Why unions survive: understanding how unions overcome the free-rider problem
This paper provides evidence for why individuals join unions instead of free riding. I model membership as legal insurance. To test the model, I use the incidence of news stories concerning allegations against teachers in the United Kingdom as a plausibly exogenous shock to demand for such insurance. I find that for every five stories occurring in a region, teachers are 2.2 percentage points more likely to be members in the subsequent year. These effects are larger when teachers share characteristics with the news story and can explain 45% of the growth in teacher union membership between 1992 and 2010. ? 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
1 October 2020
Journal of Labor Economics 38(4) , pp.1141-1188, 2020
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/706091
This Journal article is published under the centre's Education programme.