While corporate political connections are known to enhance equity values, we demonstrate that union political activity can have the opposite effect. We examine the consequences of a recent Australian state law that restricts union political activity, but does not change collective bargaining...

Using detailed employee-employer administrative data, we analyze the impact of the gender pay gap on the performance of firms and find that it depends on the presence of labor unions. When the firm is not unionized, the gender pay gap reduces profitability. In contrast, when unions are present,...

We examine investment by different types of institutional investors in underperforming firms with agency problems complicated by laws and regulations: U.S. firms with strong labor unions. As unions have special powers granted by government, unions have to serve the interests of politicians if...

Do employees benefit from worker representation on corporate boards? Economists and policymakers are keenly interested in this question – especially lately, as worker representation is widely promoted as an important way to ensure the interests and views of the workers. To investigate this...

Do employees benefit from worker representation on corporate boards? Economists and policymakers are keenly interested in this question - especially lately, as worker representation is widely promoted as an important way to ensure the interests and views of the workers. To investigate this...

This study examines whether a firm’s leverage can be used strategically to improve its bargaining position with an organized labor union using samples of non-financial firms listed on the Korean Stock Exchange (KSE) from 1999 to 2013. Through empirical testing, we find that the portfolio with...

This paper identifies an externality of a firm's unionization that affects the capital structure decisions of other, non-unionized firms within a local labor market. We find that union victory in a firm leads non-unionized firms to increase their market leverage ratio by 0.9 to 1.3 percentage...

Labor unionization has no causal effect on firm risk. Using a regression discontinuity design to study the impact of labor union elections on option-implied firm risk, we find that unionization per se does not affect investor perceptions about a firm's price, tail, or variance risk. This finding...

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...

We examine the empirical relation between labor unions and firm indebtedness in the contemporary United States. Our identification strategy exploits two negative exogenous shocks in union power and the threat of unionization. Further, in the context of panel regressions, we develop a novel...