Historically, worker movements have played a crucial role in making workplaces safer. Firms traditionally oppose better health standards. According to our interpretation , workplace safety is costly for …rms but increases the average health of workers and thereby the aggregate labour supply. A laissez-faire approach in which …rms set safety standards is suboptimal as workers are not fully informed of health risks associated with jobs. Safety standards set by better-informed trade unions are output and welfare increasing. JEL codes: J 51, J 81
Most empirical studies have estimated a positive union-nonunion "injury gap," suggesting that unionized workers are more likely to have a nonfatal occupational injury than their nonunion counterparts. Using individual-level panel data for the first time, I study several explanations for this puzzling result. I find that controlling for time-invariant individual fixed effects already reduces the gap by around 40%. Some of the explanations that I study contribute in reducing this gap even further. I, however, do not find evidence of the gap becoming negative and the impact of unions on nonfatal injuries appears to be insignificant at best. JEL codes: J 51, J 28, J 81, C 33
Most empirical studies have estimated a positive union-nonunion "injury gap," suggesting that unionized workers are more likely to have a nonfatal occupational injury than their nonunion counterparts. Using individual-level panel data for the first time, I study several explanations for this puzzling result. I find that controlling for time-invariant individual fixed effects already reduces the gap by around 40%. Some of the explanations that I study contribute in reducing this gap even further. I, however, do not find evidence of the gap becoming negative and the impact of unions on nonfatal injuries appears to be insignificant at best. JEL codes: J 51, J 28, J 81, C 33
Using a large European data set, I investigate the impact of knowing foreign languages on unemployment for the first time. The focus is on natives (not on immigrants). I find that (1) knowing a foreign language reduces the probability of being unemployed by at least 3.4 percentage points;(2) females benefit more than males from learning foreign languages; (3) English and German tend to have a larger and more robust impact on unemployment than French, Spanish, and Italian; (4) but the impact of all these five languages varies considerably across countries.I would like to thank three anonymous referees, Frank St€ ahler, Harald Baayen, Marcel Smolka, and participants at several workshops and conferences for their helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank Richard Sellner for sharing with me his data set on regional trade and FDI.
Historically, worker movements have played a crucial role in making workplaces safer. Firms traditionally oppose better health standards. According to our interpretation, workplace safety is costly for …rms but increases the average health of workers and thereby the aggregate labour supply. A laissez-faire approach in which …rms set safety standards is suboptimal as workers are not fully informed of health risks associated with jobs. Safety standards set by better-informed trade unions are output and welfare increasing.JEL codes: J 51, J 81
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