To investigate whether unions have helped or hindered the employment prospects of minorities and women, the author analyzes data on 1,273 California manufacturing plants for the period 1974-80. The main finding is that, with the exception of Hispanic females, unions have not been a significant...

This study examines the effects of executive compensation policy and organizational structure on the performance of 439 large U.S. corporations between 1981 and 1985. Companies with long-term incentive plans enjoyed significantly greater increases in ROE (return on equity) than did companies...

This study analyzes the components of the post-1950 trends in the share of the private work force organized by unions, which rose from 1950 to 1954 and then fell steadily to 1980. The authors decompose the sources of growth and decline into changes in organizing activity, success in...

Using longitudinal data collected in 1996–98 from over 800 similar workplaces owned and operated by one corporation, the authors examine how workplace diversity and employee isolation along the dimensions of gender, race, and age affected employee turnover. This design controls for much...

This analysis examines how changes in major industrial relations policies affected productivity over the years 1974–91 at one of the most important manufacturing plants in the United States. The authors find that productivity fell greatly, both in percentage terms and in absolute dollars,...

Using a new set of directly observed wage expectations among firms, this paper finds that in general firms' forecasts fail the unbiasedness and efficiency requirements of weak-form rational expectations. These market participants consistently underestimate the wages they actually end up paying,...

Recent arguments that employment growth occurs disproportionately at small establishments are fundamentally misleading because they confuse regression to the mean with structural shifts in the size distribution of establishments and with an aging effect within cohorts. The net growth usually...

We develop a model of turnover and wages based on the legal limits on workers' liability. A simple two-period model generates differences among firms in entry level wages, and in returns to age and tenure. It predicts that both quits and discharges are negatively correlated with the steepness of...

Using longitudinal matched employer-employee data, we show that a standard wage equation ignoring firm and individual effects yields a baseline explaining 36 percent of wage variation. Firm specific wage components, including common firm-wide omitted human capital, accounts for an additional 22...