Union status models ignore the fact that rent-seeking prospective members have an incentive to bid up entry costs so that higher union wage gains make union jobs more costly to obtain. The standard presumption that higher union wages cause firms to substitute toward higher quality workers is...

This paper presents time-series evidence on the voting behavior of members of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1975 to 1990. The empirical results indicate that voting behavior of individual congressmen is remarkably stable over time. The authors find no evidence of economically...

We analyze the changes the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), a widely studied cartel, made in 2002 to the organizational structure of its most valuable asset, the Division I men’s basketball tournament. The NCAA granted itself more freedom in assigning participating teams to...

This paper analyzes the relationship between changes in unionization and firm growth. Average growth is significantly low er in manufacturing firms that experience successful union elections bu t these strong "effects" are largely illusory. The authors find no evidence of a significant...

The authors estimate employer-specific wage, tenure, and wage growth differentials using a unique Bureau of Labor Statistics' establishment survey of full-time, white-collar workers. Employer wage and tenure differentials, conditional on worker characteristics, are substantial in these data....

The authors estimate the short-run and life-cycle effects of unplanned children on unwed mothers by comparing unmarried women who first gave birth to twins with unwed mothers who bore singletons. They find large short-term effects of unplanned births on labor-force participation, poverty, and...

Self-employment rates and incomes differ significantly by race. The authors show that these differentials arise in markets with consumer discrimination and incomplete information about the price of the good and the race of the seller. Equilibrium income distributions have two properties: mean...