TY - JOUR AU - Card,David AU - Lemieux,Thomas AU - Riddell,W. Craig TI - Unionization and Wage Inequality: A Comparative Study of the U.S, the U.K., and Canada JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 9473 PY - 2003 Y2 - February 2003 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9473 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9473.pdf N1 - Author contact info: David Card Department of Economics 549 Evans Hall, #3880 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 Tel: 510/642-5222 Fax: 510/643-7042 E-Mail: card@econ.berkeley.edu Thomas Lemieux Department of Economics Vancouver School of Economics University of British Columbia #997-1873 East Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1 CANADA Tel: 604/822-2092 Fax: 604/822-5915 E-Mail: thomas.lemieux@ubc.ca Craig Riddell University of British Columbia Department of Economics #997-1873 East Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1 CANADA E-Mail: criddell@mail.ubc.ca M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2003-07-01 AB - This paper presents a comparative analysis of the link between unionization and wage inequality in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. Our main motivation is to see whether unionization can account for differences and trends in wage inequality in industrialized countries. We focus on the U.S., the U.K., and Canada because the institutional arrangements governing unionization and collective bargaining are relatively similar in these three countries. The three countries also share large non-union sectors that can be used as a comparison group for the union sector. Using comparable micro data for the last two decades, we find that unions have remarkably similar qualitative impacts in all three countries. In particular, unions tend to systematically reduce wage inequality among men, but have little impact on wage inequality for women. We conclude that unionization helps explain a sizable share of cross-country differences in male wage inequality among the three countries. We also conclude that de-unionization explains a substantial part of the growth in male wage inequality in the U.K. and the U.S. since the early 1980s. ER -