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...

Do unions promote creative destruction? In this paper we apply a shift-share approach and historical unionisation data from 1918 to study the impact of changes in regional unionisation on regional wage and productivity growth and job creation and destruction during the period 2003-2012. As local...

In the absence of closed-shops and discriminatory wage policies, union membership can be explained by the existence of social norms. We develop a theoretical frame-work which nests various social custom models. Using micro data for Germany and Great Britain, we find evidence for social custom...

Using administrative linked employer-employee data for Norway we estimate the impact of changes in tax subsidies for union membership on individuals' membership probabilities. Increased subsidisation of the union good increases union take-up, while increased union fees reduce the demand for...

This paper analyzes the economic impact of unions on productivity in the manufacturing sector across six Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Using an augmented Cobb-Douglas production function, the paper finds that unions have positive, but mostly...

It is well known that the organizing environment for labor unions in the U.S. has deteriorated dramatically over a long period of time, contributing to the sharp decline in the private sector union membership rate and resulting in many fewer representation elections being held. What is less well...

What type of businesses do unions target for organizing? A dynamic model of the union organizing process is constructed to answer this question. A union monitors establishments in an industry to learn about their productivity and decides which ones to organize and when. An establishment becomes...

In this paper, I study the political rationale for labor market regulation. Oligopolists employ raw labor and human capital (i.e. key workers) for production and R&D. There are many jurisdictions, in each of which a self-interested policy maker can regulate/deregulate the local labor market. I...