Unionization, Monopsony Power, and Police Salaries

The impact of police unionization on municipal budgetary outcomes

“…Further empirical research on the wage impact of municipal unions has been directed toward police (19,20), firefighters (21,22), and various occupational groupings of other municipal employee~(23~24). Firefighters would appear to benefit most from unionization, enjoying a wage advantage varying from 2 to 18 percent, and averaging about 8 percent; organized police and other local government workers have not fared quite as well.…”

Modeling government behavior in collective bargaining: A test for self-interested bureaucrats

“…Papers in this area, many of which are devoted to estimating the effect of unions on public sector wages, include Ashenfelter (1971), Bartel and Lewin (1981), Edwards and Edwards ( 1982a, b), Ehrenberg (1973a, b), Ehrenberg and Goldstein (1975), Hall and Vanderporten (1977), Ichniowski (1980), Landon and Baird (1971), Nelson, Stone, and Swint (1981), Schmenner (1973), and Zax (1985). Among these studies, papers that control for labor market monopsony effects bear an especially close relationship to the present research (see, for example, Ehrenberg and Goldstein (1975), Hall and Vanderporten (1977), and Landon and Baird (1971) Finally, by attempting to discriminate empirically between the demandconstrained and efficient-bargain models of collective bargaining, the paper joins a small recent literature directed toward this goal (see Eberts and Stone (1986) and MaCurdy and Pencavel (1986)). The present approach to discriminating between the models is novel and should be of interest to labor economists working in this area.…”

Local government pay drift: the search for causality

“…Unfortunately the available data on geographically differentiated work incomes is not particularly sensitive and in this instance average country earnings, taken from the New Earnings Survey, must suffice as the measure used to attempt to capture the foregoing influence. The principal focus of the American literature has been on the effect of local government unionization on the supply, and hence wage, of labour, as is clear from Ashenfelter's (1971) (Hall and Vanderporten, 1977) to 15 % (Schmenner, 1973), and the issue of union power a subject of hot debate in Britain, the question is of considerable interest here. The percentage of an authority's work-force that is unionized, U, is therefore examined here as a supply-side influence with the standard expectation that it will positively affect pay drift.…”