Reinhard Hujer (Department of Economics, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Mertonstraße 17, 60054 Frankfurt am Main, Germany) Bernd Fitzenberger () (Department of Economics, University of Mannheim, 68131 Mannheim, Germany, E-Mail: Bernd.Fitzenberger@vwl.uni-mannheim.de) Reinhold Schnabel (Department of Economics, University of Essen, Universitätsstraße 12, 45117 Essen, Germany) Thomas E. MaCurdy (Stanford University, Department of Economics, Landau Economics Building, Stanford, CA 94305-6072, USA)
Additional information is available for the following
registered author(s):
The rise of unemployment in West Germany is often attributed to an inflexibility of the wage structure in the face of a skill bias in labor demand trends. In addition, there is concern in Germany that during the 70s and 80s unions were pursuing a too egalitarian wage policy. In a cohort analysis, we estimate quantile regressions of wages taking account of the censoring in the data. We present a new framework to describe trends in the entire wage distribution across education and age groups in a parsimonious way. We explore whether wage trends are uniform across cohorts, thus defining a macroeconomic wage trend. Our findings are that wages of workers with intermediate education levels, among them especially those of young workers, deteriorated slightly relative to both high and low education levels. Wage inequality within age-education groups stayed fairly constant. Nevertheless, the German wage structure was fairly stable, especially in international comparison. The results appear consistent with a skill bias in labor demand trends, recognizing that union wages are only likely to be binding floors for low-wage earners.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Find related papers by JEL classification: J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials C24 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Truncated and Censored Models
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.