Combining information from labor historians and using techniques from finance we analyze the strikes that labor historians have agreed are pivotal in American history' during the period 1925-1937. Using information we collected on strike dates and historical financial market stock price data we...

Recent developments in the thoery of strategic bargaining demonstrate howinformational asymmetries can lead to prolonged and costly bargaining. These models can be applied to contract negotiations between unions and firms yielding an economic theory of strikes. To date, however, few empirical...

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...

Concerns over the impacts of hospital strikes on patient welfare led to substantial delay in the ability of hospitals to unionize. Once allowed, hospitals unionized rapidly and now represent one of the largest union sectors of the U.S. economy. Were the original fears of harmful hospital strikes...

We explore umpires' racial/ethnic preferences in the evaluation of Major League Baseball pitchers. Controlling for umpire, pitcher, batter and catcher fixed effects and many other factors, strikes are more likely to be called if the umpire and pitcher match race/ethnicity. This effect only...

The origins of American exceptionalism þ the apolitical nature of American labor unions compared to their European counterparts þ have puzzled labor historians. Recently, the hypothesis has been advanced that organized labor abandoned attempts to win reform through legislation because the...

It is argued in many circles that a structural change occurred in U.S. collective bargaining in the 1980s. We investigate the extent to which the hiring of replacement workers can account for this change. For a sample of over 300 major strikes since 1980, we estimate the likelihood of...

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...

We study strike durations and outcomes for some 2000 disputes that occurred between 1881 and 1886. Most post-strike bargaining settlements in the 1880s fell into one of two categories: either a union "victory", characterized by a significant wage gain or hours cut, or a union "defeat",...

We attempt a synthesis of the industrial relations market structure hypothesis with the modern asymmetric information theory of wage and strike outcomes The industrial relations literature contains a variety of arguments indicating that wage settlements should be positively related to the degree...