Collective bargaining power and corporate cash policy

Abstract

This paper provides novel evidence on the role of labor unions in firms’ corporate cash policy. Examining the unionization rates of firms across 29 countries for the period 2004–2015, we show that firms respond to an increase in unionization rate by decreasing their corporate cash holdings. The reported effect is symmetric, in that firms respond to increases (decreases) in unionization rate by decreasing (increasing) their cash buffers. These results are consistent with the bargaining hypothesis, namely, that firms strategically decrease their cash level to counter the rise in employees’ bargaining power due to increased unionization. Additionally, we find that the negative effect of unionization on cash holdings is more pronounced in labor-intensive, large, high-growth, high profitability, and low labor productive firms. The countries’ quality of institutions intensifies the documented relationship, what is in line with the cost economies theory. Moreover, we exploit shocks to the economies and show that increase in the unionization following a banking crisis influence negatively firm's cash levels. These findings are robust to different unionization variable constructions, alternative dependent variable definitions, controlling for potentially correlated time-variant firm characteristics, saturation of a dense set of fixed effects, and endogeneity concerns.