This paper outlines the steps involved in constructing a new panel dataset of U.S. contract negotiations and strike activity. This data set has a much broader coverage of firms and unions than micro data sets analyzed to date. Key findings include the discovery that the variability, and not the level of firm profitability, affects the probability of a strike. Personal characteristics of the union workforce also emerge as key determinants of strike activity. Finally, strikes are found to be more likely when the local labor market is tight, but less likely when the industry labor market is tight.

This paper outlines the construction of a new panel data set of U.S. contract negotiations and strike activity. This is the first to contain data on both strikes and contract expirations. Key findings are that 15 percent of scheduled negotiations end as strikes, but strike probabilities are higher in June and lower in December; the variability, and not the level, of firm profitability affects strike activity; personal characteristics of the union workforce affect strike activity; and strikes are more likely when the local labor market is tight, but less likely when the industry labor market is tight.

A study finds that women, like men, experience most of the expected wage response to dollar fluctuations at times of job transitions, rather than when they remain with the same employer. In this context, dollar-depreciation periods, which are generally viewed as providing positive labor demand shocks, reduce the penalties that often are associated with a job change. Since women have higher job-changing rates than their male counterparts, these findings suggest that the average female worker has more sensitive wages than her male counterpart. Within the population there is diversity in these effects, with the least-educated women having both the highest job-transition rates and the largest response to exchange rates at these transitions.

Exchange Rates and Employment Instability: Evidence from Matched CPS Data by Linda Goldberg, Joseph Tracy and Stephanie Aaronson. Published in volume 89, issue 2, pages 204-210 of American Economic Review, May 1999

We develop a private-information model of union contract negotiations in which disputes signal a firm's willingness to pay. Previous models have assumed that all labor disputes take the form of a strike. Yet a prominent feature of U.S. collective bargaining is the holdout: negotiations often continue without a strike after the contract has expired. Production continues with workers paid according to the expired contract. We analyze the union's decision to strike or hold out and highlight its importance to strike activity. Strikes are more likely to occur after a drop in the real wage or a decline in unemployment.