Rising Wage Inequality, the Decline of Collective Bargaining, and the Gender Wage Gap This paper investigates the increase in wage inequality, the decline in collective bargaining, and the development of the gender wage gap in West Germany between 2001 and 2006. Based on detailed linked employer-employee data, we show that wage inequality is rising strongly – driven not only by real wage increa...

This paper considers the size of the market for unionisation in Britain and what unions can do to increase employees’ desire for membership and representation. It identifies quite high levels of union satisfaction among members, but a sizeable minority of 10-14% of members who are discontented with their union who are most at risk of leaving the union. Successful retention depends upon unions i...

Using data from the social survey ALLBUS for West Germany in the period 1980 to 2006, this paper demonstrates that union members are on average older than non-unionized employees. The probability of being unionized shows the inverted U-shaped pattern in age conjectured by Blanchflower (BJIR 2007) only in very few years. It is demonstrated that both intra-cohort change and cohort replacement eff...

Rotationally mediated focused inelastic resonances ~RMFIR’s! in the angular distributions of D2 scattered from Cu~001! are observed. The FIR effect involves a phonon-assisted focusing of an incident beam of arbitrary energy and direction into a final channel of one single well-defined energy and direction. Surprisingly for an incident energy Ei527 meV the RMFIR conditions for the scattered beam...

Unions, Training, and Firm Performance: Evidence from the British Workplace Employee Relations Survey This paper uses a combination of workplace and matched-employee workplace data from the British 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey to examine the impact of unions and firm-provided training (incidence, intensity/coverage, and duration) on establishment performance. The performance effects...

This paper introduces bias-corrected estimators for nonlinear panel data models with both time invariant and time varying heterogeneity. These models include systems of equations with limited dependent variables and unobserved individual effects, and sample selection models with unobserved individual effects. Our two-step approach first estimates the reduced form by fixed effects procedures to ...

Nurse Unions and Patient Outcomes We estimate the impact of nurse unions on health care quality using patient discharge data and the universe of hospital unionizations in California between 1996 and 2005. We find that hospitals with a successful union election outperform hospitals with a failed election in 12 of 13 nurse sensitive patient outcomes measures. We also find that hospitals with a un...

Centralized wage-setting institutions compress relative wages. Motivated by this fact, we investigate the effects of centralized wage setting on the industry distribution of em-ployment. We examine Sweden’s industry distribution from 1960 to 1994 and compare it to the U.S. distribution over the same period. We relate U.S.-Swedish differences in the industry distribution and their evolution over...

Unions and the Labor Market for Managers We examine the relationship between the employment and compensation of managers and CEOs and the presence of a unionized workforce. We develop a simple efficiency wage model, with a tradeoff between higher wages for workers and more monitoring, which requires more managers. The model also assumes rent sharing between workers, managers and the owners of t...