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.

本文为工会在企业现金政策中的作用提供了新的证据。通过检查 29 个国家/地区 2004 年至 2015 年期间企业的工会化率，我们发现企业通过减少公司现金持有量来应对工会化率的提高。报告的效果是对称的，因为公司通过减少（增加）现金缓冲来应对工会率的增加（减少）。这些结果与讨价还价假设一致，即公司战略性地降低现金水平以应对因工会化增加而导致员工讨价还价能力的上升。此外，我们发现工会化对现金持有的负面影响在劳动密集型、大型、高增长、高盈利和低劳动生产率的企业中更为明显。国家的制度质量加强了记录在案的关系，这与成本经济理论是一致的。此外，我们利用对经济的冲击，并表明银行危机后工会的增加对公司的现金水平产生负面影响。这些发现对于不同的联合变量结构、替代因变量定义、控制潜在相关的时变公司特征、一组密集固定效应的饱和以及内生性问题都是稳健的。