the scope of mandatory bargaining a critique and a proposal this paper argues that the mandatory permissive distinction in the scope of the duty to bargain collectively should be abandoned in favor of a policy of classifying all lawful subjects as mandatory the author shows that in recent applications of the distinction by the nlrb and the courts many subjects of interest to labor have been declared within the exclusive control of management she argues that the rationales used by the board and the courts in these decisions are not compelling and the mandatory permissive distinction is even less convincing when its current application is compared to the criteria of an ideal scope of bargaining

the impact on economic performance of a transformation in workplace relations this study examines how a transformation in patterns of conflict and cooperation affected economic performance in 25 work areas of a large unionized manufacturing facility in the period 1984 87 unlike most studies of industrial relations and economic performance this study clearly distinguishes conflict from cooperation but evaluates the two together rather than focusing on only one an analysis of data collected from union and employer records and interviews strongly suggests that work areas with traditional labor management relations rooted in adversarial assumptions had higher costs more scrap lower productivity and a lower return to direct labor hours worked than work areas with transformational relations characterized by increased cooperation and improved dispute resolution

unions and family income inequality the effect of union wage gains of private sector blue collar workers on the size distribution of family incomes and the level of poverty in 1970 is examined in this paper collective bargaining wage gains are found to compress the distribution of income among union families when union and nonunion families are combined however the union impact on measured inequality is negligible due in part to the fact that on average middle income families reap the largest gains from collective bargaining the impact of union wage gains on the incidence of poverty also is very small

the effects of human resource management practices on productivity a study of steel finishing lines the authors investigate the productivity effects of innovative employment practices using data from a sample of thirty six homogeneous steel production lines owned by seventeen companies the productivity regressions demonstrate that lines using a set of innovative work practices which include incentive pay teams flexible job assignments employment security and training achieve substantially higher levels of productivity than do lines with the more traditional approach which includes narrow job definitions strict work rules and hourly pay with close supervision their results are consistent with recent theoretical models which stress the importance of complementarities among work practices

unions and wage inequality the roles of gender skill and public sector employment we examine the changing relationship between unionization and wage inequality in canada and the united states our study is motivated by profound recent changes in the composition of the unionized workforce historically union jobs were concentrated among low skilled men in private sector industries with the steady decline in private sector unionization and rising influence in the public sector half of unionized workers are now in the public sector accompanying these changes was a remarkable rise in the share of women among unionized workers currently approximately half of unionized employees in north america are women while early studies of unions and inequality focused on males recent studies find that unions reduce wage inequality among men but not among women in both countries we find striking differences between the private and public sectors in the effects of unionization on wage inequality at present unions reduce economy wide wage inequality by less than 10 however union impacts on wage inequality are much larger in the public sector once we disaggregate by sector the effects of unions on male and female wage inequality no longer differ the key differences in union impacts are between the public and private sectors not between males and females syndicats et inegalites salariales importance du genre des habiletes et de l emploi dans le secteur public dans cet article nous examinons l evolution de la relation entre syndicalisation et inegalites salariales au canada et aux etats unis notre etude se fonde sur les changements recents et profonds de la composition de la main d uvre syndiquee historiquement les emplois syndiques etaient occupes par des hommes peu qualifies travaillant dans les industries du secteur prive avec le declin regulier de la syndicalisation au sein du secteur prive et son influence croissante au sein du secteur public la moitie des travailleurs syndiques fait desormais partie du secteur public ces changements ont ete accompagnes d une hausse spectaculaire du pourcentage de femmes parmi les travailleurs syndiques actuellement pres de la moitie des employes syndiques en amerique du nord sont des femmes tandis que les premieres etudes sur les syndicats et les inegalites portaient sur les hommes certaines plus recentes ont montre que les syndicats permettaient de reduire les inegalites salariales entre les hommes mais pas entre les femmes dans les deux pays nous avons decouvert des differences frappantes entre secteur prive et secteur public relativement aux effets de la syndicalisation sur les inegalites salariales aujourd hui les syndicats permettent de reduire les inegalites salariales de moins de 10 dans l ensemble de l economie neanmoins l influence des syndicats sur les inegalites salariale est bien plus forte dans le secteur public en decomposant les donnees par secteur les effets des syndicats sur les inegalites salariales entre hommes et femmes sont les memes en matiere d influence des syndicats les differences fondamentales se situent entre le secteur prive et le secteur public et non entre les hommes et les femmes

