The Causal Effect of Faculty Unions on Institutional Decision-Making

The goal of this paper is to estimate the causal effect of unionization on institutional decision-making. We use a national survey of presidents and faculty senate leaders to measure the level of shared governance at 341 public universities in fifteen different areas. To address the endogeneity of faculty unionization, we use an index of state employee collective bargaining rights as an instrument for unionization. We find that unionization greatly increases faculty influence over decision-making in areas such as setting faculty salary scales, individual faculty salaries, appointing department chairs, and appointments to institution-wide committees