During the 1930s and 1940s, collective bargaining emerged as the workplace governancenorm in much of the U.S. industrial sector. Following its peak in the 1950s, union density inthe U.S. private sector fell steadily, to only 7.4 percent in 2006. Governance shifted from aformalized union norm to...

Estimates of union wage effects have been challenged due to concerns over unobserved worker heterogeneity and endogenous job changes. Many believe that union wage premiums lead to business failures and other forms of worker displacement. In this paper, displacement rates and union wage gaps are...