Anna Stansbury
@annastansbury · Cambridge MA & London · joined 04 Apr 2009
Economist: Labo(u)r, Macro, Inequality || 🇬🇧 / 🇺🇸 || Ass't Prof @MITSloan @MIT_IWER || Nonres fellow @piie
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3 540Following
11 660Posts total
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This is a great paper - which we discuss every year with the MBAs in my "People & Profits" course @MITSloan
One really striking thing, which I think does *not* necessarily fit people's priors ... MBA managers' effects look basically the same for workers in the US or Denmark ht
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This is a great paper - which we discuss every year with the MBAs in my "People & Profits" course @MITSloan.
One really striking thing, which I think does *not* necessarily fit people's priors ...
MBA managers' effects look basically the same for workers in the US or Denmark ht
6.2K views · 75 likes
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Transport & urban policy folks:
With a feasible future of fleets of autonomous + electric vehicles (+ a clean grid), how should we be thinking differently about long-term intra-city transit investments? Are trams / rail less relevant?
What should I read on this?
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This is a stellar paper on the incidence of corporate tax cuts.
Important findings are
- a big increase in investment after corporate tax cuts, which boosts growth
- incidence mostly on shareholders and high income workers : no (direct) benefit showing up in median wage
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Back-of-the-envelope MVPF: we estimate that $1 in corp tax cuts generates ~$1.47 in private income.
Incidence: In the short-run, ~80% of gains flow to the top 10% of the income distribution
Takeaway: Corp tax cuts increase economic growth, with highly uneven gains.
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@annastansbury @microsamonomics @ALPWillen Nice paper! You should come and present in Uppsala at some point, lots of interest in unions here.
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@QJEHarvard paper link here: https://t.co/FsXP6j9CAJ
Ungated PDF here: https://t.co/DdhltknXoW
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Takeaways:
- firm responses to unions - & who ultimately bears the cost - depend hugely on *market structure*.
- unions can offset employer monopsony power & reallocate from small to large firms.
- in our setting, unions primarily redistribute from consumers, not shareholders.
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For the average manufacturing firm, with all its market power, the union-induced increase in labor costs is paid for *almost entirely by consumers* in the form of higher prices, and somewhat also by higher productivity. https://t.co/jCsxpYZWNa
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So: "Who Pays for Unions?"
For the average private sector firm, the union-induced increase in labor costs is paid for mostly by firm owners in the form of lower profits, and consumers in the form of higher prices.
Many workers also lose as firms shrink. https://t.co/RvgfBQ0n6j
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For Norwegian manufacturing firms:
- monopsony power meant employment rose, rather than fell, as wages rose
- monopoly power meant they could pass on higher labor costs in prices
- some combination of productivity improvements + increased market power enabled no fall in profits h
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2. Improve workforce productivity by hiring and retaining better workers. Some of this seems to show up in improved product quality, which can explain why prices rise without a fall in demand. https://t.co/9DjtJmjVl8
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So why does manufacturing look so different from the average private sector firm?
Market power.
We show that Norwegian manufacturing firms have substantial market power in both product and labor markets.
-> Market power really matters for the effects of unionization.
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How do they do this? They do two things
1. Exercise their product market power to raise prices. Norwegian manufacturers sell highly specialized products at already-high prices. They have a lot of product market power - and get more as they expand. https://t.co/xfBuozHs0r
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Manufacturing looks VERY different from the average private sector firm. The "Econ-101" story is not present here.
The average manufacturing firm actually *grows*, not shrinks, when unions raise labor costs! https://t.co/jl8MelTvO9
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With rising labor costs and employment, and a falling markdown, this is consistent with manufacturing firms having a lot of monopsony power: here, unions are acting as countervailing power to the firm.
