Do teacher unions affect the productivity of public schools? The authors examine this question using individual student data from the Sustaining Effects Survey sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. Holding resources constant and using achievement gains on standardized tests as the...

The authors conjecture that previous studies have tended to overestimate the productivity of union firms relative to nonunion firms due to inadequate controls for output quality and input usage-important omissions if the higher cost of unionized labor leads to less labor-intensive products and...

This paper provides evidence that confirms the results of previous studies that teacher unionism produced relatively small wage gains during the early 1970s, but it also shows that union gains increased substantially in the late 1970s. The evidence is based on an application of two complementary...