This paper examines the effect of nominal contracting provisions on employment determination in union contracts. In most contracts the nominal wage rate is wholly or partially predetermined. Real wage rates therefore contain unanticipated components that reflect unexpected price changes and the degree of indexation. The empirical analysis, based on a large sample of indexed and nonindexed contracts, suggests that unexpected real wage changes are associated with systematic employment responses in the opposite direction. I conclude that nominal contracting provisions play a potentially important role in the cyclical properties and persistence of employment movements in the union sector.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of firm-specific employment and wage outcomes for mechanics in the domestic airline industry. A dynamic contracting model is presented that incorporates both costly employment adjustment and potential gaps between contract wage rates and the opportunity value of workers' time. The model gives a useful description of the employment-output linkage in the data, but is less successful in capturing the dynamic relation between employment, contract wage rates, and wage rates outside the airline industry.

This paper describes the responses of index-linked wage rates to concurrent price increases for a sample of Canadian union contracts and then analyzes theseresponses in terms of a simple model of indexation to the aggregate price level. The model highlights the importance of aggregate price movements in conveying information about industry-specific prices. The empirical analysis confirms that industry-specific correlations between input and output prices and the consumer price index are important determinants of the flexibility of wages to prices across indexed contracts.

Some of the most important but difficult issues in modern societies revolve around a simple question: What factors ensure that a young person will have a good start when she or he first enters the labor market? The importance of this question has been driven home by three sets of research findings. First, there is substantial persistence in labor market outcomes over the life cycle. Good or bad outcomes early in a career are strong indicators of long-term success or failure. Second, although immutable factors like parents’ education exert a powerful and lasting influence on children’s outcomes, there is an important causal role for potentially malleable factors like schools, neighborhoods, and local institutions. Third, some groups of youth—particularly those from disadvantaged family backgrounds—appear to be especially vulnerable to both temporary shocks and permanent features of the environment in which they were raised. Traditionally, economists have thought of employment as a key metric for assessing the initial success of young people. By this standard, youth are much worse off today than in earlier decades. As shown in figure 1, the average fraction of 16–24-year-olds working in any week fell from around 60% in the late 1970s to around 50% today. The decline for teenagers was even steeper. A closer examination of the relative employment rate of youth (plotted in the bottom line in fig. 1) suggests that it has been trending downward over the past 40 years, with discrete declines after each of the last four recessions (in 1982–83, 1991, 2001, and 2007–9). Viewed from this perspective, the Great Recession is just the latest in a long series of setbacks for young workers. Of course, employment is only part of the story. Given smaller family sizes and higher incomes, an increasing fraction of US families may decide

This article uses 1990 census data to study the effects of immigrant inflows on occupation-specific labor market outcomes. I find that intercity mobility rates of natives and earlier immigrants are insensitive to immigrant inflows. However, occupation-specific wages and employment rates are systematically lower in cities with higher relative supplies of workers in a given occupation. The results imply that immigrant inflows over the 1980s reduced wages and employment rates of low-skilled natives in traditional gateway cities like Miami and Los Angeles by 1-3 percentage points. Copyright 2001 by University of Chicago Press.

This article presents an empirical study of strike activity in a panel of contract negotiations for some 250 firm-and-union pairs. Evidence is presented on two sources of variation in dispute rates: changes in the characteristics of the collective bargaining agreement that affect subsequent strike outcomes and the effects of lagged strikes on the incidence and duration of subsequent disputes. Strike probabilities are significantly affected by the duration and expiration month of the previous agreement. Dispute rates are also increased by the occurrence of a short strike during the previous negotiations and reduced by the occurrence of a long strike.

On April 1, 1992, New Jersey's minimum wage rose from $4.25 to $5.05 per hour. To evaluate the impact of the law we surveyed 410 fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania before and after the rise. Comparisons of employment growth at stores in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (where the minimum wage was constant) provide simple estimates of the effect of the higher minimum wage. We also compare employment changes at stores in New Jersey that were initially paying high wages (above $5) to the changes at lower-wage stores. We find no indication that the rise in the minimum wage reduced employment.