But again, the labor share doesn't fall - firms maintain their margins. https
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🏭🧑🏭
Next, we zoom in on the manufacturing sector. The manufacturing sector is interesting of itself, but also because
(1) It's disproportionately larger firms with more market power
(2) We can trace passthrough onto prices using detailed, product-level price data
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We find big differences by firm size: the smallest firms are hardest hit, and the largest quartile of firms hardly shrink at all.
That is, unionization reallocates from smaller to larger firms (as w the min wage).
(also consistent with larger firms having monopsony power ...)
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There's a clear "insider-outsider" dynamic. Firms shift their employment away from "less attached" workers and part-time workers.
There's also a productivity effect: Firms retain the more productive workers, and there's also work intensification - fewer sick days. https://t.co/i
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- firms shrink across the board (no evidence of capital-labor substitution).
- profits go down.
Surprisingly, there's no labor share increase - no transfer from capital to labor.
And the probability of exit does *not* rise - unions don't negotiate themselves out of existence h
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That gives us our instrument: firms whose workers were more affected by the increase in the subsidy saw bigger increases (or, usually, smaller decreases) in their union membership.
This is because Norwegian workers are quite price sensitive to union dues! https://t.co/CQVue9p8w
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Unsurprisingly, and as in prior work by Barth et al, when unions are strengthened at a firm, worker earnings go up.
For the average private sector firm, we see Econ-101 style results:
- employment goes down (and the response is very elastic). https://t.co/rSkFw1eOvk
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In Norway, there is two-tier bargaining: sectoral bargains set a series of minimum wages, and then there are additional establishment-level bargains between the unions at a given workplace and the employer. We're studying what happens when the firm's union is strengthened...
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The key: an exogenous shock to firm-level union density. The Norwegian government increased the subsidy to union membership (raising the tax deduction cap) several times over 2000-2014.
Since different unions have very different dues, this affected firms differently. https://t.c
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*When unions increase wages, who pays?*
It's normally v hard to answer this Q: unions don't behave randomly, they respond to firm conditions, and detailed firm data is hard to get.
Our setting in Norway tackles both...
🧵on our paper (@microsamonomics & @ALPWillen) https://t.co
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Recently accepted by #QJE: “Who Pays for Unions?” by Dodini (@microsamonomics), Stansbury (@annastansbury), and Willen (@ALPWillen): https://t.co/G38BFQV0xs
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Against accounts of the same size
25 posts from the last 90 days, next to the 10K–100K follower range. shown to more people than peers of the same size.
Median views994this account924median for 10K–100K
Reach, %4.65%this account3.62%median for 10K–100K
Engagement, %1.66%this account1.52%median for 10K–100K
| Metric | This account | Median for 10K–100K | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median views per post | 994 | 924 | 1.08× |
| Reach (views ÷ followers) | 4.65% | 3.62% | 1.28× |
| Engagement rate | 1.66% | 1.52% | 1.09× |
Others in this range → Compare with another account → How these benchmarks are built →
Growth & engagement
How the posts we collected actually performed: views and reaction rate post by post, what the audience did with them, and where the follower count goes.
Views per post
70431 Aug
690
658
636
603
775
722
732
587
15.6K
10.3K
1.2K3 Sep
6.2K
9.7K
Last 14 collected posts, oldest on the left. The scale is logarithmic: one post can outrun the rest a hundred times over.
Engagement rate per post
2.56%31 Aug
3.19%
2.13%
2.20%
3.81%
2.06%
2.08%
2.32%
1.36%
0.39%
0.86%
0.40%3 Sep
1.48%
0.89%
Reactions — likes, reposts, replies and quotes — divided by views. Median for 10K–100K accounts is 1.52%.
What the audience does
Likes61.0%1 155 in total
Reposts11.5%218 in total
Replies2.4%46 in total
Quotes0.8%15 in total
Bookmarks24.3%460 in total
Share of every reaction we collected for this account. Replies mean argument, reposts mean endorsement, bookmarks mean the post was worth keeping.
The follower curve appears once this account has two daily snapshots — we take one a day, and this one is on its first.
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