specific, time-varying, unobserved heterogeneity. I do not find a significantly negative employment effect, even though the minimum wage is binding in (East) Germany. Possible explanations include substitution effects, non-compliance and models of monopsonic competition.

This study contributes to the sparse literature on employment spillovers of minimum wages. We exploit the minimum wage introduction and subsequent increases in the German roofing sector that gave rise to an internationally unprecedented hard bite of a minimum wage. We look at the chances of remaining employed in the roofing sector for workers with and without a binding minimum wage and use the plumbing sector that is not subject to a minimum wage as a suitable benchmark sector. By estimating the counterfactual wage that plumbers would receive in the roofing sector given their characteristics, we are able to identify employment effects along the entire wage distribution. The results indicate that the chances for roofers to remain employed in the sector in eastern Germany deteriorated along the entire wage distribution. Such employment spillovers to workers without a binding minimum wage may result from scale effects and/or capital-labour substitution.

The introduction, abolition and subsequent re-introduction of the minimum wage in the German electrical trade gave rise to series of natural experiments, which are used to study minimum wage effects. We find similar impacts in all three cases on wages, employment and the receipt of public welfare benefits. Average wages are raised by the minimum wage in East Germany, but there is almost no evidence for employment effects. The results also show that the wage effect is quickly undone after the abolition of the minimum wage.

Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel provide insight into the relationship between standard and non-standard work, from the perspective of dual labour market theory. We identify two segments that largely correspond to the common distinction between these forms of employment and find substantial differences in the determination of wages, as well as the composition of worker and job characteristics. These differences tend to increase after the Hartz reforms. The estimates also indicate the existence of a primary sector wage premium and job rationing, as well as specific patterns of labour mobility due to (partly non-economic) barriers between segments.

We review the labor market implications of recent real-business cycle and New Keynesian models that successfully replicate the empirical equity premium. We document the fact that all models reviewed in this article that do not feature either sticky wages or immobile labor between two production sectors as in Boldrin et al. (2001) imply a negative correlation of working hours and output that is not observed empirically. Within the class of Neo-Keynesian models, sticky prices alone are demonstrated to be less successful than rigid nominal wages with respect to the modeling of the labor market stylized facts. In addition, monetary shocks in these models are required to be much more volatile than productivity shocks to match statistics from both the asset and labor market.