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...

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...

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...

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...

Unions play a crucial role in determining wages and employment outcomes. However, union bargaining power may also have important effects on non-pecuniary working conditions. We study the effects of right-to-work laws, which removed agency shop protection and weakened union powers on long hours...

We give an overview of the "German model" of industrial relations. We organize our review by focusing on the two pillars of the model: sectoral collective bargaining and firm-level codetermination. Relative to the United States, Germany outsources collective bargaining to the sectoral level,...

Against a background of projections of sharply increasing elderly dependency rates, workers in the major industrial economies are apprehensive that their social security benefit entitlements will be cut before or after they retire, leaving them with inadequate retirement income. This paper looks...

This paper presents a framework for how to incorporate prior sources of information into the design of a sequential experiment. These sources can include previous experiments, expert opinions, or the experimenter's own introspection. We formalize this problem using a multi-prior Bayesian...

Many governments have engaged in policy experimentation in various forms to resolve uncertainty and facilitate learning. However, little is understood about the characteristics of policy experimentation, and how the structure of experimentation may affect policy learning and policy outcomes. We...