It is widely agreed that unionization affects the rules and procedures governing the employment relation in organized establishments. The effect of these changes on establishment productivity, however, is unclear. Existing evidence is based on a comparison of union/non-union differences in value...

This paper utilizes household-level budget data from the 1889/90 United States Commissioner of Labor survey to estimate the full Almost Ideal Demand System with demographic and other covariates. Price data were obtained from the Aldrich Report of 1892. The purpose is to make better use of the...

This working paper presents Chapter 2 of a book that has been submitted to the University of Chicago Press for publication consideration. The point of the book is to compare taxes on income from capital infour countries,accounting for corporate, personal, and property taxes, and including...

This working paper presents Chapter 7 of a book to be published for the National Bureau of Economic Research by the University of Chicago Press. The point of the book is to compare taxes on income from capital in four countries,accounting for corporate, personal, and property taxes, and...

Why do people join open-shop unions when they would receive union wage rates even if they were not members? Why are unionization rates so low in the south-east of England? To address these questions, which we treat as interrelated, the paper considers the idea that unions offer insurance against...

This paper shows that in the 2000s unions in the UK and US made innovative use of the Internet to deliver union services and move toward open source unions better suited for the modern world than traditional union structures. In contrast to analysts who see unions as being on an inexorable path...

This paper provides evidence for why individuals join unions instead of free-riding. I model membership as legal insurance. To test the model, I use the incidence of news stories concerning allegations against teachers in the UK as a plausibly exogenous shock to demand for such insurance. I find...

The unionized share of the work force changed markedly in the United Kingdom between the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1970s density rose steadily, making the United Kingdom the most heavily organized large OECD country. In the 1980s, by contrast, density fell by 1.4 percentage points per annum -- a...

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...

This paper examines how measurement error biases longitudinal estimates of union effects. It develops numerical examples, statistical models, and econometric estimates which indicate that measurement error is a major problem in longitudinal data sets, so that longitudinal analyses do not provide...