What Do Unions Do for Economic Performance?

The publication in 1984 of Richard Freeman and James Medoff’s What Do Unions Do?, which summarized and synthesized results from their broad-based research program, was a landmark in labor economics and industrial relations. What Do Unions Do? quickly changed the subject matter and approach for scholars studying unions. The models (or descriptions) of unions employed by labor economists were extended to include a collective voice face of unions in addition to its microeconomic monopoly face. Empirical analyses of unions, which once focused almost exclusively on union wage effects, began to address the large variety of topics studied in What Do Unions Do? Industrial relations scholars, who had never abandoned a broad multi-disciplinary approach to what unions do, increasingly were expected to include data and econometric analysis in their research.