Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'union'
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Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 17
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Working PaperUnionization, Employer Opposition, and Establishment Closure
July 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-35
We study the effect of private-sector unionization on establishment employment and survival. Specifically, we analyze National Labor Relations Board union elections from 1981'2005 using administrative Census data. Our empirical strategy extends standard difference-in-differences techniques with regression discontinuity extrapolation methods. This allows us to avoid biases from only comparing close elections and to estimate treatment effects that include larger marginof- victory elections. Using this strategy, we show that unionization decreases an establishment's employment and likelihood of survival, particularly in manufacturing and other blue-collar and industrial sectors. We hypothesize that two reasons for these effects are firms' ability to avoid working with new unions and employers' opposition to unions. We find that the negative effects are significantly larger for elections at multi-establishment firms. Additionally, after a successful union election at one establishment, employment increases at the firms' other establishments. Both pieces of evidence are consistent with firms avoiding new unions by shifting production from unionized establishments to other establishments. Finally, we find larger declines in employment and survival following elections where managers or owners were likely more opposed to the union. This evidence supports new reasons for the negative effects of unionization we document.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperShareholder Power and the Decline of Labor
May 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-17
Shareholder power in the US grew over recent decades due to a steep rise in concentrated institutional ownership. Using establishment-level data from the US Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database for 1982-2015, this paper examines the impact of increases in concentrated institutional ownership on employment, wages, shareholder returns, and labor productivity. Consistent with theory of the firm based on conflicts of interests between shareholders and stakeholders, we find that establishments of firms that experience an increase in ownership by larger and more concentrated institutional shareholders have lower employment and wages. This result holds in both panel regressions with establishment fixed effects and a difference-in-differences design that exploits large increases in concentrated institutional ownership, and is robust to controls for industry and local shocks. The result is more pronounced in industries where labor is relatively less unionized, in more monopsonistic local labor markets, and for dedicated and activist institutional shareholders. The labor losses are accompanied by higher shareholder returns but no improvements in labor productivity, suggesting that shareholder power mainly reallocates rents away from workers. Our results imply that the rise in concentrated institutional ownership could explain about a quarter of the secular decline in the aggregate labor share.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperEmployer Concentration and Labor Force Participation
March 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-08
This paper examines the association between employer concentration and labor outcomes (labor force participation and employment). It uses restricted data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database to estimate, at the county level, to what extent more concentrated labor markets have lower labor force participation rates and lower employment. The analysis also examines whether unionization rates and education levels mediate these associations.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperDo Short-Term Incentives Affect Long-Term Productivity?
March 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-10
Previous research shows that stock repurchases that are caused by earnings management lead to reductions in firm-level investment and employment. It is natural to expect firms to cut less productive investment and employment first, which could lead to a positive effect on firm-level productivity. However, using Census data, we find that firms make cuts across the board irrespective of plant productivity. This pattern seems to be associated with frictions in the labor market. Specifically, we find evidence that unionization of the labor force may prevent firms from doing efficient downsizing, forcing them to engage in easy or expedient downsizing instead. As a result of this inefficient downsizing, EPS-driven repurchases lead to a reduction in long-term productivity.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperA Task-based Approach to Constructing Occupational Categories with Implications for Empirical Research in Labor Economics
September 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-27
Most applied research in labor economics that examines returns to worker skills or differences in earnings across subgroups of workers typically accounts for the role of occupations by controlling for occupational categories. Researchers often aggregate detailed occupations into categories based on the Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) coding scheme, which is based largely on narratives or qualitative measures of workers' tasks. Alternatively, we propose two quantitative task-based approaches to constructing occupational categories by using factor analysis with O*NET job descriptors that provide a rich set of continuous measures of job tasks across all occupations. We find that our task-based approach outperforms the SOC-based approach in terms of lower occupation distance measures. We show that our task-based approach provides an intuitive, nuanced interpretation for grouping occupations and permits quantitative assessments of similarities in task compositions across occupations. We also replicate a recent analysis and find that our task-based occupational categories explain more of the gender wage gap than the SOC-based approaches explain. Our study enhances the Federal Statistical System's understanding of the SOC codes, investigates ways to use third-party data to construct useful research variables that can potentially be added to Census Bureau data products to improve their quality and versatility, and sheds light on how the use of alternative occupational categories in economics research may lead to different empirical results and deeper understanding in the analysis of labor market outcomes.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperWhy are employer-sponsored health insurance premiums higher in the public sector than in the private sector?
February 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-03
In this article, we examine the factors explaining differences in public and private sector health insurance premiums for enrollees with single coverage. We use data from the 2000 and 2014 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey-Insurance Component, along with decomposition methods, to explore the relative explanatory importance of plan features and benefit generosity, such as deductibles and other forms of cost sharing, basic employee characteristics (e.g., age, gender, and education), and unionization. While there was little difference in public and private sector premiums in 2000, by 2014, public premiums had exceeded private premiums by 14 to 19 percent. We find that differences in plan characteristics played a substantial role in explaining premium differences in 2014, but they were not the only, or even the most important, factor. Differences in worker age, gender, marital status, and educational attainment were also important factors, as was workforce unionization.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperStrong Employers and Weak Employees: How Does Employer Concentration Affect Wages?
April 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-15
We analyze the effect of local-level labor market concentration on wages. Using plant-level U.S. Census data over the period 1977'2009, we find that: (1) local-level employer concentration exhibits substantial cross-sectional and time-series variation and increases over time; (2) consistent with labor market monopsony power, there is a negative relation between local-level employer concentration and wages that is more pronounced at high levels of concentration and increases over time; (3) the negative relation between labor market concentration and wages is stronger when unionization rates are low; (4) the link between productivity growth and wage growth is stronger when labor markets are less concentrated; and (5) exposure to greater import competition from China (the 'China Shock') is associated with more concentrated labor markets. These five results emphasize the role of local-level labor market monopsonies in influencing firm wage-setting.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperWage Determination in Social Occupations: the Role of Individual Social Capital
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-46
We make use of predicted social and civic activities (social capital) to account for selection into "social" occupations. Individual selection accounts for more than the total difference in wages observed between social and non-social occupations. The role that individual social capital plays in selecting into these occupations and the importance of selection in explaining wage differences across occupations is similar for both men and women. We make use of restricted 2000 Decennial Census and 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. Individual social capital is instrumented by distance weighted surrounding census tract characteristics.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperTRADE LIBERALIZATION AND LABOR SHARES IN CHINA
May 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-24
We estimate the extent to which firms responded to tariff reductions associated with China's WTO entry by altering labor's share of value. Firm-level regressions indicate that firms in industries subject to tariff cuts raised labor's share relative to economy-wide trends, both through input choices and rent sharing. Labor's share of value is an estimated 12 percent higher in 2007 than it would be if tariffs had remained at their 1998 levels. There is significant variation across firms: the impact is larger where market access is better and it is influenced by union presence and state ownership.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperWHO DO UNIONS TARGET? UNIONIZATION OVER THE LIFE-CYCLE OF U.S. BUSINESSES
February 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-09R
What type of businesses do unions target for organizing and when? A dynamic model of the union organizing process is constructed to answer this question. A union monitors establishments in an industry to learn about their productivity, and decides which ones to organize and when. An establishment becomes unionized if the union targets it for organizing and wins the union certification election. The model predicts two main selection effects: unions target larger and more productive establishments early in their life-cycles, and among the establishments targeted, unions are more likely to win elections in smaller and less productive ones. These predictions find support in union certification elections data for 1977-2007 matched with data on establishment characteristics.View Full Paper PDF
