Draft:Alfred Kleinknecht

• Comment: Possibly notable, but needs more in-depth references. No sentences should be unsourced. HickoryOughtShirt?4 (talk) 21:18, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

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Alfred Kleinknecht (Lehrensteinsfeld, 1951) is a German professor of economics. Kleinknecht is well known in the Netherlands for his criticism of the wage moderation policy that the country followed for decades.

Career

Kleinknecht graduated in economics from the Free University of Berlin in 1977 and subsequently worked for some time at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. In 1984, he received his PhD from the Free University of Amsterdam. Since then, he has been affiliated with the University of Maastricht, the University of Amsterdam, again the Free University of Amsterdam, and from 1997 to 2013 with Delft University of Technology. In 2006, he was a visiting professor at the Sapienza University of Rome and in 2009 he was a visiting professor at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris. Since 2013, he has been affiliated with the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung in Düsseldorf, among others, and since 2019 he has been a visiting professor at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan.

Kleinknecht's Law

Kleinknecht gained national fame in the Netherlands through his inaugural address (inaugural speech as professor) at the VU in 1994 in which he criticized the policy of wage moderation. The inaugural address was the opening of the national news that day and made the front page of the national newspapers.

PvdA parliamentary group leader Wouter Bos called Kleinknecht's theory that wage moderation harms productivity 'Kleinknecht's Law' in 2004.

Kleinknecht has since conducted a great deal of research showing that wage moderation and flexibilization of the labor market have a negative impact on innovation and the growth of the labor productivity.

Credit and euro crisis

Kleinknecht warned on April 3, 2007 in the Dutch newspaper NRC about the danger of a credit crisis, well before it would break out. In the same newspaper, on 22 April 2008, he already pointed out the problematic debt build-up in Southern European countries.

Trivia

• Nobel Prize winner Jan Tinbergen wrote a foreword in the trade edition of Kleinknecht's dissertation.
• For his services to science and his dedication and involvement in Dutch society, Kleinknecht was appointed Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau on 27 April 2012.