This paper explores the link between employee perceptions of working conditions and the desire for worker representation in Britain and the US. We find that the distribution of employee perceptions of poor working conditions is similar in Britain and the US; similar factors affect the number of...

This paper examines the impact of de jure desegregation on education in the South and of increased black voting power on the demand for black schoolteachers in the United States. Because changes in the black share of voters in the post-World War II South are due largely to "exogenous" national...

This paper examines how measurement error biases longitudinal estimates of union effects. It develops numerical examples, statistical models, and econometric estimates which indicate that measurement error is a major problem in longitudinal data sets, so that longitudinal analyses do not provide...

This article demonstrates that state collective bargaining laws are important determinants of union and nonunion public employee compensation. State laws that provide stronger bargaining rights and ensure closure to the bargaining process increase the direct effect of police unions on...

Globalization of scientific and technological knowledge has reduced the US share of world scientific activity; increased the foreign-born proportion of scientists and engineers in US universities and in the US labor market; and led to greater US scientific collaborations with other countries....

Volunteer activity is work performed without monetary recompense. This article shows that volunteering is a sizeable economic activity in the United States, that volunteers have high skills and opportunity costs of time, that standard labor supply explanations of volunteering account for only a...

This study investigates the impact of union organization on the wages and labor practices of establishments newly organized in the 1980s. It uses a research design in which establishments are "paired" with their closest nonunion competitor. It finds that, unionism had only a modest effect on...

The economic position of workers has weakened in much of the advanced world. Over the past 30–40 years the share of national income going to labor has fallen. Labor earnings have become more unequally distributed. The proportion of workers in trade unions has trended downward, accompanied...