Abstract
Innovation in the U.S. economy depends critically on the productivity of its knowledge workers. This study examines how unionization and the associated changes in wage-setting institutions affect labor market outcomes and productivity among academic scientists and engineers—a central segment of the knowledge economy. While existing research has explored the effects of unions in broader labor markets, much less is known about their impact in high-skill sectors characterized by substantial worker heterogeneity and uneven mobility across career stages, which may shape how labor market adjustments occur.
This study provides one of the first causal analyses of unionization in U.S. higher education, a setting central to the production of innovation and high-skill human capital. Leveraging restricted microdata from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR), the staggered adoption of faculty unions across U.S. universities, and state-level variation in the implementation of Right-To-Work and public-sector collective bargaining laws, we plan to estimate the short- and long-run impacts of union recognition and contract ratification on wages, employment, sorting, and research productivity. We combine staggered difference-in-differences designs with state-level variation to isolate the causal effects of union exposure. The SDR enables us to track individual scientists’ earnings, employment trajectories, and research output across sectors, allowing us to examine both wage-setting and mobility responses.
Preliminary evidence using institution-level data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) suggests limited aggregate wage effects. However, there is substantial heterogeneity across faculty ranks and clearer adjustment along employment margins. In particular, both earnings and employment decline for associate and assistant professors relative to other ranks, while effects for senior faculty and non-tenure-track positions are smaller and less precisely estimated. These patterns suggest that unionization may operate less through uniform wage compression and more through differential adjustments across the tenure track, with implications for the composition of the academic workforce and long-run institutional productivity outcomes.