This paper examines the relationship between union membership and deaths of despair. Using state-level variation in the timing of the adoption of right-to-work (RTW) laws as a natural experiment, I show that right-to-work laws are associated with a decline in union membership and an increase in...

Die vorliegende Studie geht der Frage nach, inwieweit an angelsächsischen Vorbildern orientierte Organizing-Konzepte, die seit Mitte der 2000er Jahre zunehmend Eingang in die gewerkschaftliche Praxis gefunden haben, zu einer Stabilisierung des Tarifsystems beitragen können. Die Erwartung dabei...

Collective bargaining has a marginal and steadily diminishing role in employment regulation in Hungary. Flaws in the legal framework are certainly among the main reasons behind low and decreasing coverage. In the light of ILO standards and comparative national examples, this article analyses the...

Die vorliegende Studie geht der Frage nach, inwieweit an angelsächsischen Vorbildern orientierte Organizing-Konzepte, die seit Mitte der 2000er Jahre zunehmend Eingang in die gewerkschaftliche Praxis gefunden haben, zu einer Stabilisierung des Tarifsystems beitragen können. Die Erwartung dabei...

Can collective bargaining mitigate monopsony power? This paper addresses this question by examining how the regulation of noncompete agreements for employees by collective agreements affects firm-level markdowns in the French manufacturing sector. Using a staggered difference-in-differences...

This paper examines the evolution of trade union density in Greece between 1970 and 2020. While unionization grew substantially across most Western economies during the postwar reconstruction period, Greek organized labour largely missed this expansion due to the disruptions of the Greek Civil...

Labor unions play a crucial role in liberal democracies by influencing labor market and political dynamics, organizing workers' demands and linking them to parties. However, their importance has progressively diminished in the last decades. We suggest that technological change - and industrial...

Short-time work (STW) has been widely used, both during the Great Recession and the COVID crisis, to preserve jobs. In most European countries, the implementation of STW schemes is often the result of bargaining between trade unions and employers, yet very little is known about the role of...

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...

A series of studies show that unions and works councils have an influence on workers' political activities and attitudes. However, at issue are the transmission channels through which worker representation impacts workers' political activities and attitudes. This article discusses from a...

A series of studies show that unions and works councils have an influence on workers' political activities and attitudes. However, at issue are the transmission channels through which worker representation impacts workers' political activities and attitudes. This article discusses from a...

A series of studies show that unions and works councils have an influence on workers' political activities and attitudes. However, at issue are the transmission channels through which worker representation impacts workers' political activities and attitudes. This article discusses from a...

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...

Institutions representing the workers' voice have long been a contentious topic in the economic literature. Against a backdrop of inconclusive evidence and limited use of credible identification strategies, we study the impact of the 2015 policy change that introduced mandatory board-level...

In Chile during the period 2006-2016, workers' organization and industrial insurgency grew, especially in the export sectors of the economy. The conventional approach has labeled this period as one of union renewal since rank-and-file organizations involved measures such as strikes and raised...

The effects of trade unions on firm performance are theoretically ambiguous. The sizable empirical literature on their effects is almost exclusively confined to developed countries, particularly those in North America and Europe. We contribute to the literature by estimating union effects on...

Social interactions between young and senior colleagues might have consequences for union membership uptake of young workers, thus influencing public policies on unions. We apply Norwegian administrative register data to test this claim about the influence of social interactions on unionization,...

U.S. manufacturing facilities generate approximately 30 billion pounds of hazardous waste annually, 10% of which is released into the environment. The negative economic and health impacts of such toxic chemicals are significant (Currie et al., 2015; Aguilar-Gomez et al., 2022). It is therefore...

We study the role of union heterogeneity in shaping wages and inequality among unionized workers. Using linked employer-employee data from Brazil and job moves across multi-firm unions, we estimate over 4,800 union-specific pay premia. Unions explain 3-4% of earnings variation. While unions...

Since 1995, the European Commission has authorised the marketing of medicines across the whole European Union. Central authorisations are valid in all EU Member States and are based on rigorous scientific evaluations by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), which gathers experts from all Member...

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...

Official government estimates show a gradual decline in union density in Japan over several decades akin to that in other countries with decentralized bargaining structures. However, new evidence from various social surveys indicates that union density has been rising in Japan. Using one of...

Seit Jahren verzeichnen Gewerkschaften in Deutschland massive Mitgliederverluste. Während die Mitgliederzahlen des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes (DGB) nach der deutschen Wiedervereinigung Anfang der 1990er Jahre noch die 10-Millionen-Marke überschritten hatten, sind laut Angaben des DGB im...

Using administrative data from Germany, this study provides first evidence on the wage effects of collective bargaining compliance laws. These laws require establishments receiving public contracts to pay wages set by a representative collective agreement, even if they are not formally bound by...