centralized bargaining and reorganized work are they compatible the paper examines the implications for wage bargaining of an important aspect of the ongoing reorganization of work the move from occupational specialization toward multi tasking the analysis shows how on account of such reorganization centralized bargaining becomes increasingly ine cient and detrimental to rms pro t opportunities since it prevents rms from o ering their employees adequate incentives to perform the appropriate mix of tasks the paper also shows how centralized bargaining inhibits rms from using wages to induce workers to learn how to use their experience from one set of tasks to enhance their performance at other tasks in this way the paper may also help explain the increasing resistance to centralized bargaining in various advanced market economies 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

skill demands and mismatch in u s manufacturing recent economic events have sparked debates over the degree of structural mismatch in the u s economy one of the most frequent claims is that workers lack the skills that employers demand the existing literature however analyzes this potential mismatch at a high level of aggregation with abstract indices and noisy proxies that obscure the underlying mechanisms the authors address these issues by presenting and analyzing results from a survey of u s manufacturing establishments the survey is the first to their knowledge to directly measure concrete employer skill demands and hiring experiences in a nationally representative survey at the industry level the findings indicate that demand for higher level skills is generally modest and that three quarters of manufacturing establishments do not show signs of hiring difficulties among the remainder demands for higher level math and reading skills are significant predictors of long term vacancies but demands for computer skills and other critical

strikes scabs and tread separations labor strife and the production of defective bridgestone firestone tires this paper provides a case study of the effect of labor relations on product quality we consider whether a long contentious strike and the hiring of permanent replacement workers by bridgestone firestone in the mid 1990s contributed to the production of an excess number of defective tires using several independent data sources we find that labor strife in the decatur plant closely coincided with lower product quality count data regression models based on two data sets of tire failures by plant year and age show significantly higher failure rates for tires produced in decatur during the labor dispute than before or after the dispute or than at other plants also an analysis of internal firestone engineering tests indicates that p235 tires from decatur performed less well if they were manufactured during the labor dispute compared with those produced after the dispute or compared with those from other non striking plants monthly data suggest that the production of defective tires was particularly high around the time wage concessions were demanded by firestone in early 1994 and when large numbers of replacement workers and permanent workers worked side by side in late 1995 and early 1996

industrial relations performance economic performance and qwl programs an interplant analysis this study analyzes the relationship among plant level measures of industrial relations performance economic performance and quality of working life programs the analysis employs pooled time series and cross section data from 18 plants within a division of general motors for the years 1970 79 the empirical results show strong associations between industrial relations and economic performance measures and limited support for the hypothesis that quality of working life efforts improve both kinds of performance

farsighted coalitional stability abstract i define the largest consistent set a solution concept which applies to situations in which coalitions freely form but cannot make binding contracts act publicly and are fully farsighted in that a coalition considers the possibility that once it acts another coalition might react a third coalition might in turn react and so on without limit i establish weak nonemptiness conditions and apply it to strategic and coalitional form games and majority rule voting i argue that it improves on the von neumann morgenstern stable set as it is usually defined but is consistent with a generalization of the stable set as in the theory of social situations journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c71

interpreting income distributions in a welfare state the case of sweden abstract it is shown in this paper that the distribution of purchasing power and hence probably also economic well being in a welfare state like sweden is not tightly connected with the contribution of households in the production system moreover economic inequality is drastically exaggerated when income statistics are not adjusted for differences in working time and in the time profile of income over life however it is also shown that some important inequalities are not removed even by the very ambitious tax and welfare state system in sweden and that some new inequalities are in fact introduced the paper also tries to highlight the wide wedges which in an advanced welfare state are necessarily driven between factor costs for firms and factor rewards for households all this holds in particular for annual income

unions innovation and investment australian evidence machin and wadhwani have produced evidence indicating that trade unions encourage investment in the uk this paper uses comparable data to ascertain whether their finding holds with respect to australia in general and contrary to the uk study the net effect of unions on investment in australia is found to be negative nevertheless investment levels at workplaces where unions were active were above the levels at non union workplaces offering support for the union voice hypothesis which machin and wadhwani use to explain their results

