Trade unions and employers' associations play an important role in Germany not only in wage setting, but also in social policy and labour market regulation. While the majority of companies are organised in employers' associations, less than one fifth of employees are still members of a trade...

Trade unions and employers' associations play an important role in Germany not only in wage setting, but also in social policy and labour market regulation. While the majority of companies are organised in employers' associations, less than one fifth of employees are still members of a trade...

We investigate how firms adjust to demand shocks when wages and employment determination are regulated. Using firm-level data for the Italian metal engineering industry from 2009 to 2021, we estimate the elasticity of the wage bill to changes in firm's real sales. We disentangle the effect on...

Public service reforms often provoke political backlash. Can they also yield political benefits for the politicians who champion them? We study a Wisconsin law that weakened teachers' unions and liberalized pay, prompting mass protests. Exploiting its staggered implementation across school...

This paper proposes novel natural language methods to measure worker rights from collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) for use in empirical economic analysis. Applying unsupervised text-as-data algorithms to a new collection of 30,000 CBAs from Canada in the period 1986-2015, we parse legal...

Public service reforms often provoke political backlash. Can they also yield political benefits for the politicians who champion them? We study a Wisconsin law that weakened teachers' unions and liberalized pay, prompting mass protests. Exploiting its staggered implementation across school...

This paper studies how a special wage increase for assistant nurses in Sweden affected income and employment. Workers in the public sector receive wages based on negotiations between unions and employers. These agreements usually provide the same wage increase for all covered workers. In 2016,...

When employers face a trade-off between being large and paying low wages - and in this sense have monopsony power - some productive employers decide to acquire few customers, forgo sales, and remain small. These decisions have adverse consequences for aggregate labor productivity. Using...

The prevalence of labor unions have declined post-WWII, and this paper examines whether globalization is a contributing factor. Offshoring jobs abroad may change the composition of domestic firms and employment and thus reduce union density. Alternatively, a firms' ability to offshore may erode...

This paper studies the relation between the wage and amenity components of compensation under collective bargaining. Using the universe of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in Brazil, I augment information on workers' wages with the comprehensive set of amenities codified in the text of...

Although European institutions and national governments have long pushed for a more decentralized wage bargaining structure, in some countries company or establishment-level negotiations struggle to take place. This paper offers an interpretation for that based on workers' optimal choices in an...

If a profit-maximising firm credibly commits to an employment-enhancing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) objective in negotiations with a trade union, the union can reduce its wage demands. Lower wages, ceteris paribus, raise profits, while the increase in employment enhances the payoff of...

A large body of research has investigated the impact of industrial relations on workplace innovation. Econometric research based on U.S. data suggests that unions are detrimental to innovation, while evidence from Europe is more mixed. This points to the importance of "contextualized" theorizing...

Empirical studies find that firms with employee representation have a higher productivity than firms without employee representation. The exact mechanisms for this consistent finding remain unclear, however. A frequent theoretical argument postulates that employee representation provides a...

This paper studies the impact of downward wage rigidity on wage and employment dynamics after the outbreak of major recessions in Spain. Downward wage rigidity stems from collective agreements, which set province-sector-skill specific minimum wage floors for all workers. By exploiting variation...

Unions and collective bargaining play a central role in shaping wages and influencing firms' employment decisions and firm survival, especially in industrialised countries, and where they are traditionally strong. Their impact depends on the institutional role unions (can) play in different...

Do employees fare better in firms they partly own? Examining workers' reviews of their employers on Glassdoor, we compare employee satisfaction between firms in which workers own company shares through an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and conventional firms in which they do not. Focusing...

This paper introduces innovative, newly developed forward-looking indicators of negotiated wage growth in the euro area using data on collective bargaining agreements from seven countries: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Austria and Greece. The paper demonstrates how...

Do labour institutions influence how wages respond to the business cycle? Such responsiveness can then shape several economic outcomes, including unemployment. In this paper, we examine the role of two key labour market institutions - collective bargaining and temporary contracts - upon wage...

We study how local bargaining institutions affect the within-job gender wage gap among Swedish blue collar workers. Collective agreements with varying degrees of local flexibility tend to cover blue-collar workers across different occupations within the same firm. As a consequence, workers...

Using representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper finds a statistically significant union wage premium in Germany of almost three percent, which is not simply a collective bargaining premium. Given that the union membership fee is typically about one percent of...

Negotiations are a valuable and important tool for increasing the voice of workers in the informal economy. This paper provides empirical evidence from Africa, Asia and the Americas on negotiations and collective bargaining by workers in the informal economy. These practices demonstrate that...

Using representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper finds a statistically significant union wage premium in Germany of almost three percent which is not simply a collective bargaining premium. Given that the union membership fee is typically about one percent of...

Consistent with Convention 87 of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Section 79 of the Labour Act, 2003 (Act 651) empowers every employee in an organization to either form or join a trade union of their choice for the promotion and protection of their economic and social interests. In...

This research presents a bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature on collective bargaining between 2012 and 2021. The main objective of this research is to analyze how scientific research on collective bargaining has evolved during this period and to identify current trends and future...

This paper presents and describes a new database of major minimum wage and collective bargaining (CB) shocks covering 26 advanced economies over the period 1970-2020. The main advantage of this dataset is the precise identification of the nature and date of major shocks, which is valuable in...

Although coverage of collective bargaining agreements has been declining for decades in most countries, it is still extensive, especially in non-Anglo-Saxon countries. Strong unions may influence firms' incentives to invest in capital, particularly in sectors where capital investments are sunk...

The paper explores the role of social partnership for facilitating processes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Europe. Social partnership can help to facilitate the transition to lower emissions by negotiating the costs and benefits of climate reducing policies with the workers affected. At...

We use a youth payroll tax cut in Sweden to investigate whether retail firms that were exposed to substantial labor cost savings increased employment of minimum wage workers more than firms that received smaller labor cost savings. Our dataset includes information on both contracted wages and...

Using representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper finds a statistically significant union wage premium in Germany of almost three percent which is not simply a collective bargaining premium. Given that the union membership fee is typically about one percent of...

Using representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper finds a statistically significant union wage premium in Germany of almost three percent which is not simply a collective bargaining premium. Given that the union membership fee is typically about one percent of...