Using data spanning half a century for adjacent jurisdictions in the United States and Canada, the authors study the long-term effects of a generous unemployment insurance (UI) program on the distribution of weeks worked. They find substantial effects. For example, in 1990, about 12.6% of...

The authors use newly available data from the Ontario Ministry of Labour to estimate the effects of advance notification of permanent layoff on unemployment durations. While notice is strongly negatively correlated with unemployment in the raw data, most of this effect disappears when they...

We study worker behavior in an efficiency-wage environment in which coworkers’ wages can influence a worker’s effort. Theoretically, we show that an increase in workers’ responsiveness to coworkers’ wages should lead profit-maximizing firms to compress wages. Our laboratory experiments,...

Unions are introduced into a general equilibrium model of firm formation. The author finds, under reasonable conditions, that la rge firms are more likely to be unionized, and that unionized firms a re more productive and "better managed" than nonunion firms of the same size. As well, unions...

We consider the welfare effects of skilled worker emigration in a context where skilled labor plays a role in product design. We show such emigration can benefit the residents left behind, even when consumers' tastes exhibit a form of home bias. This is because emigration improves the design of...