A large number of potential determinants of union membership, which often can be interpreted in terms of costs and benefits, have been incorporated into economists' traditional supply and demand framework or into new models of an individual's decision to unionise (such as social custom theory)....

Surveying some recent data and the empirical literature from various disciplines, this paper attempts to shed some light on what we know and don't know about (trends in) unionization and its determinants in advanced countries. It shows that there are relatively few robust stylized facts, for...

Surveying some recent data and the empirical literature from various disciplines, this paper attempts to shed some light on what we know and don't know about (trends in) unionization and its determinants in advanced countries. It shows that there are relatively few robust stylized facts, for...

Mit Daten des ALLBUS 2002 und des European Social Survey 2002/03 analysiert diese Arbeit erstmalig die "Nie-Mitgliedschaft" in deutschen Gewerkschaften. Wir zeigen, dass 54 bis 59 Prozent aller Beschäftigten in Deutschland niemals Mitglied einer Gewerkschaft waren. Die individuelle...

Using representative data from the German social survey ALLBUS 2002 and the European Social Survey 2002/03, this paper provides the first empirical analysis of trade union never-membership in Germany. We show that between 54 and 59 percent of all employees in Germany have never been members of a...

Using data from the social survey ALLBUS for West Germany in the period 1980 to 2006, this paper demonstrates that union members are on average older than non-unionized employees. The probability of being unionized shows the inverted U-shaped pattern in age conjectured by Blanchflower (BJIR...

An empirical analysis of various waves of the ALLBUS social survey shows that union density fell substantially in western Germany from 1980 to 2004 and in eastern Germany from 1992 to 2004. Such a negative trend can be observed for men and women and for different groups of the workforce....