Prior theoretical work predicts an underprovision of advance-notice contracts stemming from their enforcement costs. In the present model, it is rather the fundamental inability of workers to alienate their right to quit taken in conjunction with parameters central to job separation decisions that jointly determine the mix of notice and no-notice contracts observed in equilibrium. Not all equilibrium contracts are efficient, but there is no underprovision of notice. Mandating notice cannot improve on joint value and indeed may reduce it. Furthermore, although a mandate can be merely redistributive, there are cases in which it harms all parties.

Using special CPS data on displaced workers, this article investigates the wage consequences of job displacement in a framework that emphasizes the effects of past job duration(s) and unemployment duration(s) on postdisplacement wages. Our model also attempts to take account of the simultaneity between unemployment duration and the postdisplacement wage. It is found that duration strongly reduces subsequent earnings and that considerable overstatement of the loss in firm-specific training investments is implied by conventional routes to measuring wage losses.

This article interprets literature examining union effects on economic performance. Production function studies indicate small overall union impacts on productivity; positive effects, where they exist, appear to result from management response to decreased profit expectations and from a natural selection process. Lower profitability among unionized firms is well established; more interesting is the possibility that unions appropriate quasi rents deriving from long-lived tangible and intangible capital. The connection between unions, investment behavior, and productivity growth emerges as a particularly fruitful line of empirical inquiry, although it does not encourage a sanguine view of unionism's long-run impact.

McDonald, James B., and Richard J. Butler, Some Generalized Mixture Distributions with an Application to Unemployment Duration, this REVIEW 69 (May 1987), 232-240. Podgursky, Michael, and Paul Swaim, Duration of Joblessness Following Displacement, Industrial Relations 26 (Fall 1987), 213-226. Prentice, Ross L., A Log Gamma Model and Its Maximum Likelihood Estimation, Biometrika 61 (Dec. 1974), 539-544. Swaim, Paul, and Michael Podgursky, Advance Notice and Job Search: The Value of an Early Start, Journal of Human Resources 25 (Spring 1990), 148-178.

Using an accelerated failure time model, the extended generalized gamma distribution is deployed to discriminate among various special cases of that distribution. Displaced worker data from the January 1984 Current Population Survey are analyzed within a regression framework that accommodates the stochastic nature of the point of censoring associated with incomplete spells of unemployment. Not only are the regression parameters sensitive to distributional assumption but also there is evidence of different distributional shapes and hence duration dependencies in subsets of the data.