labour unrest and the quality of production evidence from the construction equipment resale market this paper examines the construction equipment resale market to assess whether equipment produced by the world s largest manufacturer of construction machinery caterpillar experienced lower product quality in facilities that underwent contract disputes during the 1990 s analysis of auction data reveals that resale market participants significantly discounted machines produced in these dispute affected facilities additionally pieces of equipment produced in facilities undergoing unrest were resold more often received worse appraisal reports and had lower list prices taken together the evidence supports the hypothesis that workmanship at dispute affected facilities declined and that the resulting impact on the economic quality of the equipment produced was significant the dispute was associated with at least 400 million in lost service flows due to inferior quality equipment alone

wage inequality and varieties of capitalism this article draws on a new data set that enables the authors to compare the distribution of income from employment across oecd countries specifically the article conducts a pooled cross sectional time series analysis of the determinants of wage inequality in sixteen countries from 1973 to 1995 the analysis shows that varieties of capitalism matter the authors find that the qualities that distinguish social market economies from liberal market economies shape the way political and institutional variables influence wage inequality of particular interest to political scientists is the finding that the wage distributive effects of government partisanship are contingent on institutional context union density emerges in the analysis as the single most important factor influencing wage inequality in both institutional contexts

the impact of taxes on growth and distribution in developed capitalist countries a cross national study has the scope of public planning in contemporary capitalist economies promoted or hindered economic growth and income distribution we explore this question by assessing the impact of various mechanisms for raising government revenues on investment growth and income distribution in 22 developed market economy countries the article considers whether growth and distribution are affected differently by governments relative reliance on personal and corporate income taxes social security contributions property taxes and sales and value added taxes or by the relative progressivity of tax mechanisms our findings lend support to the assertion that fiscal instruments especially personal income taxes can be used successfully to achieve greater income equality on the other hand these findings run counter to the conventional notion that an automatic trade off exists between an active public sector and a dynamic expanding economy although there is surely some tension between the economic goals of growth and equality it is not at all clear that they are necessarily incompatible or that government can contribute only to the latter

how unions affect productivity in manufacturing plants this study investigates several hypotheses as to how unions may affect productivity analysis of data from 46 manufacturing plants for 1982 indicates a negative union impact on productivity the author finds evidence suggesting that unions reduce the effectiveness of some managerial practices undertaken to increase productivity and that a poor labor management relations climate also reduces productivity these two factors account for almost 50 percent of the negative union impact

unions and nonunion wage dispersion previous research has found that union standard rate policies lower the dispersion of union wages and that unions indirectly raise nonunion wage levels as firms weigh the probability of unionizing and wage costs these two findings imply that unions lower the dispersion of nonunion wages since for a given payroll a nonunion firm can achieve the greatest reduction in the probability of unionism by giving raises to those who would benefit most from a union this hypothesis is confirmed on current population survey data taking into account the endogeneity of unionism ceteris paribus nonunion wage dispersion is lower in more highly unionized industries copyright 1987 by mit press

worker participation and productivity in labor managed and participatory capitalist firms a meta analysis using meta analytic techniques the author synthesizes the results of 43 published studies to investigate the effects on productivity of various forms of worker participation worker participation in decision making mandated codetermination profit sharing worker ownership employee stock ownership or individual worker ownership of the firm s assets and collective ownership of assets workers collective ownership of reserves over which they have no individual claim he finds that codetermination laws are negatively associated with productivity but profit sharing worker ownership and worker participation in decision making are all positively associated with productivity all the observed correlations are stronger among labor managed firms firms owned and controlled by workers than among participatory capitalist firms firms adopting one or more participation schemes involving employees such as esops or quality circles

union bargaining decisions and contract ratifications the 1982 and 1984 auto agreements the authors of this study investigate the determinants of union contract ratification votes by analyzing plant level data relevant to the 1982 and 1984 auto industry agreements with the uaw the results strongly suggest that the more vulnerable workers are to layoff the more likely they are to vote for ratification of proposed agreements the results also show however that workers tend to vote against ratification in plants in which other things equal the labor relations climate is poor in addition comparisons across contracts indicate how voting patterns associated with various plant and worker characteristics change when contract proposals shift toward greater job security and away from wage increases

