Unionized employers may have an incentive to worsen the quality of working conditions in reaction to union-appropriated monopoly wage rents. Indeed, this is a plausible explanation for why union workers are found to have higher injury rates than their nonunion counterparts. This paper spells out...

There is a conflict of interest between workers and firms over the intensity of labor effort. The labor market may fail, or simply be too costly, as a mechanism for resolving this conflict, and so nonmarket allocative mechanisms embedded in the institutional arrangements of shopfloor governance...

This paper offers empirical evidence on the impact of trade unions on wage inequality in Mexico. The results indicate that unions were a strongly equalizing force affecting the dispersion of wages in 1984, but were only half as effective at reducing wage inequality in 1996. Not only did the...

This paper utilizes worker-firm matched data on city contract establishments affected by the Los Angeles Living Wage Ordinance to explore the extent of labor-labor substitution following establishment of a minimum wage. We are able to test for substitution on observable and unobservable skill...

Instead of merely setting a lower bound on the wages of formal sector workers, minimum wages serve as a norm for wage setting more generally throughout the Mexican economy. Our results suggest that wages are commonly set at multiples of the minimum wage, and that changes in minimum wages...

This paper utilizes establishment survey data from Mexico to explore the impact of union voice on fringe benefits, turnover, job training and productivity. Mexican unions have a significant effect on these outcome measures for workers and firms. Unions increase both the value of fringe benefits...

This in an introduction to the papers that follow in the symposium.