It is well known that the organizing environment for labor unions in the U.S. has deteriorated dramatically over a long period of time, contributing to the sharp decline in the private sector union membership rate and resulting in many fewer representation elections being held. What is less well...

This study examines the impact of unions on wages and employment using data from Uruguay in a period where unions were banned (1973-1984), then legalized with tripartite bargaining (1984-1991) followed by industry-wide or firm-specific bargaining (1992-1997). The relationship between wages and...

"Standard rate" wage policies, under which all workers in a particular job receive the same wage, are common for blue-collar workers, especially those covered by collective bargaining agreements and those who work for large employers.This paper analyzes the impact of standard-rate wage...

This paper investigates the correlates of union success in NLRB certification and decertification elections. The analysis includes a wide variety of bargaining unit, union, industry, and geographic attributes, many of which have not been considered in previous studies. Variables having a...

This study examines the effect of public sector unions on compensation packages. The model of the compensation determination process incorporates distinctive institutional aspects of public sector labor relations, particularly the differences in collective bargaining laws across states. The...

There is now a substantial body of economic research that models the behavior of labor unions as maximization of a well defined objective function. This paper presents both a selective critical survey of this literature and a preliminary consideration of some important problems that have not...

This paper argues that public sector labor relations is best understood in a framework that focuses on unions' ability to shift demand curves rather than to raise wages, as is the case in the private sector. It reviews the public sector labor relations literature and finds that: (i) public...

This paper examines the role of union wage contracts in the persistence of inflation, and the implication of these contracts for the problem of disinflation in the United States. A quantitative model of overlapping con- tracts explicitly oriented toward the major union sector is developed. The...

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 study uses establishment level data to examine the effect of unionism on the wage structure within establishments. The major finding is that unionism substantively reduces within-establishment dispersion of wages, in part through explicit wage practices, such as single rate or automatic...