John H. Pencavel

Chapter 1 Labor supply of men: A survey

This chapter presents a survey on the labor supply of men. This survey of male labor supply covers the determinants of whether men work for pay in the labor market and, if so, the determinants of their hours of work. The chapter also discusses the work behavior of men prior to their retirement from the labor force. Moreover, even though there are noteworthy investigations into the labor supply of men in many different countries, this survey is restricted almost entirely to the Anglo-American literature. The chapter identifies the major time-series and cross-section empirical regularities in male labor supply behavior. It is these that any economic theory should be designed to address. The chapter presents the canonical static model of labor supply and then immediately proceeds to deal with the problems in applying this model at the aggregative level. The static model is amended to handle the situation of nonlinear budget constraints. The chapter concludes with an outline of the most popular life-cycle model of labor supply. The chapter also addresses the issues in and results from the estimation of the static model. Problems in specifying the model are first considered and then the results are presented from the U.S. nonexperimental literature, the British literature, and the U.S. experimental literature. The chapter also discusses the estimates from the applications of the life-cycle model.

American Trade Union Growth: 1900–1960

I. Some determinants of union growth, 435. — II. Empirical results, 439. — III. Consideration of some subperiods, 445. — IV Conclusion, 447.

A note on income tax evasion, labor supply, and nonlinear tax schedules

Abstract The existing literature on income tax evasion lays claim to two important implications: one is that higher tax rates induce greater income declarations and the other is that increases in gross income induce a fall in the fraction of income declared. The purpose of this paper is to examine the robustness of these results with respect to three modifications of the standard model. The first involves relaxing the assumption of linear income tax schedules. The second modification is to consider an alternative form for the penalty function. Thirdly, we consider the consequences of the tax payer making a joint hours of work-income declaration decision.

Wages and Employment under Trade Unionism: Microeconomic Models and Macroeconomic Applications

The first part of this paper is a critical survey of microeconomic research into behavioural models of trade unionism. Although certain formulations of union objectives and models of wage and employment determination in unionized markets have found favor with economists, unfortunately only a little is known about their empirical relevance. The second part of this paper deals with the daunting problems of applying these models at the macroeconomic level. One such model is estimated with data from Sweden’s mining and manufacturing sector from 1968 to 1982.

The Tradeoff Between Wages and Employment in Trade Union Objectives

This paper demonstrates that, contrary to a widely-held opinion, the determination of the goals of unions is fully amenable to empirical analysis. A characterization of the wage and employment-setting process in unionized markets is adopted and its qualitative implications examined. The first-order condition for this model is fitted to time- series data on the newspaper industry from ten cities. The Inter- national Typographical Union s objective function reveals very restricted opportunities for substituting wages for employment in response to a change in the slope of the employers labor demand function. Larger union locals place greater emphasis on wages versus employment than smaller union locals.

The Market Work Behavior and Wages of Women: 1975-94

Changes in the market work and wages of women from 1975 to 1994 are documented. Women are organized into nine birth cohorts, five schooling groups, and each year of age from 25 to 60 years and their weekly and annual work hours, their annual work weeks, their employment-population ratio, and their real average hourly earnings tabulated. Schooling differences in work behavior have become wider in recent cohorts as have their wages. The relationship between work and wages is estimated for women of different ages, cohorts, and marital status. The gap between the work of unmarried and married women has narrowed and the role of wages (both the wages of women and those of husbands) is examined to determine the extent to which changes in wages account for these movements.

Wage and Employment Determination under Trade Unionism: The International Typographical Union

The wages and employment of typographers are examined to see whether they can be usefully characterized as the outcome of a process by which the union maximizes an objective function containing wages and employment and is constrained by a trade-off between these two variables as represented by the employers labor demand function. Our functional form assumptions permit investigation of some familiar special cases of union behavior. The parameter implications of both the wage bill maximization hypothesis and the rent maximization hypothesis provide inferior explanations of the movement of wages and employment of these workers compared with our more general formulation.

The demand for union services: An exercise

Presents a study that proposed a framework for analyzing the growth in trade union membership. Distinction between the collective, semicollective, and private services offered by trade unions; Results; Implications of the study findings. (Abstract copyright EBSCO.)

An Investigation into Industrial Strike Activity in Britain

In the proliferating diagnoses of Britains post-war economic performance, its system of industrial relations has come under increasing criticism. Practically every day the news media supply us with examples of the most bizarre of employee-management contretemps, so that the general public must be forgiven if it concludes that these incidents are typical of Britains system of industrial relations. Above all, attention has been focused on the frequency of industrial disputes, and unfavourable comparisons have been made with the strike record of other countries. Notwithstanding increasing public concern over industrial conflict and the availability of a large amount of reasonably accurate data, economists have done little to apply to strike activity those techniques of multivariate statistical analysis that characterize so much of current research in economics. This paper embarks on such a statistical analysis by specifying and testing the implications of a model that has been used to account successfully for work stoppages in the United States. As in other branches of economics, these methods complement and do not supplant other methods of enquiry. Thus, the unresolved questions in this study may prove more tractable when examined by alternative analytical tools. However, an investigation into strike activity employing multiple regression techniques should yield some rewards particularly by affording the opportunity to test some standard hypotheses. For instance, one may ask whether there is a statistical foundation for the common belief that industrial conflict has been tending to increase in recent years. Similarly, is there an association between the frequency of strike action and the ideological complexion of the particular party in power? Do different industries display markedly different strike propensities? This paper addresses itself to these and other questions in the belief that the conclusions which follow are not without value. The plan of this paper is as follows. In the first section, the model is outlined and the question of its applicability to Britains system of labour-management relations discussed. Section II tests the implications of the model with aggregate data on the number of strikes beginning in each quarter in the period from 1950 to 1967. There follows in Section III an analysis of industrial disputes in four major industries. Finally,

Changes in Work Hours of Male Employees, 1940–1988

This paper examines changes in work hours of male employees as reported in Decennial Censuses from 1940 to 1980 and in the 1980 and 1988 Current Population Surveys. Aggregate data analyzed in previous research do not reveal the changes in hours that have occurred among workers of different skills. Although median weekly hours were virtually constant from 1940 to 1988, the upper tail of the hours distribution fell for those with little schooling and rose for the well-educated. Hours declined for young and older men (especially black men), but changed little for white men in their prime working years.