This paper examines an economy with a large number of industries, each producing a different good. Technological change follows a Poisson process where firms improve their productivity through investment in R&D. The less there are firms in the economy or the more they can coordinate their...

During the 1930s and 1940s, collective bargaining emerged as the workplace governance norm in much of the U.S. industrial sector. Following its peak in the 1950s, union density in the U.S. private sector fell steadily, to only 7.4 percent in 2006. Governance shifted from a formalized union norm...

It is well known that the organizing environment for labor unions in the U.S. has deteriorated dramatically over a long period of time, contributing to the sharp decline in the private sector union membership rate and resulting in many fewer representation elections being held. What is less well...

We consider a theoretical model in which unions not only take the outside option into account, but also base their wage-setting decisions on an internal reference, called the fairness reference. Wage and employment outcomes and the shape of the aggregate wage-setting curve depend on the weight...

The standard theoretical solution to the observation of substantial turnout in large elections is that individuals receive utility from the act of voting. However, this leaves open the question of whether or not there is a significant margin on which individuals consider the effect of their vote...

Restrictions on work hours are more important in countries with a large welfare state. We show that this empirical observation is consistent with the strategic effects of such restrictions in a welfare state in the context of optimal direct taxation in the tradition of Mirrlees (1971). Our...

This paper assesses the impact of product market competition on job instability as proxied by the use of fixed-term labor contracts. Using both worker data from the Spanish Labor Force Survey and firm data from the Spanish Business Strategies Survey, I show that job instability rises with...

In many countries, an expired labor contract is automatically extended during the often protracted delay before the new contract is signed. Our theoretical model focuses on macroeconomic factors in explaining the delay. It emphasizes the importance of the realized nominal and real shocks, and of...

This paper describes IZAΨMOD, the policy microsimulation model of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). The model uses household microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and firm data from the German linked employer-employee dataset LIAB. IZAΨMOD consists of three components:...

This study looks at the effect of welfare programs on work incentives and the adult labor supply in developing countries. The analysis builds on the experimental evaluations of three programs implemented in rural areas: Mexico's PROGRESA, Nicaragua's RPS and Honduras' PRAF. Comparable results...