This study examines the effect of unions on job security in the public and private sectors. Despite much lower unemployment rates for public than private sector workers, once one controls for differences in worker and job characteristics, the odds of being unemployed are identical for nonunion...

We examine the changing relationship between unionization and wage inequality in Canada and the United States. Our study is motivated by profound recent changes in the composition of the unionized workforce. Historically, union jobs were concentrated among low-skilled men in private sector...

This study uses a Cox proportional hazards model to estimate ther elationship between state-level collective bargaining policies and union growth in the public sector. The proportional hazards analysisis performed with data on approximately eight hundred municipal police departments. The timing...

This paper presents an analytical framework that can be used to analyze the effects of unions on productivity in the public sector. Our initial focus is on public libraries because considerable effort has been devoted to conceptualizing library productivity measures and because of the...

Studies of public/private sector wage differentials typically assume that the govenment and union status of a worker are exogenous variables. Recently, some studies have relaxed this assumption slightly by allowing the union status to be endogenous. In this paper, we consider a more general...

The absence of a competitive market may enable public-sector workers to extract rents from taxpayers in the form of high pay, especially when public-sector workers are unionized. On the other hand, this rent extraction may be suppressed by the ability of taxpayers to vote with their feet,...

This study investigates the relationship between strike activity by nonunion public employees and unionization. Examining the strike activity and unionization rates of some 600 nonunion municipal police departments from 1972 to 1978, this study finds that recognition strikes are concentrated...

The quality of governance depends on public sector worker productivity. We use micro data from China to document that judges are less productive on polluted days. Building on the insights of Alchian and Kessel (1962), we discuss the role of organization design and the incentives of public versus...

This paper provides a critical survey of the literature dealing with public sector labor markets. It discusses the research by economists on wage determination in the state and local sector (including the effects of unions), on the estimation of compensating wage differentials for pecuniary and...

This paper investigates how state and local fiscal institutions affect the pattern of relative wages between state and local government employees and their private sector counterparts. It focuses on changes in relative wages during the 1979-1986 period. Empirical analysis of data from the...