Union Wage Effects: Does Membership Matter?

Does Wage Indexing Matter?

The Rogoff (1985) proposition that it is socially optimal to delegate monetary policy to a central banker that is more inflation averse than society has been widely accepted and implemented in practice. However, there is a literature that argues that if there is an inflation-averse monopoly union in the economy, it is optimal to delegate monetary policy to an “ultra-liberal” central banker, tha...

Does Union Membership Really Reduce Job Satisfaction?

We investigate the effect of union membership on job satisfaction. Whilst it is common to study the effects of union status on satisfaction treating individual membership as given, in this paper, we account for the endogenous selection induced by the sorting of workers into unionised jobs. Using linked employer-employee data from the 1998 British Workplace Employee Relations Survey, we address ...

The Effects of Union Membership Status and Union-Management Climate

Does Wage Persistence Matter for Employment Fluctuations ?

Recent work by Robert Shimer (2005) has stressed the difficulties of the standard Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides (1994) model in explaining the cyclical movement of unemployment. As potential mechanism behind observed employment dynamics, several papers (e.g., Shimer 2004, Robert Hall 2005, and Hall and Paul Milgrom 2008) have suggested rigidities in the wage setting process th...

The Union Membership Wage-Premium Puzzle: Is there a Free Rider Problem?

Economists have, at least since Olson (1965), suggested that there is a free rider problem associated with labour union membership. The reason is that union-set wages are available to all workers covered by unions irrespective of whether or not they are union members, and given that there are costs to membership – workers will only join if they are coerced or offered incentive excludable goods....