Increasingly, firms are considering the adoption of new work practices, such as problem-solving teams, enhanced communication with workers, employment security, flexibility in job assignments, training workers for multiple jobs, and greater reliance on incentive pay. This paper provides...

This paper investigates the individual and joint effects of group incentive pay and problem-solving teams on productivity. To estimate models of adoption of these work practices and models of the effects of the work practices on productivity, we constructed a data set on the operations of 34...

This paper compares the impact of new IT-enhanced technology on the efficiency of production in the U.S. and the U.K. for one manufacturing industry, valve manufacturing. There is a long-standing question of whether technological change and organizational changes have the same rates of adoption...

Empirical models of local government unionization reveal substantial reductions in union membership due to right-to-work laws. Free riders, rather than underlying antiunion sentiments, are probably responsible because the unionization models include better measures of sentiments than...

This study analyzes the consent decree of 1974 that reformed plant seniority systems in basic steel to resolve problems of equal employment opportunity. The author argues that the major factors leading to the negotiation of this industrywide decree were the large number of plant-level suits...

This study estimates the effects of unionism on the compensation of firefighters through regression analysis of cross-section data for over 1,000 cities and for pay before and after the advent of formal bargaining in 300 to 500 cities. The author concludes that there is a greater union effect on...

This article demonstrates that state collective bargaining laws are important determinants of union and nonunion public employee compensation. State laws that provide stronger bargaining rights and ensure closure to the bargaining process increase the direct effect of police unions on...

This paper reveals that municipal police departments are much less likely to strike in states that have collective bargaining laws than in states with no police bargaining law or when police bargaining has been outlawed. Unlike previous research which has used the state as the unit of...

This study documents extreme variations in productivity within a panel of eleven firms in the same narrowly defined industry classification. Many of the sources of this variation were identified in field investigations of each plant.These investigations in turn allowed for the development of...