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10/14/2025 - 10/14/2025 | Berlin

Unions, Firms, and Wage Inequality

The RFBerlin Applied Economics Seminar series brings leading researchers to Berlin to share their latest work. We welcome Thomas Lemieux (University of British Columbia) for this session, a Professor at the Vancouver School of Economics, where he is the Director of the Centre on Wealth and Income Inequality. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Society of Labor Economists, and the Econometric Society.

We use Canadian matched employer-employee data to estimate the effect of unions on wage dispersion. Our approach relies on an extension of Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999) (AKM) two-way fixed effects approach, where unions are allowed to affect the returns to unobservable worker characteristics captured by worker fixed effects. We find that unions compress the returns to unobserved characteristics, resulting in a substantial decline in within-firm dispersion. In contrast, unions have a modest effect on between-firm wage dispersion, as estimated by comparing the relationship between firm wage premiums and productivity among union and non-union firms. Overall, we find that most of the large difference in the variance of log wages between union (variance of 0.24) and non-union (variance of 0.36) workers is due to union wage compression effects, rather than composition effects.

Information on participating / attending:

Date:

10/14/2025 14:00 - 10/14/2025 15:15

Event venue:

RFBerlin, Gormannstrasse 22
10119 Berlin
Berlin
Germany

Target group:

Scientists and scholars, all interested persons

Email address:

Relevance:

transregional, national

Subject areas:

Economics / business administration, Politics

Types of events:

Seminar / workshop / discussion

Entry:

08/22/2025

Sender/author:

Harald Schultz

Department:

Kommunikation

Event is free:

yes

Language of the text:

English

URL of this event: http://idw-online.de/en/event79895


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