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Germany’s economy is so bad even sausage factories are closingIWHThe Economist, January 15, 2026
We estimate the wage effects of shared governance, or codetermination, in the form of a mandate of one-third of corporate board seats going to worker representatives. We study a reform in Germany that abruptly abolished this mandate for stock corporations incorporated after August 1994, while it locked the mandate for the slightly older cohorts. Our research design compares firm cohorts incorporated before the reform and after; in a robustness check we draw on the analogous difference in unaffected firm types (LLCs). We find no effects of board-level codetermination on wages and the wage structure, even in firms with particularly flexible wages. The degree of rent sharing and the labor share are also unaffected. We reject that disinvestment could have offset wage effects through the canonical hold-up channel, as shared governance, if anything, increases capital formation.
Nonemployment is often posited as a worker’s outside option in wage-setting models such as bargaining and wage posting. The value of nonemployment is therefore a key determinant of wages. We measure the wage effect of changes in the value of nonemployment among initially employed workers. Our quasi-experimental variation in the value of nonemployment arises from four large reforms of unemployment insurance (UI) benefit levels in Austria. We document that wages are insensitive to UI benefit changes: point estimates imply a wage response of less than $0.01 per $1.00 UI benefit increase, and we can reject sensitivities larger than $0.03. The insensitivity holds even among workers with low wages and high predicted unemployment duration, and among job switchers hired out of unemployment. The insensitivity of wages to the nonemployment value presents a puzzle to the widely used Nash bargaining model, which predicts a sensitivity of $0.24–$0.48. Our evidence supports wage-setting models that insulate wages from the value of nonemployment.
In the canonical DMP model of job openings, all job openings stem from new job creation. Jobs denote worker-firm matches, which are destroyed following worker quits. Yet, employers classify 56 percent of vacancies as quit-driven replacement hiring into old jobs, which evidently outlived their previous matches. Accordingly, aggregate and firm-level hiring tightly track quits. We augment the DMP model with longer-lived jobs arising from sunk job creation costs and replacement hiring. Quits trigger vacancies, which beget vacancies through replacement hiring. This vacancy chain can raise total job openings and net employment. The procyclicality of quits can thereby amplify business cycles.
This paper uses administrative data to analyze a large employer-borne payroll tax rate cut for young workers in Sweden. We find no effect on net-of-tax wages of young treated workers relative to slightly older untreated workers, and a 2–3 percentage point increase in youth employment. Firms employing many young workers receive a larger tax windfall and expand right after the reform: employment, capital, sales, and profits increase. These effects appear stronger in credit-constrained firms. Youth-intensive firms also increase the wages of all their workers collectively, young as well as old, consistent with rent sharing of the tax windfall.
I show how quantity regulation can lower elasticities and thereby increase optimal tax rates. Such regulation imposes regulatory incentives for particular choice quantities. Their strength varies between zero (laissez faire) and infinite (command economy). In the latter case, regulation effectively eliminates any intensive behavioral responses to taxes; a previously distortionary tax becomes a lump sum. For intermediate regulation (where some deviation is feasible), intensive behavioral responses are still weaker than under zero regulation, and so quantity regulation reduces elasticities, thereby facilitating subsequent taxation. I apply this mechanism to labor supply and present correlational evidence for this complementarity: hours worked in high-regulation countries are compressed, and these countries tax labor at higher rates.
