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Silke Anger
- 27 July 2007
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 783The cyclicality of effective wages within employer-employee matches: evidence from German panel dataDetails
- Abstract
- Using individual based micro-data from the German Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP), I analyse the cyclicality of real wages for male workers within employer-employee matches over the period 1984-2004, and compare different wage measures: the standard hourly wage rate, hourly wage earnings including overtime and bonus payments, and the effective wage, which takes into account not only paid overtime, but also unpaid working hours. None of the hourly wage measures is shown to exhibit cyclicality except for the group of salaried workers with unpaid overtime. Their effective wages react strongly to changes in unemployment in a pro-cyclical way. Despite a-cyclical wage rates, salaried workers without unpaid hours but with income from extra payments, such as bonuses, experienced pro-cyclical earnings movements. Monthly earnings were also pro-cyclical for hourly paid workers who received overtime payments. The pro-cyclicality of earnings revealed for Germany is of comparable size with the one in the U.S.
- JEL Code
- E32 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles→Business Fluctuations, Cycles
J31 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs→Wage Level and Structure, Wage Differentials - Network
- ECB/CEPR labour market workshop on wage and labour cost dynamics