The origins of American exceptionalism þ the apolitical nature of American labor unions compared to their European counterparts þ have puzzled labor historians. Recently, the hypothesis has been advanced that organized labor abandoned attempts to win reform through legislation because the...

The goal of this paper is to examine the implied penalty policies underlying the remedies created by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in terms of the policies' impact on employer and union behaviors. We present a simple model of deterrence as a means of evaluating workplace penalty...

This study examines two innovative efforts to provide union services to workers with the aid of low cost Internet communication: the AFL-CIO's Working America, a "community affiliate" that enrolled 2 million workers from 2004 to 2007 by canvassing them at their homes and over the Internet...

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 through 2008....

During its ten years of existence, CARSUD, a firm in New Caledonia, experienced, an initial period rife with labor disputes between local Oceanian employees and a management from France, and then an astonishing renaissance under the leadership of a young, inventive manager, who succeeded where...

Supply-side Social Security reforms intended to increase employment and delay benefit claiming among older individuals may be frustrated by age discrimination. We test for policy complementarities between these reforms and demand-side efforts to deter age discrimination, specifically studying...

The NBA provides an intriguing place to test for taste-based discrimination: referees and players are involved in repeated interactions in a high-pressure setting with referees making the type of split-second decisions that might allow implicit racial biases to manifest themselves. Moreover, the...

Discrimination is notoriously difficult to document. Convincing tests for discrimination require good measures of the legitimate determinants of the outcome of interest, for example wages and productivity. While few contexts provide data adequate to the task of measuring discrimination, copious...

The recent development of networks has engendered both the evanescence of “macro-actors” (i.e., big formal organizations) and new problems related to corporate social responsibility. The concept of “organization” must be redefined and analyzed so as to identify network externalities and...