Unions and Inequality over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data*
Henry S Farber,
Daniel Herbst,
Ilyana Kuziemko and
Suresh Naidu
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2021, vol. 136, issue 3, 1325-1385
Abstract:
U.S. income inequality has varied inversely with union density over the past 100 years. But moving beyond this aggregate relationship has proven difficult, in part because of limited microdata on union membership prior to 1973. We develop a new source of microdata on union membership dating back to 1936, survey data primarily from Gallup (N ≈ 980,000), to examine the long-run relationship between unions and inequality. We document dramatic changes in the demographics of union members: when density was at its mid-century peak, union households were much less educated and more nonwhite than other households, whereas pre-World War II and today they are more similar to nonunion households on these dimensions. However, despite large changes in composition and density since 1936, the household union premium holds relatively steady between 10 and 20 log points. We use our data to examine the effect of unions on income inequality. Using distributional decompositions, time series regressions, state-year regressions, as well as a new instrumental-variable strategy based on the 1935 legalization of unions and the World War II–era War Labor Board, we find consistent evidence that unions reduce inequality, explaining a significant share of the dramatic fall in inequality between the mid-1930s and late 1940s.
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (121)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjab012 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
Working Paper: Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data (2021) 
Working Paper: Unions and Inequality over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data (2020) 
Working Paper: Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data (2018) 
Working Paper: Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data (2018) 
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:oup:qjecon:v:136:y:2021:i:3:p:1325-1385.
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals
Access Statistics for this article
The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva
More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().