Trade Union Action and Collective Bargaining in Europe: Trends and Problems

This paper deals with the transformations that have taken place in European countries over the last ten years— the decade of the 80s— in union action and collective bargaining. For the latter in particular the trend towards greater convergence, or to maintain the traditional differences found between the industrial relations systems of one country and another, emerges clearly. The conclusions, moreover, underline the persistence (and the rise during the past years) of safeguards and negotiational contractual mediation, the greater (at least as compared to the previous decade) adhesion of bargaining action to the economic situation, and the determining influence that the various national economies have had on this action, with a rising importance played by the industrial relations of the major firms.     

On the Failure of the Bootstrap for Matching Estimators

Matching estimators are widely used in empirical economics for the evaluation of programs or treatments. Researchers using matching methods often apply the bootstrap to calculate the standard errors. However, no formal justification has been provided for the use of the bootstrap in this setting. In this article, we show that the standard bootstrap is, in general, not valid for matching estimators, even in the simple case with a single continuous covariate where the estimator is root‐N consistent and asymptotically normally distributed with zero asymptotic bias. Valid inferential methods in this setting are the analytic asymptotic variance estimator of Abadie and Imbens (2006a) as well as certain modifications of the standard bootstrap, like the subsampling methods in Politis and Romano (1994).