COLBAR-EUROPE's contribution to the EU policy agenda focusses on the knowledge gap in the field of industrial relations. Until recently, the important question about what is agreed in collective agreements in European countries could not be answered, as can be noticed in EC's Industrial Relations Reports and ESDE 2017 report, the EC's 2017 white paper, as well as in the forthcoming OECD report on the impact of collective bargaining and in the EUROFOUND website. No other publication discusses the content of Collective Agreements, whether it relates to wage setting or to other topics agreed in collective bargaining.

COLBAR-EUROPE's research questions are fivefold:

a) Which topics are agreed upon 'in the agreements and can patterns in bargaining topics be identified within and across countries and private and public sectors?

b) Do agreements include wage clauses, pay scales, and indexation clauses, and how do pay scales compare within and across countries and sectors?

c) To what extent is a wider bargaining agenda agreed upon and are clauses traded off against each other?

d) Do agreements converge across countries when concluded by daughters of multinational companies and do they align with Transnational Agreements?

5. How feasible is a continuous Europe-wide data collection of collective agreements?