Trevor Bain explores the industry restructurings that occurred in eight major steel-producing countries, including the U.S., Germany and Japan. He begins by categorizing each country as having either an adversarial or a cooperative industrial relations system, and then analyzes the differences...

This book's essays analyze innovative responses by unions, corporations and governments to job loss caused by economic restructuring, drawing on examples from Western Europe and the U.S.

It is widely recognized that human capital is essential to sustaining a competitive economy at high and rising living standards. Yet acceptance of persistent high unemployment, stagnant wages, and other indicators of declining job quality suggests that policymakers and employers undervalue human...

We analyze a model of wage delay in which strategic complementarity arises because each employer's costs of violating its contracts decrease with the arrears in its labor market. The model is estimated on panel data for workers and firms in Russia, facilitating identification through fixed...

What role do community norms play in the diffusion and persistence of new organizational practices? We explore this question through an examination of the widespread practice of wage arrears, the late and nonpayment of wages, in Russia during the 1990s. Existing research on wage arrears most...

This paper addresses the question of how a minimum wage increase affects the wages of low-wage workers. Most studies assume that there is a simple mechanical increase in the wage for workers earning a wage between the old and the new minimum wage, with some studies allowing for spillovers to...

The authors perform a meta-analysis of more than 200 published studies on the effects of raising the minimum wage to determine impacts on employment, wages, and more.

The essays in this volume, authored by close friends, associates and students, pay tribute to Sar Levitan and the enduring mark he left on the field of social policy. The book is loosely organized around the method of analysis taught and practiced by Levitan: identifying problems through the...