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...

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...

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...

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...

Representative establishment data reveal that over 60 percent of German plants covered by collective agreements pay wages above the level stipulated in the agreements, creating a wage cushion between actual and contractual wages. While collective bargaining coverage has fallen over time, the...

This study documents the evolution of minimum wages bargained in Italian private sector collective contracts over a forty-year period (1983-2023). Minimum wages have grown in real levels over the last three decades, particularly among high-skilled occupations, but this growth has been partially...

This paper investigates whether workers' bargaining power, which extends beyond union membership to collective wage agreements in Germany, affects the level and distribution of wages at the regional level. We conduct fixed-effect regression analysis and a DFL decomposition on SOEP data from 2014...