concession bargaining the impact on shareholders equity this analysis of bargaining settlements in 1982 83 shows that on average shareholders in those firms that negotiated concessionary settlements enjoyed an 8 to 10 percent increase in the value of their holdings the author interprets this result to mean not that the value of the firm increased but rather that concessions enlarged the shareholders portion of the firm s value at the expense of the workers portion on the other hand concession bargaining does not seem to have reallocated business risk between shareholders and labor finally the evidence suggests that firm specific sources of risk can explain in part not only the magnitude of the concession effects but also the probability that concession bargaining will occur

toward a structural account of union participation in management the case of western airlines in 1983 and 1984 four unions at western airlines agreed to wage cuts work rule changes two tier wage plans and other concessions in return for seats on the board of directors a health services program financial information sharing and an employee involvement program the author uses data from interviews conducted with all parties between 1983 and 1987 to argue that meaningful and lasting employee participation occurred only when the union had enough power to induce management to forgo some of its traditional prerogatives a structural factor the union and management shared a vision of how participation could serve both parties interests a cognitive factor and the union had substantial institutional security a second structural factor

carrots and sticks pay supervision and turnover the efficiency wage model ewm has been advanced as an explanation for large and persistent wage differentials the shirking version of the ewm assumes a trade off between self supervision and external supervision the turnover version assumes turnover is costly to the firm variation across firms in the cost of monitoring shirking or turnover then is hypothesized to account for wage variations across firms for homogeneous workers using a new sample of firm data this paper presents empirical evidence of the trade off of wage premiums for supervisory intensity and turnover little evidence is found to support either version of the ewm

paying the professor sources of salary variation in academic labor markets using a set of 58 academic fields as distinct labor markets we examined the extent of wage variation within markets the degree to which wages vary is an indicator of market efficiency and of whether a market wage exists holding constant differences in human capital we found that the degree of wage variation in an academic labor market is negatively related to mobility within that market and positively related to the oversupply of labor we also found that as wage variation increases male female wage differentials also increase

farsighted strategies in the formation of a communication network abstract i examine the formation of a specific communication network a variant of the two way flow model in which agents have farsighted strategies i show that the likelihood to form efficient networks tends to zero for sufficiently large network sizes

employee voice human resource practices and quit rates evidence from the telecommunications industry the authors draw on strategic human resource and industrial relations theories to identify the sets of employee voice mechanisms and human resource practices that are likely to predict firm level quit rates then empirically evaluate the predictive power of these variables using data from a 1998 establishmentlevel survey in the telecommunications industry with respect to alternative voice mechanisms they find that union representation predicts lower quit rates even after they control for compensation and a wide range of other human resource practices that may be affected by collective bargaining also predicting lower quit rates is employee participation in offline problem solving groups and in self directed teams no apparent association is found between quit rates and the availability of nonunion dispute resolution procedures regarding human resource practices higher relative wages and internal promotion policies predict lower quit rates and contingent staffing electronic monitoring and variable pay predict higher rates

unions and cooperative behavior the effect of discounting using union contract and industry wage survey data this article examines the effect of discounting on cooperative bargaining behavior by unions and firms game theory predicts that higher discount rates raise the temptation to defect from cooperation measures of cooperative behavior included the presence of merit pay incentive pay wage employment guarantees or labor management study committees discount rates were proxied by the relevant industry s failure rate failure rates generally had negative effects on cooperation industry wage survey results showed larger effects for union than non union establishments providing support for the union bargaining framework

segmented labor markets in ldcs this discussion is confined to the urban labor markets in developing countries and to manual workers it outlines the process by which the urban market for workers of low skill tends to develop a sector of high wage often accompanied by job security and fringe benefits unavailable to the large number of workers outside this sector it views the problem of large wage differentials within the urban manual work force more as one of distribution of income than as creating distortions of income or inefficiency in the neoclassical sense the paper concludes that the difference in efficiency wages and hence of labor costs between different size classes of enteprises could be much less than the observed wage gap the urban economy appears to be characterized by widening wage differentials between the formal and the residual sectors with a declining proportion of the urban labor force employed in the former what happens to income distribution in its lower reaches depends crucially on the dynamism of the self employed sector of petty producers and traders which often shows high returns to small doses of capital and entrepreneurship and which may provide an alternative to job seekers not able to get into the high wage sector

