Union membership in the United States displayed a ∩-shaped pattern over the 20th century, while income inequality sketched a ∪. A model of unions is developed to analyze these facts. There is a distribution of productivity across firms in the economy. Firms hire capital, plus skilled and...

The U.S. labor share of income has been on a secular downward trajectory since thebeginning of the new millennium. Using data that are disaggregated across both state andindustry, we show the decline in the labor share is broad-based but the extent of the fallvaries greatly. Exploiting a new...

Global Union Federations have made significant progress in advancing Global Framework Agreements (GFAs) that create arenas for labor relations based on the Core Labor Standards of the International Labour Organization (ILO). These Agreements – signed and implemented by labor and management –...

Organized labor has been politically vocal in the United States ever since the movement emerged in the late 1800s. A striking development since the 1970s, however, is its hardening opposition to trade liberalization. Labor leaders have opposed virtually all legislative initiatives since the...

The inclusion of labor-related provisions in US Free Trade Agreements has been a contentious issue. They have been attacked both for allegedly weakening the comparative advantage of developing and emerging countries; and for being too weak and inconsistent with the recommendations of the...

This paper studies the impact of trade within US-headquartered multinational companies (MNCs) on labour demand for all employees, as well as, for those of high and low skill in US manufacturing for the period 1995 - 2005. We find strong evidence on the positive and negative effect of intra-firm...

This paper studies the impact of trade within US-headquartered multinational companies (MNCs) on labour demand for all employees, as well as, for those of high and low skill in US manufacturing for the period 1995 - 2005. We find strong evidence on the positive and negative effect of intra-firm...

We provide three new stylized facts that characterize the role of multinationals in the U.S. manufacturing employment decline, using a novel microdata panel from 1993-2011 that augments U.S. Census data with firm ownership information and transaction-level trade. First, over this period, U.S....

We construct a new linked data set with over one thousand off shoring events by matching Trade Adjustment Assistance program petition data to micro-data from the U.S. Census Bureau. We exploit this data to assess how offshoring impacts domestic firm-level aggregate employment, output, wages and...

Estimating the causal effect of offshoring on domestic employment is difficult because of the inherent simultaneity of multinational firms' domestic and foreign affiliate employment decisions. In this paper, we resolve this identification problem using variation in Bilateral Tax Treaties (BTTs),...