Links: public employment, trade unions and welfare state

How Trade Unions Increase Welfare

Historically, worker movements have played a crucial role in making workplaces safer. Firms traditionally oppose better health standards. According to our interpretation, workplace safety is costly for firms but increases the average health of workers and thereby the aggregate labour supply. A laissez-faire approach in which firms set safety standards is suboptimal as workers are not fully info...

: Trade Unions and the State

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Public Employment and the Welfare State in Sweden

This is a nontechnical summary of a much longer study which will appear with the same title in Richard Freeman, Birgitta Swedenborg, and Robert Topel, eds. (forthcoming). I am especially indebted to Henry Ohlsson and Birgitta Swedenborg, and to Stan Engerman, Vic Fuchs, Assar Lindbeck, Stephen Lundgren, and Agnar Sandmo for comments on initial drafts. I alone am responsible for the views expres...

Trade-diverting Customs Unions and Welfare Improvement: a Clarification

Unions and Employment Growth: Evidence from State Economic Recoveries

We test the hypothesis that in an economic recovery, unionization negatively affects job creation. We examine state-level job growth following two recent recessions, those with troughs in November 1982 and March 1991. In the five years following the troughs, we assess whether variations across states in union membership and right-to-work laws affect the rate of job growth. We find evidence that...