Advancement to Candidacy Presentation: “Unionization and Turnover in the US", Thomas Fullagar

Speaker

Thomas Fullagar, University of California, Santa Barbara

Biography

Thomas is a PhD economics student at the University of California Santa Barbara. His research is in applied microeconomics with a focus on labor and education. He loves all things data.

Event Details

Thomas will be presenting his Advancement to Candidacy paper, “Unionization and Turnover in the US”. To access the Advancement paper, you must have an active UCSB NetID and password.

Abstract and JEL Codes

Unions are seeing a post-pandemic resurgence in the United States. This paper leverages a novel data set containing millions of resumes with National Labor Relations Board election data to study the contemporary effects of unionization. I estimate the effects of winning a union election on separations, hires, and net employment for the period 2007 through 2022. I document evidence of employer manipulation at the cutoff. To address this, I take advantage of the panel nature of my data by using a difference-in-discontinuities approach, which combines elements of regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences. I find that, compared to elections where the union loses, a union victory leads to 0.27 additional separations, 0.31 additional hires, and a negligible affect on net employment. These magnitudes are considerable -- the average number of separations by firms in the pre-election period was 0.66 and the average number of hires was 1.

JEL Codes: J23, J31, J38, J50, J53, J58, J83