This paper comes from a February 2012 Symposium, "The Role of ADR Mechanisms in Public Sector Labor Disputes: What Is at Stake, Where We Can Improve & How We Can Learn from the Private Sector." It discusses the history of an important form of alternative dispute resolution: the use of what is...

This paper uses as its theoretical starting point the concept of the firm as a nexus of contracts. It examines the full range of contracts which go into forming this nexus: those formally negotiated, those adopted by custom or practice, and those imposed as legal defaults. The concept of...

The goal of this paper is to examine the implied penalty policies underlying the remedies created by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in terms of the policies' impact on employer and union behaviors. We present a simple model of deterrence as a means of evaluating workplace penalty...

The problem of "creeping legalism," or incremental formalism, in grievance arbitration cases has been a continuing refrain in legal literature; however, until now empirical research concerning this problem has been scant. This study provides the most comprehensive and thorough analysis to date...

Ontario and British Columbia, Canada, have not seen a police strike in living memory. The reason for this is the mandatory interest arbitration model adopted in the two provinces, which sees disputes that cannot be resolved by mutual bargaining referred to a panel of arbitrators who assess...

Disagreements over business deals, land boundaries, or loan non-repayment are very common sources of disputes, and courts are congested in developing countries. We evaluate the effects of the government introducing formal "village courts" (VCs) in rural Bangladesh using a randomized controlled...

With one million people treated every 36 hours, routinely collected UK National Health Service (NHS) health data has huge potential for medical research. Advances in data acquisition from electronic patient records (EPRs) means such data are increasingly digital and can be anonymised for...

This study discusses a new procedure for masking confidential numerical data--a procedure called data shuffling--in which the values of the confidential variables are "shuffled" among observations. The shuffled data provides a high level of data utility and minimizes the risk of disclosure. From...