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...

Using cross-country data from the European Company Survey, we investigate the relationship between workplace employee representation and five behavioral outcomes: strike incidence, the climate of industrial relations, sickness/absenteeism, employee motivation, and staff retention. The evidence...

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...

The increase in the real wages of British workers over the last one hundred years is often attributed to the growth in labour productivity, but this has rarely been confirmed. In the research reported here, this ascription is confronted with annual observations on wages and productivity spanning...

We shed light on an understudied group: retirees in unions. Using representative individual-level data of 19 European countries, we find that the share of retirees in unions and the union density of retirees increased between 2008 and 2020. Econometric analyses indicate that on average retired...

Unions make differences to employee satisfaction that correspond to their effects on individual economic advantage. Panel data reveal how changes in economic circumstance and changes in job satisfaction are linked to changes in union coverage. When individuals move into a union covered job they...

Does the creative destruction induced by unions entail increased social security uptake? Creative destruction implies the closures of less productive workplaces, and if the regional benefits from this process is not large enough, the displacements caused by workplace closures cause increased...

We present a simple framework for analyzing decline in union voice in the Anglo-American world and its replacement by non-union, often direct, forms of worker voice. We argue that it is a decline in the in-flow to unionisation among employers and workers, rather than an increase in the outflow...

Spatial variance in union membership has been attributed to the favourable attitudes that persist in areas with an historical legacy of trade unionism. Within the UK, villages and towns located in areas once dominated coalmining remain among the strongest and durable bases for the trade union...

The literature on the union wage premium is among the most extensive in labour economics but unions' effects on other aspects of the wage-effort bargain have received much less attention. We contribute to the literature through a study of the union premium in paid holiday entitlements, using...