Union Wage Effect: New Evidence From Matched Employer-Employee Data

Changhui Kang ()

Departmental Working Papers from National University of Singapore, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper estimates a union wage effect, using matched employer- employee data and estimation models that control an association between a worker's union status and an employer's characteristics. Failure to control this association may cause previous studies' estimates of the union wage effect to be biased. As long as a worker is more likely to become a union worker in a firm that offers her a higher potential for better pay, the union status is (positively) associated with employer characteristics. The empirical finding of this paper verifies this possibility. Estimates of the union wage effect are shown to be upward-biased in the estimation models without control of the employer characteristics. The estimated union wage effect of this study (in an approximate range of 0.2"3.2 percent) is less than a quarter of cross-sectional estimates, and half of individual panel estimates with unobservable person effects.

Keywords: Union; Wage; Endogeneity; Person Effect; Firm Effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 C23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Date: 2003
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/ecs/pub/wp/wp0302.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nus:nusewp:wp0302

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from National University of Singapore, Department of Economics
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().