Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/120972 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 9323
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
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.
Subjects: 
firm performance
concession bargaining
opening clauses decentralization
pacts for employment and competitiveness
regression discontinuity design
Germany
JEL: 
D22
J3
J41
J50
J53
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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