Do Employees Benefit from Worker Representation on Corporate Boards?

Christine Blandhol, Magne Mogstad, Peter Nilsson, Ola Vestad and J. Peter Nilsson

No 8794, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Do employees benefit from worker representation on corporate boards? Economists and policymakers are keenly interested in this question – especially lately, as worker representation is widely promoted as an important way to ensure the interests and views of the workers. To investigate this question, we apply a variety of research designs to administrative data from Norway. We find that a worker is paid more and faces less earnings risk if she gets a job in a firm with worker representation on the corporate board. However, these gains in wages and declines in earnings risk are not caused by worker representation per se. Instead, the wage premium and reduced earnings risk reflect that firms with worker representation are likely to be larger and unionized, and that larger and unionized firms tend to both pay a premium and provide better insurance to workers against fluctuations in firm performance. Conditional on the firm’s size and unionization rate, worker representation has little if any effect. Taken together, these findings suggest that while workers may indeed benefit from being employed in firms with worker representation, they would not benefit from legislation mandating worker representation on corporate boards.

Keywords: worker compensation; worker representation; corporate governance; unions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G34 G38 J31 J54 J58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cfn, nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp8794.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Unavailable

Related works:
Working Paper: Do employees benefit from worker representation on corporate boards? (2021)
Working Paper: Do Employees Benefit from Worker Representation on Corporate Boards? (2020)
Working Paper: Do Employees Benefit from Worker Representation on Corporate Boards? (2020)
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:ces:ceswps:_8794

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().