TY  - JOUR
AU  - DiNardo,John
AU  - Lee,David S.
TI  - The Impact of Unionization on Establishment Closure: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Representation Elections
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 8993
PY  - 2002
Y2  - June 2002
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8993
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8993.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
John DiNardo
Ford School of Public Policy
5238 Weill Hall
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI  48109-3091
Tel: 734/647-7843
Fax: 734/763-9181
E-Mail: jdinardo@umich.edu

David Lee
Industrial Relations Section
Princeton University
Firestone Library A-16-J
Princeton, NJ 08544
Tel: 609/258-9548
Fax: 609/258-2907
E-Mail: davidlee@princeton.edu
AB  - Using data on more than 27,000 establishments (1983-1999) in the United States, this paper produces estimates of the causal effect of unionization of employer closure by exploiting the fact that most employers become 'unionized' as a partial consequence of a secret ballot election among the workers. If employers where unions barely won the election (e.g. by one vote) are ex ante comparable in all other ways to employers where unions barely lost (by one vote), differences in their subsequent outcomes should represent the true impact of union recognition. The regression discontinuity analysis finds little or no union effect on short- and long-run employer survival rates over 1- to 18-year horizons. We thus conclude that evidence of large effects of unions would more likely be found 1) along the within-employer (intensive margin) of employment and/or 2) in analyses of union threat effects.
ER  -