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...

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...

The view that high unemployment in West Germany and other European countries is caused by a path dependence effect - or hysteresis effect - is quite popular among economists. However, because of an identification problem, much of the empirical evidence for this hypothesis is not fu lly...

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...

This paper investigates the influence of industrial relations on firm wage premia in Germany. OLS regressions for the firm effects from a two-way fixed effects decomposition of workers' wages by Card, Heining, and Kline (2013) document that average premia are larger in firms bound by collective...

Using panel data from 1985 to 2019, we provide the first comprehensive investigation of the relationship between trade union membership and job satisfaction in Germany. Cross-sectional analyses reveal a negative correlation, while fixed effects estimates indicate an insignificant relationship....

This paper shows that immigration fostered the emergence of organized labor in the United States. I digitize archival data to construct the first county-level dataset on historical U.S. union membership and use a shift-share instrument to isolate a plausibly exogenous shock to the labor supply...

Why did substantial parts of Europe abandon the institutionalized churches around 1900? Empirical studies using modern data mostly contradict the traditional view that education was a leading source of the seismic social phenomenon of secularization. We construct a unique panel dataset of...

I present the first database of historical local population figures for all Germany. The German Local Population Database (GPOP) includes total population in 1871, 1910, 1939, 1946, 1961, 1987, 1996, 2011, and 2019 for the universe of all German municipalities, counties, and states at consistent...