We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
From the Fringe to the Fore: Labor Unions and Employee Compensation.
- Authors
Knepper, Matthew
- Abstract
Conventional wisdom suggests that labor unions raise worker wages, while the newer empirical literature finds only negligible earnings effects. I reconcile this apparent contradiction by arguing that collective bargaining targets fringe benefits. Using U.S. firm-level data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) Multinational Enterprise Survey and Compustat, I exploit a regression discontinuity in majority rule union elections to compare changes in employee compensation at firms whose establishment barely won a union election against those that barely lost an election. Following unionization, average employee compensation and employer pension contributions increase, which raises the labor share of compensation.
- Subjects
UNITED States. Bureau of Economic Analysis; LABOR union personnel; EMPLOYEE benefits; REGRESSION discontinuity design; COLLECTIVE bargaining; WAGES; ELECTION forecasting; INDUSTRIAL relations
- Publication
Review of Economics & Statistics, 2020, Vol 102, Issue 1, p98
- ISSN
0034-6535
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1162/rest_a_00803