The dramatic decline in unionization over the last decade is investigated in the context of a supply/demand model of union status determination. Data from surveys conducted in 1977 and 1984 are used to decompose the decline into components due to a drop in the demand for union representation and...

The central claim of a rapidly growing literature in international relations is that members of pairs of democratic states are much less likely to engage each other in war or in serious disputes short of war than are members of other pairs of states. Our analysis does not support this claim....

We develop and estimate a model of the union's optimal extent oforganizing activity that accounts for the decision of employers regardingresistance to union organizing. The central exogenous variable in theanalysis is the quantity of quasi-rents per worker available to be splitbetween unions and...

Three central facts describe inter-firm worker mobility in modern labor markets: (1) long-term employment relationships are common; (2) most new jobs end early; and (3) the probability of a job ending declines with tenure. Models based on firm-specific capital provide a parsimonious explanation...

There is a substantial body of economic research, largely theoretical but with a recent empirical component, on the analysis of union behavior. This chapter reviews this literature selectively to place it in perspective so that analysts may begin to answer questions raised by the descriptive...

The standard theoretical solution to the observation of substantial turnout in large elections is that individuals receive utility from the act of voting. However, this leaves open the question of whether or not there is a significant margin on which individuals consider the effect of their vote...

The standard theoretical solution to the observation of substantial turnout in large elections is that individuals receive utility from the act of voting. However, this leaves open the question of whether or not there is a significant margin on which individuals consider the effect of their vote...

This brief survey contains a review of several new empirical papers that attempt to measure the extent of monopsony in labor markets. As noted originally by Joan Robinson, monopsonistic exploitation represents the gap between the value of a worker's marginal product and the worker's wage, and it...

The Great Recession from December 2007 to June 2009 is associated with a dramatic weakening of the labor market from which the labor market is now only slowly recovering. The unemployment rate remains stubbornly high and durations of unemployment are unprecedentedly long. I use data from the...

The Great Recession from December 2007 to June 2009 is associated with a dramatic weakening of the labor market from which the labor market is now only slowly recovering. The unemployment rate remains stubbornly high and durations of unemployment are unprecedentedly long. I use data from the...