Labour Unions and Firm Productivity

Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Jubiläumsfonds)

How do trade unions affect the performance of business, and thereby productivity and macroeconomic policy? To answer this question, this project aims to combine trade union membership registry data and firm level data to establish a novel data set that covers a substantial part of the Austrian economy. The large data set allows for a fine disaggregation at the sectoral, occupational and regional levels as well as between firms of different characteristics, such as size and firm type. The large number of observations provides the unique possibility for a robust analysis of blind spots of past research like the role of trade unions in small and unlisted companies or in the service sector. We explore the association of trade union power with productivity, firm profit and wages with respect to heterogeneous effects among sectors and firm size. The dataset created by this project will provide ample research opportunities to apply quasi-experimental research designs to explore the relationship between unionization and firm performance.