Four years after the beginning of the Great Recession, the labor market remains historically weak. Many observers have concluded that structural impediments to recovery bear some of the blame. The author reviews such structural explanations, but after analyzing U.S. data on unemployment and...

Researchers of industrial relations issues in manufacturing have long recognized that careful study of production has significant implications for labor productivity. Recent theory and analysis has shown the large influence of organizational forgetting. The authors of this study demonstrate that...

Using a survey of Canadian city managers during the period 2002 -2003 modeled on the U.S. International Cities and Counties Management Association surveys, the authors examine a range of union responses to proposals to privatize city services. When confronted with possible member losses, unions...

An important question to ask regarding social insurance programs such as workers' compensation (WC) is to what extent do higher benefits lead to more claims? The authors of this study revisit incentive effects of WC, using 25 years of data (1977?2004) from the March Current Population Survey...

The author examines the extent to which mothers are willing to trade wages for non-wage job attributes within the context of maternity leave. The key aspect of this framework is that mothers can decide whether and when to return to their guaranteed job. In contrast to previous studies that...

Using a large, matched employer-employee data set, the authors investigate the impact of company and industry collective bargaining agreements on wages in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (CE3). They also examine the changing characteristics of the union wage premium in different cohorts...

This study investigates whether the expansion of temporary employment in Japan has caused an increased perception of job insecurity among workers there. Non-regular employment, such as part-time and temporary work, has increased as a proportion of the Japanese workforce in recent years. The...

The authors examine the role of employee job satisfaction in Finnish manufacturing plants over the period 1996?2001 to determine the extent to which it affects establishment-level productivity. Using matched data on job satisfaction from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) and...

The author investigates gender differences in the impact of accumulated union experience on job satisfaction. Because there are fewer women than men in both public and private sector unions, and women are disproportionately underrepresented in union leadership, their collective bargaining power...

A growing number of economists blame the length and severity of the Great Depression on factors that rigidified wage rates, raised production costs, and interfered with the market allocation of labor. The target of their critique is President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal labor program, which...