The current debate over distributional implications of the crisis-ridden Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is heavily biased towards inter-national accounts. Little attention is paid to who wins and who loses out intra-nationally. I argue that in Germany the EMU has reinforced dualization, the insider-outsider cleavage in the country’s welfare state and production model. To scrutinize this argument, I analyze longitudinal linked employer-employee data (N>9.6 mio) and pursue a mechanistic three-step identification strategy: First, I illustrate how the introduction of the Euro distorted real interest and exchange rates within the Eurozone. Second, I demonstrate how these imbalances redistributed rents from the domestic sector, in particular from construction, to the core manufacturing industry. Third, I show how this shift in industry rents reverberated to the wage distribution and increased inequality. The study contributes to resolve the puzzle why wage inequality in Germany increased through a fanning out of the wage distribution whereas countries similarly exposed to technological change and globalization grew unequal through a polarization of their wage distribution.
Wage Inequality in Latin America: Learning from Matched Employer-Employee Data