I establish four facts regarding the pattern of NLRB supervised representation election activity over the past 45 years: 1) the quantity of election activity has fallen sharply and discontinuously since the mid-70's after increasing between the mid-1950's and the mid-1970's; 2) union success in...

I examine the extent to which workers who lose jobs find work in alternative employment arrangements including temporary work and independent contracting and find part-time work, both voluntary and involuntary. The analysis is based on data from the Displaced Worker Supplements (DWS) and the...

I examine changes in the incidence and consequences of job loss by reported cause between 1981 and 1993 using data from Displaced Workers Surveys (DWS), conducted as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS) in even years since 1984. The overall rate of job loss is up somewhat in the 1990s....

The public believes that job security has deteriorated dramatically in the United States. In this study, I examine job durations from eight supplements to the Current Population Survey (CPS) administered between 1973 and 1993 in order to determine if, in fact, there has been a systematic change...

I use a sample of over fourteen thousand full-time jobs held by workers in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to examine mobility patterns and to evaluate theories of inter-firm worker mobility. The roles of both heterogeneity and state dependence in determining mobility rates for...

The dramatic decline in the demand for union representation among nonunion workers over the last decade is investigated using data on worker preferences for union representation from four surveys conducted in 1977, 1980, 1982, and 1984. Relatively little of the decline can be accounted for by...

In 1955 only a few states had laws governing collective bargaining by public employees. By 1984 only a few states were without such laws. The emergence of these policies coincides with a dramatic increase in unionization among public employees, and an important puzzle is the direction of...

The dramatic decline in unionization over the last decade is investigated in the context of a supply/demand model of union status determination. Data from surveys conducted in 1977 and 1984 are used to decompose the decline into components due to a drop in the demand for union representation and...

There is now a substantial body of economic research that models the behavior of labor unions as maximization of a well defined objective function. This paper presents both a selective critical survey of this literature and a preliminary consideration of some important problems that have not...

It is a well known fact that the extent of unionization is lower in states with Right-to-Work (RTW) laws. A framework is developed for determining whether RTW laws actually cause a decrease in the extent of unionization or whether they simply mirror preexisting tastes of workers against unions....