The 1990s economic performance of the US suggests that the country may have the right mix of institutions and policies to be the peak capitalist economy in the new information economy. This paper develops criterion for judging peak status and examines whether the US fulfills these criterion. The...

Capitalist countries have historically had quite different labour market institutions and social policies. Do these differences produce sufficiently different economic outcomes to identify a single peak set of institutions? This paper shows that: 1. Labour market institutions have large effects...

This paper examines the spurt in U.S. unionism during the Great Depression. It argues that the Depression spurt is better understood as resulting from a Depression sparked endogenous social process than from New Deal legislation and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) leadership. Four...

This paper shows that participation in crime and involvement with the criminal justice system has reached extraordinary levels among young men. With approximately 2 percent as many men incarcerated as in the labor force, the crime rate should have plummeted. It didn't. Evidence suggests that the...

Volunteer activity is work performed without monetary recompense. This paper shows that volunteering is a sizeable economic activity in the U.S.; that volunteers have high skills and opportunity costs of time; that standard labor supply explanations of volunteering account for only a minor part...

This paper presents evidence on the relation among incarceration, crime, and the economic incentives to crime, ranging from unemployment to income inequality. It makes three points: 1) The U.S. has incarcerated an extraordinarily high proportion of men of working age overall, and among blacks....

In this paper I examine the evolution of labor relations institutions during the initial phase of marketization in Poland, Hungary. and Czechoslovakia and develop a model of changing support for reforms during the transition to a market economy. I find surprising stability in labor institutions...

This paper examines the magnitude of criminal activity among disadvantaged youths in the 1980s. It shows that a large proportion of youths who dropped out of high school, particularly black school dropouts, developed criminal records in the decade; and that those who were incarcerated in 1980 or...

This paper estimates the effect of changing union density on earnings differentials and inequality among male workers in the U.S. and on industry earnings differentials among OECD countries. For the U.S. the evidence indicates that the fall in union density contributed to the 1980s increase in...

This study contrasts the economic position of youths across local labor markets that differ in their rates of unemployment using the annual merged files of the Current Population Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The paper finds: (1) Local labor market shortages raise the...