Abstract
Innovation depends critically on highly skilled knowledge workers, yet we know relatively little about how unionization affects labor markets in the knowledge economy. This project studies how faculty and graduate-student unions shape sorting, employment, wages, productivity, and labor demand in academic science and engineering. We use staggered union recognition and contract ratification across U.S. universities to estimate short- and long-run effects at public and private institutions, and we leverage the timing of union legislation as a plausibly exogenous source of variation in union exposure. By focusing on a labor market with high mobility and substantial heterogeneity in worker ability and effort, the paper examines how collective bargaining changes incentives and performance in a sector where innovation is central.