Implementation of workplace policies--whether through enforcement of laws or administration of programs--raises the question of the interaction between institutions created to carry out laws and the activities of workplace based agents that directly (e.g. unions) or indirectly (e.g. insurance...

In this paper we focus our attention on the question of whether union/nonunion differences in nonwage outcomes can, in fact, be explained in terms of standard price-theoretic responses to real wage effects, as opposed to the real effect of unionism on economic behavior. We reach three basic...

This paper presents a wage bargaining model in which the employer and employee are each uncertain about the other's reservation wage. Under specified circumstances, the model's equilibrium is shown to involve unilateral wage setting and inefficient labor turnover. In addition, aggregate demand...

Some workers bargain with prospective employers before accepting a job. Others face a posted wage as a take-it-or-leave-it opportunity. Theories of wage formation point to substantial differences in labor-market equilibrium between bargained and posted wages. We surveyed a representative sample...

In this paper I examine the evolution of labor relations institutions during the initial phase of marketization in Poland, Hungary. and Czechoslovakia and develop a model of changing support for reforms during the transition to a market economy. I find surprising stability in labor institutions...

In countries where wages are primarily set by collective bargaining, the effects on unemployment of changes in the economic environment depend crucially on the speed of learning of unions. This speed of learning is likely to depend in turn on the quality of the dialogue that unions have with...

The authors analyze establishment-level data from the three Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys of 1980, 1984 and 1990 to document and explain the sharp decline in unionization that occurred in Britain over the 1980s. Between 1980 and 1990 the proportion of British establishments which...

For many reasons a group of workers may have sufficient bargaining power to claim for themselves some share of any monopoly surplus earned by an enterprise and (in the short run) a share of the return on fixed assets. This paper explores the effect of the threat of collective action on wages and...

This paper studies the stability of centralized wage-setting systems in light of the on-going decentralization of labor relations in much of the Western world. It takes the decline of peak level bargaining in Sweden, the traditional archetype of centralized collective bargaining, as its key case...

Using Canadian data on large, private-sector contract negotiations from January 1967 to March 1993, we find that wages and strikes are substantially influenced by labor policy. In particular, we find that prohibiting the use of replacement workers during strikes is associated with significantly...