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Original Articles

Collective happiness: labour union membership and life satisfaction

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Abstract

Labour union membership is associated with higher levels of life satisfaction in low-income countries, but not in high-income countries. Evidence suggests that union membership affects life satisfaction in low-income countries through better working conditions.

JEL Classification:

Notes

1  GDP per capita and average annual unemployment rate are from the World Development Indicators.

2 Although we only report detailed results for a specification mirroring that in Column 1, the high-income/low-income comparison yields similar conclusions in both the specification with additional interaction terms and without.

3 See also Robinson (Citation1991) and Botsch (Citation1993) for specific examples of the role of worker movements in improving workplace safety.

4 The inclusion of the accident variable does reduce the sample size. However, estimating the specification in Column 1 on the reduced sample still yields a positive and significant coefficient on union membership.

5 We attempted to use both the average per cent of workers in unions and the average confidence that people in a country have in unions as instruments for individual union memberships. We obtain qualitatively similar results; however, neither of those variables satisfies the exclusion restriction in the instrumental variables estimation and are therefore not valid instruments.

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