Before about 1900, most strikes in the United States were either won or lost by the workers who called them. Relatively few strikes ended in any sort of compromise. Sometime during the last decade of the 19th century, however, the pattern begins to change, with the fraction of strikes ending in...

By relating strike outcomes and durations to the value of the disputed wage change and to the cost to each side of continuing the strike, this paper tests the hypothesis that the war of attrition with asymmetric information model of strikes accurately describes the characteristics of strikes...