Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/20056 
Year of Publication: 
2003
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 812
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
In a sharp break with past German research, some recent estimates have suggested that plants with work councils have 25 to 30 per cent higher productivity than their works-councilfree counterparts. Such findings can only serve to buttress the strong theoretical and policy interest in the German institution, not least in an environment of union decline. In the present paper, we estimate the effects of works councils on productivity, 1997-2000, using a nationally representative German data set. We recoup the works council effect by estimating translog production functions, stochastic frontier production functions, and a model in first differences. Once we focus on a core sample of establishments with 21 to 100 employees in which the powers of the works council are a datum, it emerges that the positive productivity differential is a chimera. By the same token, neither is the effect negative. This result is important in its own right given the sharply opposing findings of past empirical research and the partisan positions these have helped sustain.
Subjects: 
works councils
production functions
panel data
Germany
JEL: 
J50
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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