Firms' rents, workers' bargaining power and the union wage premium in France

Thomas Breda ()

PSE Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: In this paper, I study the wage premium associated with firm-level union recognition in France and show that this premium is due to a rent-extraction phenomenon. Using a large matched employer-employee dataset from a 2002 survey in France, I first estimate a series of wage determination models that control for individual and firm-level characteristics. I find that union recognition is associated with a 2-3% wage premium. To show that this premium results from a non-competitive phenomenon, I construct a bargaining model and estimate it empirically using a smaller but very detailed matched employer-employee dataset for 2004. The model predicts in particular that the wage premium obtained by unions should increase both with their bargaining power and with the amount of quasi-rents per worker available in the firms they organize. These predictions are validated empirically when I use the firms' market share as a proxy for their quasi-rents and the percentage of unionized as a proxy for the unions' bargaining power. All the results remain valid when I control for the firm-level workers' average productivity.

Keywords: union wage premium; rent sharing; bargaining (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cis and nep-lab
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00564903v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00564903v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Firms' rents, workers' bargaining power and the union wage premium in France (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:psewpa:halshs-00564903

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PSE Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().