We study how union certification affects the enforcement of workplace-safety laws. To generate credible causal estimates, a regression discontinuity design compares outcomes in establishments where unions barely won representation elections to outcomes in establishments where union barely lost...

How do powerful unions affect firms' debt maturity structure? I find that firms increase the fraction of long term debt as a response to unionization while keeping their leverage ratio unchanged. Using a regression discontinuity design I estimate that unionized firms increase by 25% the fraction...

Revised May 2016. We analyze a labor market with search and matching frictions in which wage setting is controlled by a monopoly union. Frictions render existing matches a form of firm-specific capital that is subject to a hold-up problem in a unionized labor market. We study how this hold-up...

The authors present a four-fold conceptual framework of union roles for enhancing workers' paid maternity leave use, consisting of availability, awareness, affordability, and assurance. Using a panel data set constructed from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, workers represented by...

The main Czech trade union confederation, the ČMKOS, launched its campaign for 'An End to Cheap Labour' at a rally of 1500 trade unionists on 16 September 2015. The aim was to start closing the pay gap with Western Europe which, even after 25 years of transformation into a market economy and...

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the quantitative importance of the factors associated with the rise in male wage inequality in Germany over the period 1995–2010. In contrast to most previous contributions, we rely on the German Structure of Earnings Surveys (GSES) which allow...

In an era of fiscal austerity and dualization of social protection, has organized labor become increasingly split along skill and industry lines? Against recent political science accounts of trade union involvement in social policy-making, this paper argues that, in the specific area of...

Unions are often stigmatized as being a source of inefficiency due to higher collective bargaining outcomes. This is in stark contrast with the descriptive evidence presented in this paper. Larger firms choose to export and are also more likely to adopt collective bargaining. We rationalize...

This paper explores the link between the presence of unions in the workplace, the adoption of decentralized labor agreements and technical efficiency, using a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We apply the Data Envelopment Analysis, and its robust version based on bootstrap theory, to...

Using a money-in-the-utility-function model, we present long-run stagnation where insatiable demand for money secularly causes deficient aggregate demand and thereby unemployment in the presence of nominal wage stickiness attributable to union wage setting. In this long-run stagnation, generous...