The RFBerlin Applied Economics Seminar series brings leading researchers to Berlin to share their latest work and engage with our community. We are pleased to welcome Thomas Lemieux (University of British Columbia) for this session.

Thomas Lemieux is a Professor at UBC’s Vancouver School of Economics, where he is the Director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Centre on Wealth and Income Inequality. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Society of Labor Economists, and the Econometric Society.

Most of his recent research revolves around the issue of earnings inequality in Canada and other countries. He is also interested in econometric methods used to analyze the earnings distribution and regression discontinuity designs.

Event Topic:

Unions, Firms, and Wage Inequality

We use Canadian matched employer-employee data to estimate the effect of unions on wage dispersion. Our approach relies on an extension of Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999) (AKM) two-way fixed effects approach, where unions are allowed to affect the returns to unobservable worker characteristics captured by worker fixed effects. We find that unions compress the returns to unobserved characteristics, resulting in a substantial decline in within-firm dispersion. In contrast, unions have a modest effect on between-firm wage dispersion, as estimated by comparing the relationship between firm wage premiums and productivity among union and non-union firms. Overall, we find that most of the large difference in the variance of log wages between union (variance of 0.24) and non-union (variance of 0.36) workers is due to union wage compression effects, rather than composition effects.

Event Details:

Date: 14 October 2025
Time: 14:00–15:15

Participation: the seminar is open to the public and targeted to an academic audience.

If you have any questions or need further information, feel free to contact us using the form or email us at [email protected]