This article examines the compensation of state and local workers, who account for 20 million of the 23 million civilian government workers in the United States. State and local workers include teachers, college instructors, police officers, health care administrators, and many other...

This paper investigates the impact of firm-level collective bargaining on firms' investment in intangible assets and, specifically R&D. While standard hold-up theories predict a negative effect of organized labour on intangible investments, the inclusion of pay-for-performance schemes in...

Debates over revitalizing the U.S. labor movement often overlook when workers are first unionized. This paper tracks a cohort of individuals from age 15/16 to 40/41 to analyze the frequency and nature of workers' first unionized jobs. It is well-established that workers are most likely to be...

Recent fights for a $15-an-hour minimum wage at Walmart and in the fast-food industry have interested academics, captivated the press, and energized the public. For good reason. The campaigns upend conventional wisdom about what unions do (help workers win collective bargaining rights) and why...

Can a merger from duopoly to monopoly be detrimental for profits? This paper deals with this issue by focusing on the interaction between decreasing returns to labour (which imply firms’ convex costs) and centralized unionization. First, it is highlighted that a wage ‘non‐rigidity’...

The game-strategic foundation of the Nash bargaining solution by a Rubinstein (1982) alternating-offers game shows that in wage bargaining models the threat point should be the inside, instead of the outside, option. So far, this insight has been largely ignored in the labor economics...

Although there is a wide diversity of labor laws among the industrialized democracies of the world, two common purposes behind these laws are the fostering of employees' right to collectively bargain and the promotion of industrial peace. Certainly these are shared purposes behind the laws of...

We develop a model of strategic networks in order to analyze how trade unions will affect the stability and efficiency of R&D collaboration networks in an oligopolistic industry with three firms. Whenever firms settle wages, the complete network is always pairwise stable and the partially...

We examine whether operating inflexibility posed by labor unions affects goodwill impairment. We predict such inflexibility hinders resource reallocation after acquisition, thereby preventing the acquiring firm from realizing synergies included in goodwill. Consistent with this prediction, we...