taking stock collective bargaining at the turn of the century examining data from two national surveys of matched pairs of union and management lead negotiators the authors evaluate the current state of practice in labor relations and test several propositions related to the transformation of american industrial relations they find that 30 40 of the parties reported that they had introduced negotiated workplace level innovations or engaged in strategic level interactions both important aspects of transformation also nearly half of the parties reported experience with use of interest based bargaining practices at the same time relatively few parties reported relationships that were improving and views on the extent of change differed between labor and management thus there is an identifiable path supporting the transformation process but only a minority of bargaining relationships are moving down that path

is pattern bargaining dead this paper challenges the common belief that pattern bargaining largely ended in the 1980s applying a measure of pattern bargaining the dispersion of log wages to wage data drawn from the same data set that audrey freedman used in her widely quoted studies of this subject the author shows that the extent of pattern bargaining was actually greater in 1983 than in 1977 the evidence suggests that managers perceptions of changes in the bargaining process which are the basis for freedman s claim that pattern bargaining has eroded are inconsistent with actual changes in wage patterns

unionization and profitability evidence from the capital market this paper examines the effect of unionization on the profitability of firms abnormal monthly common stock returns for a sample of 253 nyse listed firms are estimated for the month in which the union petitions for an election and for the month in which the national labor relations board certifies the election outcome the results suggest that unionization on average is associated with a reduction in equity value when unions win an election the average loss associated with the unionization drive is 3 8 percent of equity value when unions lose an election there is an average net reduction of 1 3 percent in the equity value of the firm

the decentralization of collective bargaining a literature review and comparative analysis the author reviews evidence that the bargaining structure is becoming more decentralized in sweden australia the former west germany italy the united kingdom and the united states although in

firms choice of method of pay using data from the bls industry wage survey the author tests the theory that firms choose their methods of pay by balancing the gains from more precise links between performance and pay against m

growing apart the changing firm size wage premium and its inequality consequences wage inequality in the united states has risen dramatically over the past few decades prompting scholars to develop a number of theoretical accounts for the upward trend this study argues that large firms have been a prominent labor market institution that mitigates inequality by compensating their low and middle wage employees with a greater premium than their higher wage counterparts large u s firms reduced overall wage dispersion yet broader changes to employment relations associated with the demise of internal labor markets and the emergence of alternative employment arrangements have undermined large firms role as an equalizing institution using data from the current population survey and the survey of income and program participation we find that in 1989 although all private sector workers benefited from a firm size wage premium the premium was significantly higher for individuals at the lower end and middle of the wage distribution compared to those at the higher end between 1989 and

unions wages and skills studies uniformly conclude that union wage effects are largest for workers with low measured skills longitudinal analysis using 1989 90 1994 95 cps matched panels produces union premium estimates equivalent across skill groups following appropriate sample restrictions and control for worker specific skills nlsy evidence on aptitude scores confirms that union workers with high measured skills have relatively low unmeasured skills differential selection by skill class and skill homogeneity in union workplaces result from employer and employee sorting in response to wage standardization union organizing where skills are homogeneous and unionized employers reluctance to hire the most as well as least able workers

networks and farsighted stability the main contribution of this paper is to provide a framework in which the notion of farsighted stability for games introduced by chwe 1994 can be applied to directed networks in particular we introduce the notion of a supernetwork a supernetwork is made up of a collection of directed networks the nodes and uniquely represents via the arcs connecting the nodes agent preferences and the rules governing network formation by reformulating chwe s basic result on the nonemptiness of farsightedly stable sets we show that for any supernetwork i e for any collection of directed networks and any collection of rules governing network formation there exists a farsightedly stable directed network we also introduce the notion of a nash network relative to a given supernetwork as well as the notions of symmetric nonsimultaneous and decomposable supernetworks to illustrate the utility of our framework we present several examples of super networks compute the farsightedly stable networks and the nash networks

union wage practices and wage dispersion within establishments this study analyzes establishment level data primarily to examine the effect of unionism on the wage structure within establishments the major finding is that within establishment dispersion of wages is significantly narrower in unionized than in nonunionized establishments a pattern the author attributes in large part to unions wage practices such as single rate or automatic progression modes of wage payment as opposed to merit reviews and individual wage determination the data also show that dispersion in average wages is narrower among organized plants but by more modest amounts than the within establishment differential overall the evidence suggests a major role for explicit union wage policies in explaining the dispersion of wages within firms and in the economy as a whole

