The paper constructs an asymmetric information model to investigate the efficiency and equity cases for government mandated benefits. A mandate can improve workers' insurance, and may also redistribute in favour of more deserving workers. The risk is that it may also reduce output. The more...

The Freeman-Lazear works council/worker involvement model is assessed over two distinct industrial relations regimes. In non union British establishments our measures of employee involvement are associated with improved economic performance, whereas for unionized plants negative results are...

Taking as our point of departure a model proposed by David Card (2001), we suggest new methods for analyzing wage dispersion in a partially unionized labor market. Card's method disaggregates the labor population into skill categories, which procedure entails some loss of information....

This paper examines the effects of union decline in Britain on changes in earnings dispersion between 1983 and 1995. As part and parcel of the exercise, the effects of changes in the wage gap and the variance gap are also calculated. Detailed findings are provided by gender and broad sector,...

Perhaps no other country in recent years has witnessed greater change in its collective bargaining framework than the UK. This paper describes the dramatic developments and their consequences. Like Gaul, it is in three parts. The first part charts the six major pieces of legislation;...