In Germany, employers used to pay union members and non-members in a plant the same union wage in order to prevent workers from joining unions. Using recent administrative data, we investigate which workers in firms covered by collective bargaining agreements still individually benefit from...

This study uses establishment level data to examine the effect of unionism on the wage structure within establishments. The major finding is that unionism substantively reduces within-establishment dispersion of wages, in part through explicit wage practices, such as single rate or automatic...

Using a common methodology, the effects of unions on wage levels and wage dispersion are estimated for two neighboring countries, Bolivia and Chile, and for the U.S. The analysis shows that unions have broadly similar effects on the wage distribution within these three economies. The findings...

The paper estimates how wages respond to changes in regional unemployment using detailed Swedish micro data. The study is set in an economy with close to complete union coverage where real wages have grown continuously in all parts of the wage distribution for the past 15 years, and where the...

The rise in college wage premium is well documented, though with shifting sands of consensus on its main causes. This paper intends to investigate if, and how, intangible capital drives wage inequality, and to what extent the outcomes can be shaped by pre-distribution policies. We construct a...

Using unique employer-employee linked full population data from Danish administrative registers, this paper offers the first empirical study to differentiate between three different mechanisms of the union wage premium that are often conflated in the literature: bargaining coverage, individual...