Nach monatelangen Tarifverhandlungen gibt es für die rund 800 000 Beschäftigten im Bauhauptgewerbe einen Schlichterspruch – und die bislang höchste Tariflohnvereinbarung Deutschlands in diesem Jahr: Die Beschäftigten im Tarifgebiet West bekommen zum 1. Mai 2018 5,7% mehr Lohn und insgesamt drei Einmalzahlungen: im November diesen Jahres 250 Euro, im Juni 2019 600 Euro und im November 2019 noch einmal 250 Euro. Im Tarifgebiet Ost steigen die Tariflöhne ab Mai 2018 sogar um 6,6% und im Juni 2019 dann um 0,8%. Dazu kommt eine Einmalzahlung im November 2019 in Höhe von 250 Euro je Beschäftigten. Doch wie viel vom Plus bleibt den Bauarbeitenden wirklich? Das IWH hat die realen Einkommenszuwächse berechnet.

Der neue Tariflohnabschluss verheißt Positives für die 2,3 Millionen Beschäftigten des öffentlichen Dienstes von Bund und Kommunen: Rückwirkend zum 01.03.2018 erhalten sie 3,2%, ab dem 01.04.2019 weitere 3,1% und zum 01.03.2020 nochmals 1,1% mehr Lohn. Die Beschäftigten bis zur Entgeltgruppe 6 erhalten zudem eine Einmalzahlung von 250 Euro.

The adverse macroeconomic consequences of the Great Recession in 2009 spread well beyond the United States, highlighting the importance of financial stability and the housing market for real economic activity. Moreover, the vicious bank-sovereign cycle and the resulting sovereign-debt crisis of 2010-2012 posed a big threat to the survival of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) as a whole. While there is widespread consensus about the underlying causes of these crises, policy makers are still debating about what can be done to prevent future crises and, especially in the Euro area, deeply disagree on the direction of reforms. After all, most regulatory measures face not only the trade-off between financial resilience versus efficiency but also the fundamental choice between rule or discretion based interventions (Bénassy-Quéré et al., 2018).

This paper investigates the influence of industrial relations on firm wage premia in Germany. OLS regressions for the firm effects from a two-way fixed effects decomposition of workers’ wages by Card, Heining, and Kline (2013) document that average premia are larger in firms bound by collective agreements and in firms with a works council, holding constant firm performance. RIF regressions show that premia are less dispersed among covered firms but more dispersed among firms with a works council. Hence, deunionisation is the only among the suspects investigated that contributes to explaining the marked rise in the premia dispersion over time.

On 23 June 2016, there will be a referendum in the United Kingdom (UK) on the stay of the country in the European Union (EU). Based on recent poll data, the share of supporters and opponents of an exit varies around 50%. Opponents of the UK breaking up with Brussels („Brexit“) refer to high costs in terms of stagnating economic growth if the UK leaves the EU. The risk of reduced trade, declining foreign direct investment, and a lower degree of financial market integration is high following an exit of the “single market”.

This paper assesses the impact of legal trades by corporate insiders on the liquidity of the firm’s stock. For this purpose, we analyze two liquidity measures and one information asymmetry measure. The analysis allows us to study as well the effect of a change in insider trading regulation, namely the implementation of the Market Abuse Directive (European Union Directive 2003/6/EC) on the Dutch stock market. The first set of results shows that, in accordance with theories of asymmetric information, the intensity of legal insider trading in a given company is positively related to the bid-ask spread and to the information asymmetry measure. We also find that the Market Abuse Directive did not reduce significantly this effect. Secondly, analyzing liquidity and information asymmetry around the days of legal insider trading, we find that small and large capitalization stocks see their bid-ask spread and the permanent price impact increase when insiders trade. For mid-cap stocks, only the permanent price impact increases. Finally, we could not detect a significant improvement of these results following the change in regulation.

In Germany, dependent employees take almost 30 days of paid vacation annually. We enquire whether an individual’s trade union membership affects the duration of vacation. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the period 1985 to 2010 and employing pooled OLS-estimators, we find that being a union member goes along with almost one additional day of vacation per year. Estimations exploiting the panel structure of our data suggest that a smaller part of this vacation differential can be due to the union membership status, while self-selection effects play a more important role.

In this paper, we employ a registry of legal insider trading for Dutch listed firms to investigate the information content of trades by corporate insiders. Using a standard event-study methodology, we examine short-term stock price behavior around trades. We find that purchases are followed by economically large abnormal returns. This result is strongest for purchases by top executives and for small market capitalization firms, which is consistent with the hypothesis that legal insider trading is an important channel through which information flows to the market. We analyze also the impact of the implementation of the Market Abuse Directive (European Union Directive 2003/6/EC), which strengthens the existing regulation in the Netherlands. We show that the new regulation reduced the information content of sales by top executives.

We analyze the determinants of sovereign default risk of EMU member states using government bond yield spreads as risk indicators. We focus on default risk for different time spans indicated by spreads for different maturities. Using a panel framework we analyze whether there are different drivers of default risk for different maturities. We find that lower economic growth and larger openness increase default risk for all maturities. Higher indebtedness only increases short-term risk, whereas net lending, trade balance and interest rate costs only drive long-term default risk.

European trade unions have attempted to coordinate their bargaining strategies transnationally in order to counter downward pressures on wages. Such coordination is most feasible in broadly integrated and exposed sectors that have to face common competitive constraints on wages. This article investigates collectively negotiated wage increases in the metal sector in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. We assume a specific logic of transnational pattern bargaining, with Germany as the ‘anchor’ country. We investigate the emergence of a transnational wage coordination effect before and after institutions for the coordination of wage bargaining were established. Finally, we draw conclusions on prospects for wage bargaining coordination with further integration of Economic and Monetary Union.