Trade Unions in Poland: Between Stagnation and Innovation

Trade unions and development

Trade Unions in Germany

Trade unions’ objectives and inflation

Important results recently achieved in games between trade unions and central banks rest on the assumption that workers’ organisations are interested, besides real wages and employment, in inflation per se. This hypothesis is crucial because: (i) the results are not robust to its removal; (ii) the justifications provided to support it are not without problems. The paper raises the issue, critic...

: Trade Unions and the State

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Do Unions Affect Innovation?

We examine the causal effect of unionization on firm innovation, using regression discontinuity design that relies on “locally” exogenous variation generated by elections that pass or fail by a small margin of votes. Passing a union election leads to an 8.7% (12.5%) decline in patent quantity (quality) three years post-election. A reduction in R&D expenditures, reduced productivity of inventors...