Alexander Bryson

Alexander Bryson is professor of Quantitative Social Science at the Social Research Institute at University College London. He is a Research Fellow at IZA, RFBerlin, and the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence and a Faculty Fellow at the School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University. He is Editor-in-Chief of Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, and an editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A and the Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership. He is on the organizing committees for the Colloquium on Personnel Economics and Counterfactual Methods for Policy Impact Evaluation.

The project

Title: Trade Unions in Developing Countries

"Trade unions are membership organizations consisting of workers who, by virtue of their collective membership, can increase their bargaining power vis-a-vis employers with a view to improving their terms and conditions of employment.  Unions achieve this by operating as a cartel to monopolize the supply of labor to the firm.  By virtue of this function, often termed their “monopoly face” unions can affect a number of firm-level outcomes which impact labor productivity and firm profitability.  The "monopoly face" of trade unions is only one aspect of the union good which workers purchase on membership.  A second is unions' “voice face” through which trade unions offer a collective "voice" at the firm, representing members' interests in a number of settings beyond collective bargaining. The net effect of these functions on firm performance is theoretically ambiguous, since the mechanisms can offset one another, and firms may be heterogeneous in their responses to unions' bargaining power. The empirical research testing theoretical predictions regarding union effects on workers and firms is extensive, going all the way back to Adam Smith and to Marx and Engels' work on factory labor in England in the 19th century.  The literature has gone through many phases, with estimates reflecting changes in union strength, institutional structures, and the advent of new and better data and estimation techniques.  However, this extensive empirical literature – perhaps the most extensive in labor economics - is almost exclusively confined to developed countries, mainly in North America and Europe."

Hosting Institution(s): Sciences Po

Selective Bibliography

• Blanchflower, D. G. and Bryson, A. (forthcoming) “Not Flourishing”, Journal of Happiness Studies
• Gomez, R., Bryson, A. and Willman, P. (forthcoming) “Trust and Cooperation in Labor-Management Relations”, chapter in K. F. Zimmerman (ed.) Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Labor Economics, Springer
• Bryson, A. (2026) The Gender Wage Gap Among Those Born in 1958: Conditioning on What and How?, IZA Discussion Paper No. 18960 and Rockwool Foundation No. 256/26
• Bryson, A., Forth, J. and Green, F. (2026) ”The Relative Importance of the Establishment in the Determination of Job Quality”, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 64, 3: 615-634
• Breda, T., Bryson, A. and Forth, J. (2026) ”Productivity Dynamics Among Union Locals in the United States”, Economic Inquiry, 64: 533-554