Worker movements played a crucial role in making workplaces safer. Workplace safety is costly for firms but increases labour supply. A laissez-faire approach leaving safety of workplaces unknown is suboptimal. Safety standards set by better-informed trade unions are output and welfare...

OPTIMThe conservative central banker has come under attack recently. Explicitly modeling the interaction of a trade union with monetary policy, it has been argued that the standard solution to the inflationary bias in monetary policy might actually be welfare reducing if the trade union has an...

A trade union whose purpose is to raise wages above the competitive level may foster economic growth if it succeeds in shifting income away from the owners of capital to the workers and if the workers' marginal propensity to save exceeds the one of capitalists. We make this point in an...

Labor unions' greatest potential for political influence likely arises from their direct connection to millions of individuals at the workplace. There, they may change the ideological positions of both unionizing workers and their non-unionizing management. In this paper, we analyze the...

Cross-country data are used to establish perceived shortfalls in employee involvement based on the responses of employee representatives in EU establishments with formal workplace employee representation. The desire for greater involvement is smaller where workplace representation is via works...

Using cross-country data, this paper investigates the relationship between workplace representation and strikes. Works councils are associated with reduced strike activity. However, where union members make up a majority of works councillors, such union-dominated councils experience greater...

Using the 2019 ECS, we investigate the relationship between union organization, workplace representation, industrial relations quality and strike incidence. We also consider some six issues behind the most recent instances of industrial action or threatened industrial action and their outcomes....

This paper adopts a flexible framework to assess both short- and long-run business cycle linkages between six Latin American (LA) countries and the four largest economies in the world (namely the US, the Euro area, Japan and China) over the period 1980:I-2011:IV. The result indicate that within...

We analyse the voting pattern in the June 23rd referendum on the continued participation of the United Kingdom in the European Union and evaluate the reasons for the results. We find that regions where GDP per capita is low, a high proportion of people have low education, a high proportion is...

This paper examines the shortcomings in the UK government's Brexit negotiation strategy which reflected Prime Minister Theresa May's weak political leadership. The Prime Minister focused on securing the short-term political survival of her government amidst turbulent and fractious domestic...