This study presents new evidence on the impacts of unionization using administrative data matching workers to employers in a regression discontinuity design. Close union elections exhibit substantial nonrandom selection or manipulation. Estimates accounting for this selection show that unionization substantially decreases payroll, employment, average worker earnings, and establishment survival. Payroll and earnings decreases are driven by composition changes, with older and higher-paid workers leaving unionizing establishments and younger workers joining or staying. Worker-level effects on earnings are small and are reconciled with large negative establishment-level effects in a model of employer and employee selection into union jobs.

Using data for three cohorts of women in the PSID, we show that annual earnings inequality fell sharply between the late 1960s and the mid-1990s, with a large decline in the component attributable to the extensive margin. We then fit earnings-generating models that incorporate both intensive- and extensive-margin dynamics to data for the three cohorts. Our models suggest that more than 80% of the decline in female earnings inequality can be attributed to a weakening of the link between family-based factors (i.e., children and the presence and incomes of partners) and the intensive and extensive margins of earnings determination.

Good information on self-employment is needed to inform the ongoing discussion of the rise of the gig economy and its implications for workers. Tax data show significant growth in self-employment not captured in the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS-ASEC). The growing gap reflects both self-employment in tax data missing from the CPS-ASEC and self-employment misreported as wage and salary work. We document consistent patterns in the discrepancies between the tax and survey data but are able to explain only a modest share of the growing disagreement between them.