australian evidence on the exit voice model of the labor market two predictions of the exit voice model of union activity that have been confirmed by empirical research in the united states are that union workers will have longer tenures and lower quit rates th

the effects of grievance activity on productivity this study develops and tests a production function that includes a plant s grievance filing rate as a determinant of productivity application of that function to data on nine unionized paper mill

wage dispersion within firms and collective bargaining in spain abstract this paper analyses the determinants of bargained wage dispersion by professional groups within firms in spain estimations show that insider factors union density sales per employee and the average bargained wage level are the main determinants of wage dispersion

union density and varieties of coverage the anatomy of union wage effects in germany collective bargaining in germany takes place at either industry or firm level and bargaining coverage is much higher than union density the share of a firm s employees covered can vary between 0 and 100 suggesting that researchers should distinguish union density coverage at the firm level and coverage at the individual level using linked employer employee data the authors estimate ols and quantile regressions of wages on these dimensions of union influence they find that a higher share of employees in a firm covered by industrywide or firm specific contracts is associated with higher wages but find no clear cut effect on wage dispersion yet holding coverage at the firm level constant individual coverage is associated with lower wages and less wage dispersion higher union density reinforces the effects of coverage but for employees in firms without coverage density s effect is negative and thus compresses the wage distribution in firms without coverage

longitudinal analyses of the effects of trade unions but union members are different from nonmembers in unobserved ways biasing your estimates y ou should make a selectivity bias correction simultaneously determine union status and economic outcomes develop an unobservables model use longitudinal data archetypical comment on virtually any study of the economic effects of umomsm or suitably modified on any other empirical subject

a strategic model of social and economic networks we study the stability and efficiency of social and economic networks when self interested individuals can form or sever links first for two stylized models we characterize the stable and efficient networks there does not always exist a stable network that is efficient next we show that this tension persists generally to assure that there exists a stable network that is efficient one is forced to allocate resources to nodes that are not responsible for any of the production we characterize one such allocation rule the equal split rule and another rule that arises naturally from bargaining of the players

the effects of union membership on wages and employee benefits the case of australia in australia pay awards by government tribunals cover nearly the entire work force and those awards set equal pay for comparable union and nonunion workers union members may however secure higher compensation through plant level bargaining this study uses 1984 88 panel data to estimate the magnitude of union effects on compensation by examining changes in the compensation of employees who enter and leave union jobs relative to changes in the compensation of workers who remain union or nonunion the results show that union workers in australia enjoy 7 18 higher wages than comparable nonunion workers and are also more likely to have access to a pension plan

duration and concentration of unemployment this paper examines labour market turnover as a determinant of unemployment in canada the distribution of completed spells of unemployment is generated from gross flow data by using hazard functions unemployment is found to be more concentrated in long spells than can be expected under markov processes difficulties in access to jobs are also revealed in a high proportion of unemployment spells not ending in jobs but in withdrawals from the labour force the incidence of multiple spells of unemployment is also high on balance the characterization of unemployment and the policy conclusions differ markedly from those emphasized by the turnover literature duree et concentration du ch6mage ce memoire examine le roulement sur le marche du travail comme une force determinante du ch6mage au canada la distribution de la longueur des periodes de ch6mage est etablie a partir des donnees brutes par le moyen de fonctions de risque on trouve que le chomage a tendance a se concentrer bien davantage en periodes plus longues que ne le suggererait un modele markovien le serieux des difficultes que les travailleurs ont a se donner acces a un emploi est revele par la proportion des periodes de ch6mage qui se termine non pas par un emploi mais par un retrait de la main d oeuvre active l incidence de plusieurs periodes de chomage est tres forte d un facon generale les diagnostics et les politiques recommendees par la litterature specialisee qui met l accent sur le roulement sur le marche du travail comme force determinante ne semblent pas etre supportes par les resultats des auteurs

wage effects of unionization and occupational licensing coverage in the united states recent estimates in standard models of wage determination for both unionization and occupational licensing have shown wage effects that are similar across the two institutions these cross sectional estimates use specialized data sets with small sample sizes for the period 2006 to 2008 the authors analysis examines the impact of unions and licensing coverage on wage determination using new data collected on licensing statutes that are then linked to longitudinal data from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy79 from 1979 to 2010 they develop several approaches using both cross sectional and longitudinal analyses to measure the impact of these two labor market institutions on wage determination the estimates of the economic returns to union coverage are greater than those for licensing statutes

