Search

PART I: INTERNATIONAL PATTERNS AND ADVANCED COUNTRIES Wages Around the World: Pay Across Occupations and Countries R.B.Freeman & R.H.Oostendorp Australian Responses to Increases in Unemployment and Wage Inequality: Comparisons with the UK, NZ and USA R.G.Gregory Wage Indexation and the Evolution of Returns to Education in Italy. 1979-1992 M.Manacorda PART II: LESS ADVANCED COUNTRIES Markets, Human Capital, and Inequality: Evidence from Rural China D.Benjamin, L.Brandt, P.Glewwe & G.Li Inequality in Latin America During the 1990s M.Szekely & M.Hilgert Inequality and Mortality During Russia's Economic Transition E.Brainerd The Impact of Minimum Wages on Wage Inequality and Employment in the Formal and Informal Sector in Costa Rica F.El-Hamidi & K.Terrell PART III: UNDERSTANDING MICRO-BEHAVIOUR AND THE BROAD ECONOMY OF INEQUALITY The Economics of Reciprocity: Evidence and Theory A.Falk & U.Fischbacher Globalization and Redistribution: Feasible Egalitarianism in a Competitive World S.Bowles Distributed Information and the Role of the State in the Economy K.J.Arrow

This study investigates the impact of unionization and firm, business line, or establishment survival. A consistent empirical finding is that unions raise wages above those found in nonunion firms, and that in a competitive product market one would expect to find that unionized firms would go out of business more than nonunion firms. However, if unions engage in economic rent-sharing, then during periods of economic hardship unionized firms may be able to remain solvent by giving back some of these rents. In order to answer this question we analyze three data sets: a data set on the union status of solvent and insolvent enterprises and business lines from the Compustat files, a data set on the union status of workers who have lost their jobs due to permanent plant closures or business failures obtained by matching files from Current Population Survey, and a data set from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service on the outcomes of elections won by unions and on the outcomes of labor- management dispute cases. Overall, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that unions behave in an economically rational manner, pushing wages to the point where union firms may expand less rapidly than nonunion firms, but not to the point where the firm, plant, or business line closes down.

Using establishment-level data from a variety of sources, this study documents and analyzes the consistent rise in interindustry wage dispersion in the United States between 1970 and 1987. The authors attribute about 60% of the rise in this measure of wage dispersion to competitive market factors, such as changes in the demographic and occupational mix of industrial sectors. They find, however, that noncompetitive factors also play an important part in this trend. The most important noncompetitive factor is a strong link between the long-term trends in industry wages and productivity growth, which appears to stem largely from rent-sharing behavior among industries.

Analyzes the condition of the engineering market in the United States from 1948 to 1972. Changes in the engineering market; Information on cobweb models of engineering manpower; Computation of the salary of engineers. (Abstract copyright EBSCO.)