A Tale of Two Countries: Unions, Closures and Growth in Britain and Norway

Using linked private sector employer-employee panel data for Britain and Norway we explore the effects of unionization on workplace closure and employment growth over the period 1997-2004. Unions prolonged the life of low-wage workplaces in Britain, whereas Norwegian unions increased (reduced) closure hazards in high (low) waged workplaces. Contrary to earlier studies, unions had no effect on workplace growth in Britain. In Norway, union workplaces experienced 4 percent per annum lower growth. However, the estimation of a dynamic panel data model for Norway indicates positive long-term causal effects of union density on employment.Unions, closure, employment growth, comparative, system-GMM

Monopsonistic Discrimination, Worker Turnover, and the Gender Wage Gap

Motivated by models of worker flows, we argue in this paper that monopsonistic discrimination may be a substantial factor behind the overall gender wage gap. On matched employer-employee data from Norway, we estimate establishment-specific wage premiums separately for men and women, conditioning on fixed individual effects. Regressions of worker turnover on the wage premium identify less wage elastic labour supply facing each establishment of women than that of men. Workforce gender composition is strongly related to employers' wage policies. The results suggest that 70-90 percent of the gender wage gap for low-educated workers may be attributed to differences in labour market frictions between men and women, while the similar figures for high-educated workers ranges from 20 to 70 percent.monopsony, gender wage gap

Monopsonistic Discrimination and the Gender-Wage Gap

Models of worker flows have revitalized the idea of monopsony in the labor market. We apply such a model to gender differences. We argue that monopsonistic discrimination may be a substantial factor behind the overall gender wage gap, in particular with respect to differences arising between occupations and establishments. Using matched employer-employee data from Norway, we investigate the wage structure within and between establishments, and present novel evidence that the establishments' excess turnover of employees is sensitive to the wage premium of men, but not to the wage premium of women. Furthermore, we show that male turnover is more wage-elastic than female turnover.

An improvement of the Kolmogorov-Riesz compactness theorem

The purpose of this short note is to provide a new and very short proof of a result by Sudakov, offering an important improvement of the classical result by Kolmogorov-Riesz on compact subsets of Lebesgue spaces

How Does Innovation Affect Worker Well-being?

We explore the effects of management innovations on worker well-being using private sector linked employer-employee data for Britain. We find management innovations are associated with lower worker well-being and lower job satisfaction, an effect which becomes more pronounced when we account for the endogeneity of innovation. This is the case for three different count measures of innovation - a global measure of innovation and measures for labour innovations and capital innovations. The effects are ameliorated when workers are covered by a collective bargaining agreement.innovation, well-being, job satisfaction, trade unions

Do Higher Wages Come at a Price?

Using linked employer-employee data for Britain we find job satisfaction and job anxiety are negatively correlated but higher wages are associated with higher job satisfaction and higher job anxiety. However, we observe a positive association between higher wages and non-pecuniary job satisfaction, which disappears with the inclusion of our effort measures. Thus high effort levels provide high levels of non-pecuniary job satisfaction and higher wages, in contrast to what compensating wage differentials predicts. On the other hand, the positive association between wages and pay satisfaction and the positive association between wages and job anxiety are both robust to the inclusion of our effort measures and rich job controls. Mean wages of co-workers are positively associated with pay satisfaction but there is no significant association with non-pecuniary job satisfaction or job anxiety. Thus there is a positive spill-over to workers from being in a high-wage workplace and there is no support for the proposition that within-workplace wage differentials are a source of job anxiety.worker wellbeing, job stress, job anxiety, job satisfaction, wages, compensating differentials

Employer size or skill-group size effect on wages?

It turns out that the employer-size effect on individual wages dwindles away once one control for the number of workers of the same skill-group (educational type) as the observed individual within the establishment. The skill-group size effect on wages is substantial. The main results, a dwindling employer size effect and a significant group size effect, remain after controlling for both individual and establishment specific heterogeneity. This observation rejects most of the proposed explanations for the employer-size effect, while it lends considerable support for the notion that there are frictions in the labor market and that each establishment faces an upward sloping supply curve for each type of labor

Union effects on product and technological innovations

We present theoretical and empirical evidence challenging early studies that found unions were detrimental to workplace innovation. Under our theoretical model, unions prefer product innovation to labor-saving technological process innovation, thus making union wage bargaining regimes more conducive to product innovation than competitive pay setting. We test the theory with population-representative workplace data for Britain and Norway. We find strong support for the notion that local bargaining leads to product innovation, either alone or together with technological innovation.acceptedVersio