Atypical employment arrangements such as agency temporary work and contracting have long been criticized as offering more precarious and unstable work than regular employment. Using data from two datasets – the CAEAS and the NLSY79 – we determine whether workers who take such jobs rather...

Alternative work arrangements (AWAs), such as contracting, consulting, and temporary work, have been criticized as providing only atypical, even precarious, employment. Yet they may also allow workers to locate suitable job matches. Exploiting data from all four Contingent and Alternative...

Atypical employment arrangements such as agency temporary work and contracting have long been criticized as offering more precarious and unstable work than regular employment. Using data from two datasets Ð the CAEAS and the NLSY79 Ð we determine whether workers who take such jobs rather than...

Atypical work arrangements have long been criticized as offering more precarious and lower paid work than regular open-ended employment. In an important paper, Booth et al. (2002) were among the first to recognize that notwithstanding their potential deficiencies, such jobs also functioned as a...

An interesting aspect of British research on unions based on the Workplace Industrial/ Employment Relations Surveys has been the apparent shift in union impact on establishment performance in the decade of the 1990s compared with the 1980s – and the recent scramble to explain the phenomenon....

This paper provides the first full examination of the effect of German works councils on wages using matched employer-employee data (specifically, the LIAB for 2001). We find that works councils are associated with higher earnings. The wage premium is around 11 percent (and is higher under...

This paper updates the major study by Macpherson and Hirsch (1995) of the effect of the gender composition of occupations on female (and male) earnings. Using large representative national samples of employees from the Current Population Survey, cross-sectional estimates of the impact of...

This paper provides estimates of the union wage gap in Portugal, a nation until recently lacking independent data on union density at firm level. Having estimated nonlinear and linear estimates of the effect of union density on the wage gap, the next stage of the analysis seeks to account for...

We estimate the impact of union density on wages using Portuguese matched employer-employee-contract data, extending Gelbach’s (2016) omitted variable bias decomposition procedure to obtain the contribution of worker, firm, and job-title heterogeneity to the union wage premium. The principal...

A number of studies have reported that union decline is associated with rising overall wage inequality, not least in Germany where the phenomenon has been linked to economic resurgence. The present paper takes an unconventional approach to this potential source of rising inequality by examining...