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...

After expanding in the 1970s, unionism in Britain contracted substantially over the next two decades. This paper argues that the statutory reforms in the 1980s and 1990s were of less consequence in accounting for the decline of unionism than the withdrawal of the state's indirect support for...

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...

This paper estimates the effect of union work rules in the building trades on employment and costs by comparing factor demand elasticities for union and nonunion contractors and subcontractors over micro data from two different types of construction. The results show that the elasticities of...

After decades of successful growth, economic unions have recently become the focus of heightened political controversy. We argue that this is partly due to the growth of trade between countries that are increasingly dissimilar. We develop a theoretical framework to study the effects on trade,...