In many countries, notably across Europe, collective bargaining coverage is enhanced by government-issued extensions that widen the reach of collective agreements beyond their signatory parties to all firms and workers in the same sector. This paper analyses the causal impact of such extensions...

Since the global financial crisis, sector-level bargaining has come under renewed scrutiny.While in Southern Europe, the crisis raised concerns about the role of collectivebargaining as an obstacle to labor market adjustment, in Northern Europe it was perceivedmore favourably and, according to...