human resource management and performance in european firms we develop a theoretical framework to examine three hypotheses on the relationship between human resource management hrm practices and organisational performance in european firms the first is that collaborative forms of hrm practice are more strongly associated with superior firm performance than calculative forms the second is that these associations are strongest where national institutional and normative settings support them the third is that employer employee consultative committees and collective payment methods are also associated with superior firm performance the first two propositions are strongly empirically supported as is the third albeit more weakly the implications of the findings for european policy and varieties of capitalism theory are discussed

union effects on productivity profits and growth has the long run arrived this article interprets literature examining union effects on economic performance production function studies indicate small overall union impacts on productivity positive effects where they exist appear to result from management response to decreased profit expectations and from a natural selection process lower profitability among unionized firms is well established more interesting is the possibility that unions appropriate quasi rents deriving from long lived tangible and intangible capital the connection between unions investment behavior and productivity growth emerges as a particularly fruitful line of empirical inquiry although it does not encourage a sanguine view of unionism s long run impact

wage settlements and wage setting results from a multi level model which dimensions of wage setting differ across establishments applying collective contracts and uncovered establishments the empirical analysis reported here utilizes german linked employer employee data for the years 1990 1995 and 2001 and is restricted to workers without supervisory functions in larger manufacturing firms results show that the expected wage of an average worker is higher in firms applying collective contracts while returns to human capital and the gender wage gap are reduced moreover during the 1990s these effects became stronger

the decline of labour market institutions and the rise in wage inequality in britain abstract at the same time as the role of labour market institutions declined very dramatically in britain there was a very sharp rise in wage inequality that since 1980 has increased at a faster pace than in most advanced countries britain in the 1980s and early 1990s therefore provides a very good testing ground for evaluating the importance of labour market institutions in explaining the evolution of the wage structure i look at this in terms of two institutions that have traditionally propped up wage levels at the bottom end of the wage distribution unions and minimum wages i find that their weakening has played an important part in the rise in wage inequality in britain

is poor worker morale costly to firms in 1985 and 1990 studies norsworthy and zabala reported evidence supporting the hypothesis that declining worker morale has reduced productivity and productivity growth this study partly replicat

why unions reduce wage inequality a theory of domino effects numerous empirical studies show that unions reduce wage differences i demonstrate that their motive might be a mix of fairness and strategy maximizing the use of union bargaining power in the presence of efficiency wages unions can push primarily for raising the lowest wages and still not sacrifice higher wages much if the employers themselves increase higher wages to protect efficiency enhancing wage differences if these domino effects are strong enough then an egalitarian wage policy might even increase the median wage

a test of an efficiency model of grievance activity copyright by cornell university this is the publisher s version also available electronically from http ilr sagepub com content 45 1 3 refs

dual factor price equalization elements of a theory abstract the article hypothesizes that despite wide differences in wages and incomes between the developed and the developing countries world wide factor price equalization is taking place once the factors of production are correctly identified in particular the developed country s counterparts to the informal sector workers in a developing country are its low skilled service sector workers and unemployed factor price equalization is largely taking place by the creation of dual economies in the developed countries rather than by their eradication in the developing countries while institutional forces are slowing down this equilibrating process strong economic and political forces such as so called thatcherism and reaganomics are threatening these same institutions some preliminary evidence is given in favor of the theory

pay for performance and compensation inequality evidence from the ecec this article examines the relationship between performance based pay and widening wage inequality using data from the employer costs for employee compensation ecec the results suggest that jobs

labor market signaling and self confidence wage compression and the gender pay gap i extend spence s signaling model by assuming that some workers are overconfident they underestimate their marginal cost of acquiring education and some are underconfident firms cannot observe workers productive abilities and beliefs but know the fractions of high ability overconfident and underconfident workers i find that biased beliefs lower the wage spread and compress the wages of unbiased workers i show that gender differences in self confidence can contribute to the gender pay gap if education raises productivity men are overconfident and women underconfident then women will on average earn less than men finally i show that biased beliefs can improve welfare

the power of labor to grieve the impact of the workplace labor market and power dependence on employee grievance filing the authors examine a model of employee grievance activity that encompasses both workplace and labor market determinants and attempts to reconcile inconsistent findings in the literature by taking