[This paper examines the impact of de jure desegregation on education in the South and of increased black voting power on the demand for black schoolteachers in the United States. Because changes in the black share of voters in the post-World War II South are due largely to "exogenous" national laws (the Voting Rights Act of 1965, in particular), the paper provides a unique test of the impact of changes in political power on public decision making. The main finding is that increased black voting power appears to have raised demand for black school-teachers in the 1960s. There is additional suggestive evidence that black voting power operated in part through election of black officials. The increase in demand due to the changes in voting offset most of the reduction in demand due to desegregation of schooling in the South, averting the potential dire effects of desegregated education on employment of black teachers. Instead of declining, relative employment of blacks in teaching was maintained, and relative incomes rose in the 1950s and 1960s. These results are consistent with broad "governmental discrimination" hypothesis that much of the economic progress or retrogression of blacks in the United States is explicable in terms of black political power and resultant governmental activity.]

Volunteer activity is work performed without monetary recompense. This article shows that volunteering is a sizeable economic activity in the United States, that volunteers have high skills and opportunity costs of time, that standard labor supply explanations of volunteering account for only a minor part of volunteer behavior, and that many volunteer only when requested to do so. This suggests that volunteering is a "conscience good or activity"-something that people feel morally obligated to do when asked, but which they would just as soon let someone else do.

This article demonstrates that state collective bargaining laws are important determinants of union and nonunion public employee compensation. State laws that provide stronger bargaining rights and ensure closure to the bargaining process increase the direct effect of police unions on compensation. Moreover, indirect threat effects on the pay of nonunion police also increase with stronger bargaining laws. In each law category investigated, nonunion police receive most of the compensation premium enjoyed by unionized police. Previous studies that have not adequately controlled for these effects of bargaining laws have therefore underestimated the full effect of public-sector unions on compensation.

This paper examines how measurement error biases longitudinal estimates of union effects. It develops numerical examples, statistical models, and econometric estimates which indicate that measurement error is a major problem in longitudinal data sets, so that longitudinal analyses do not provide the research panacea for determining the effects of unionism (or other economic forces) some have suggested. There are three major findings: