When union-firm pairs bargain sequentially, and when unobserved components of firms' abilities to pay are subject to correlated shocks, unions that bargain later in a sequence can acquire valuable information by observing previous bargaining outcomes in their industry. The authors derive the...

In contrast to nonunion workers, reemployment wages of workers displaced from unionized jobs decline with tenure on the lost job. This finding cannot easily be explained by firm- or industry-specific human capital accumulation, deferred-pay policies, standard matching models, or a correlation...

In labor markets, the ratchet effect refers to a situation where workers subject to performance pay choose to restrict their output, because they rationally anticipate that firms will respond to higher output levels by raising output requirements or by cutting pay. We model this effect as a...

Firms' incentives to inform workers about their future viability are analyzed using a two-period signaling model. The author finds that, if wages can be set after firms learn their viability, they will perfectly signal firms' closure plans. Mandatory-notice laws, if they have any effect at all,...

According to U.S. Census and Current Population Survey (CPS) data, employed U.S. men are more likely to work more than 48 hours per week today than 25 years ago. Using 1979-2006 CPS data, we show that this increase was greatest in the 1980s, among highly educated, highly paid, and older men, and...

Compared to older women, young female job seekers are more than three times as likely to report that their ability to find a good new job is compromised by their gender. This phenomenon cannot be statistically attributed to observed personal or job characteristics, or to any "objective" measure...

The authors use newly available data from the Ontario Ministry of Labour to estimate the effects of advance notification of permanent layoff on unemployment durations. While notice is strongly negatively correlated with unemployment in the raw data, most of this effect disappears when they...

We study worker behavior in an efficiency-wage environment in which coworkers’ wages can influence a worker’s effort. Theoretically, we show that an increase in workers’ responsiveness to coworkers’ wages should lead profit-maximizing firms to compress wages. Our laboratory experiments,...

Unions are introduced into a general equilibrium model of firm formation. The author finds, under reasonable conditions, that la rge firms are more likely to be unionized, and that unionized firms a re more productive and "better managed" than nonunion firms of the same size. As well, unions...