You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 13 May 2026, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held in room LG 0.423. Thomas Dohmen (University of Bonn) will be talking about “Worker Representatives”.
More information can be found here:
We study the representation of workers through professional worker representatives, focusing on the selection of German works council representatives and their impact on worker outcomes. We examine differences in the effects of blue- and white-collar representatives, motivated by the observation that blue- and white-collar workers exhibit different preferences, e.g., concerning job security. Using retirement-IV and event-study designs, we find that electing blue-collar representatives significantly reduces involuntary separations, consistent with their stronger emphasis on job security compared to their white-collar counterparts, and has no effect on the wages of the represented. We further show that becoming a professional representative yields substantial wage gains for blue-collar workers, and that both blue- and white-collar representatives are positively selected in terms of pre-election earnings and person fixed effects. In terms of descriptive representation, we document that blue-collar workers are close to proportionally represented in works councils, in contrast to representation of blue-collar workers in other domains.