I establish four facts regarding the pattern of NLRB supervised representation election activity over the past 45 years: 1) the quantity of election activity has fallen sharply and discontinuously since the mid-70's after increasing between the mid-1950's and the mid-1970's; 2) union success in...

I examine changes in the incidence and consequences of job loss between 1981 and 2001 using data from the Displaced Workers Surveys (DWS) from 1984-2002. The overall rate of job loss has a strong counter-cyclical component, but the job loss rate was higher than might have been expected during...

We use a resume audit study to better understand the role of employment and unemployment histories in affecting callbacks to job applications. We focus on how the effect of career history varies by age, partly in an attempt to reconcile disparate findings in prior studies. While we cannot...

U.S. income inequality has varied inversely with union density over the past hundred years. But moving beyond this aggregate relationship has proven difficult, in part because of limited micro-data on union membership prior to 1973. We develop a new source of micro-data on union membership...

I investigate how the the threat of union organization affects the wage paid to nonunion workers. I start by outlining the standard model of wage determination by a nonunion employer when faced with the threat of union organization. The model suggests that the nonunion wage will be directly...

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...

In this study we examine the experience of a single large hospital with an informal pre-litigation "complaint" process that resolves some cases outside of the legal system. The empirical results are generally consistent with an information structure where patients are poorly informed about 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...

A central feature of the litigation process that affects case outcomes is the selection of cases for litigation. In this study, we present a theoretical framework for understanding the operation of this suit selection process and its relationship to the underlying distribution of potential...