A growing body of work--both theoretical and empirical--has emphasized that unionization may be better understood as a tax on capital rather than a tax on labor. Under this "new" view, unionization unambiguously lowers investment. Using data on union certification elections, we estimate the...

In recent years, numerous observers have argued that global competition, increased reliance on contingent workers, and the breakdown of implicit contracts have made compensation practices in the United States more flexible; in particular, employers have become more concerned with how an...

In order to measure the flexibility of the labor market, evaluate the job-worker matching process, and model business-cycle dynamics, economists have studied the flows of workers across the labor market states of employment, unemployment, and not in the labor force. One important flow that has...

The impression that employment in the U.S. has become more part-time intensive may be driven by a tendency for faster-growing industries to use more part-time work. I document this association over 1983-1993, and demonstrate that it is robust to alternative measures. Similar relationships are...

We use earnings forecasts from securities analysts to construct more accurate measures of the fundamentals that affect the expected returns to investment. We find that investment responds significantly -- in both economic and statistical terms -- to our new measures of fundamentals. Our...

Auerbach (1979, 1981) has demonstrated that inflation can lead to large inter-asset distortions, with the negative effects of higher inflation unambiguously declining with asset life. We show that this is true only if depreciation is treated as geometric for tax purposes. When depreciation is...