Monday, April 21, 2008

esri seminar

ESRI Research Seminar

“Are Good Industrial Relations Good for the Economy?”

Prof. John T. Addison
School of Management, Queen’s University Belfast

and

Paulino Teixeira
Faculdade de Economia, University of Coimbra


Venue: The ESRI, Whitaker Square, Sir John Rogerson's Quay, Dublin 2

Date and Time: Thursday 24th April 2008, at 4 p.m.

Using international data, we investigate whether the quality of industrial relations matters for the macro economy. We measure industrial relations inversely by strikes – which proxy we cross-check with an industrial relations reputation indicator – and our macro performance indicator is the unemployment rate. Independent of the role of other institutions, good industrial relations do seem to matter: greater strike volume is associated with higher unemployment. But these results apply in cross section. Holding country effects constant, the sign of the strikes coefficient is abruptly reversed. Although it does not seem to be the case that the line of causation runs from unemployment to strikes once we control for the endogeneity of strikes, it is also the case that support for the strikes proxy for industrial relations quality is much eroded.


Details of forthcoming ESRI Seminars can be found at WWW.ESRI.IE

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