Empirical studies have emphasized three important factors in firm-labor relationships: (a) organization costs of workers, (b) management opposition against workers' organizing drives, (c) the possibility of productivity enhancing effects due to "voice/response" reasons. In this paper the...

This paper examines interactions between wage bargaining, unemployment, and growth. In the basic model, wage bargaining determines unemployment and is not influenced by growth. An increase in unemployment benefits increases unemployment and reduces capital accumulation. In a neoclassical...

Alternative ways to organize government subsidies to unemployment insurance (UI) are analyzed in a right-to-manage model where industry-level unions run UI funds of their own. It is shown that equilibrium unemployment is decreasing in the share of UI financed by the employed union members. A...

Seit der EU-Osterweiterung veraendern sich die Handlungsbedingungen der Gewerkschaften in Mittelosteuropa. Die Praegekraft des kommunistischen Erbes und der Dilemmata der Transformation lassen nach. Am Beispiel der Gewerkschaft Solidarnosc wird der organisatorische Wandel der Gewerkschaften...

Existing theoretical literature fails to explain the differences between the pay of workers that are covered by union agreements and others who are not. This study aims at closing this gap by a single general- equilibrium approach that integrates a dual labor market and a two- sector product...

Centralized wage-setting institutions compress relative wages. Motivated by this fact, we investigate the effects of centralized wage setting on the industry distribution of employment. We examine Sweden's industry distribution from 1960 to 1994 and compare it to the U.S. distribution over the...

This study examines two innovative efforts to provide union services to workers with the aid of low cost Internet communication: the AFL-CIO's Working America, a "community affiliate" that enrolled 2 million workers from 2004 to 2007 by canvassing them at their homes and over the Internet...

The inability to measure the opportunity cost of labor has plagued analyses of firm-level compensation policies for many years. Using a newly constructed data set of French workers and firms, we estimate the opportunity cost of the employees' time based on a measure of the person-effect in the...

This paper presents new evidence on the effects of changing union membership on trends in wage dispersion in the U.S. labor market. I use data from the mid-1970s and early 1990s to compare union membership rates for workers in different deciles of the wage distribution, and to calculate the...

Using a unique set of questions in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 provides some direct evidence on the mechanism through which union coverage increases WC receipt. Delineating the effects of unions on the decision to apply and the receipt of WC benefits reveals that unions...