It has become orthodox in economics research to interpret the association between hourly earnings and working hours as the expression of the preferences of workers. This convention originated in H. Gregg Lewis' explanation for the decline in hours of work since the nineteenth century. His...

Two propositions figure prominently in explanations for Britain's comparatively low growth in employment: first, the wage-setting mechanism is insufficiently responsive to the growth of unemployment and, second, there exists a well-defined negative causal relationship from wages to employment...

This paper demonstrates that, contrary to a widely-held opinion, the determination of the goals of unions is fully amenable to empirical analysis. A characterization of the wage and employment-setting process in unionized markets is adopted and its qualitative implications examined. The...

Along with house rents, wages have frequently been described as the "stickiest" prices in the economy, rarely adjusted more than once a year. Because of this stickiness (which arises from the transactions costs involved in changing wages), a distinction exists between the adjustment of wages and...

For a century, two labor market empirical regularities characterized the movements of the hours of work, employment, and hourly compensation of American manufacturing production workers. They resembled conditional labor supply functions. Increases in employment substituted for reductions in...

Differences in wages, employment, and capital between worker-owned and capitalist enterprises are computed from a matched employer-worker panel data set from Italy, the market economy with the greatest incidence of worker-owned and worker-managed firms. These differences are related to orthodox...