The dramatic decline in unionization over the last decade is investigated in the context of a supply/demand model of union status determination. Data from surveys conducted in 1977 and 1984 are used to decompose the decline into components due to a drop in the demand for union representation and...

The Great Recession from December 2007 to June 2009 is associated with a dramatic weakening of the labor market from which, by some measures, it has not completely recovered. I use data from the Displaced Workers Survey (DWS) from 1984-2014 to investigate the incidence and consequences of job...

In a seminal paper, Camerer, Babcock, Loewenstein, and Thaler (1997) find that the wage elasticity of daily hours of work New York City (NYC) taxi drivers is negative and conclude that their labor supply behavior is consistent with target earning (having reference dependent preferences). I...

It is well known that the organizing environment for labor unions in the U.S. has deteriorated dramatically over a long period of time, contributing to the sharp decline in the private sector union membership rate and resulting in many fewer representation elections being held. What is less well...

The Great Recession from December 2007 to June 2009 is associated with a dramatic weakening of the labor market from which the labor market is now only slowly recovering. The unemployment rate remains stubbornly high and durations of unemployment are unprecedentedly long. I use data from the...

We develop a model of the plaintiff's decision to file a law suit that has implications for how differences between the federal government and private litigants and litigation translate into differences in trial rates and plaintiff win rates at trial. Our case selection model generates a set of...

We study the reaction of stock prices to announcements of reductions in force (RIFs) using a sample of nearly 3878 such announcements in 1176 large firms during the 1970-97 period collected from the Wall Street Journal Index. We note that, although there has been a dramatic secular increase in...

This paper summarizes the results of nearly a dozen new papers presented at the Sundance Conference on Monopsony in Labor Markets held in October 2018. These papers, to be published as a special issue of the Journal of Human Resources, study various aspects of monopsony and failures of...

One prominent explanation for disagreement in bargaining is that the parties have divergent and relatively optimistic expectations regarding the ultimate outcome if they fail to agree. The fact that settlement rates are much higher where final-offer arbitration is the dispute settlement...

The stylized fact that seniority and earnings in a cross-section are positively related, even after controlling for total labor market experience, has served as the basis for theoretical analyses of implicit labor contracts suggesting that workers post bonds in the form of deferred compensation...