One of the most prominent features of U.S. unionism is the key role played by seniority. However, in cross-sectional data, the positive association between seniority and earnings is typically much stronger for nonunion workers than for union workers. This finding has puzzled previous...

We examine whether the decline in the availability of employer-provided health insurance is a phenomenon common to all jobs or is concentrated only on certain jobs. In particular, we investigate the extent to which employers have continued to provide health insurance on what we term reducing the...

The central claim of a rapidly growing literature in international relations is that members of pairs of democratic states are much less likely to engage each other in war or in serious disputes short of war than are members of other pairs of states. Our analysis does not support this claim....

We study the reaction of stock prices to announcements of reductions in force (RIFs) using a sample of nearly 3878 such announcements in 1176 large firms during the 1970-97 period collected from the Wall Street Journal Index. We note that, although there has been a dramatic secular increase in...

I examine changes in the incidence and consequences of job loss by reported cause between 1981 and 1993 using data from Displaced Workers Surveys (DWS), conducted as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS) in even years since 1984. The overall rate of job loss is up somewhat in the 1990s....

We test for the presence of an addictive effect of arbitration (positive state dependence) using data both from a laboratory bargaining experiment and from the field. We find no evidence of state dependence in the experimental data, and we find weak evidence of positive state dependence in the...

We develop a dynamic model of learning and wage determination: education may convey initial information about ability, but subsequent performance observations also are informative. Although the role of schooling in the labor market's inference process declines as performance observations...

It is common observation that many individuals vote despite the fact that in elections with even a moderate number of voters, the probability their vote will be pivotal is quite small. The theoretical solutions of positing that individuals receive utility from the act of voting itself "explains"...

Job tenure and the incidence of long-term employment have declined sharply in the United States. However, rates of job loss as measured by the Displaced Workers Survey (DWS), while cyclical, have not increased. This presents a puzzle that has several potential solutions. One is that, while...

Long-term employment relationships have long been an important feature of the labor market in the United States. However, increased international competition and the wave of corporate downsizing in the 1990s raised concerns that long-term employment relationships in the United States were...