The Economics of Trade Unions: Recent Meta-Analysis on the Economic Impact of Trade Unions

A recent publication by Richard Freeman, Hristos Doucouligos and Patrice Laroche summarizes the available economic evidence on the effects of trade unions by using a meta-analysis. The latter allows presenting a median of all the estimated effects of trade unions  across the wide range of studies. The method also allows observing how these estimates are driven by factors such as the different research methods used, the different periods or countries that are covered by the studies or by differences in institutional settings such as (de)regulated labour market regimes. This TUAC paper describes the key conclusions from this meta-analysis and concludes with some comments.