Morris M. Kleiner

Does Regulation Affect Economic Outcomes? The Case of Dentistry

This study examines the role of variations in occupational licensing policies in improving the quality of services provided to consumers and the effect of restrictive regulations on the prices of certain services and on the earnings of practitioners. Theory suggests that more restrictive licensing may raise prices and at the same time raise demand by reducing uncertainty about the quality of the services. This article uses unique data on the dental health of incoming Air Force personnel to analyze empirically the effects of varying licensing stringency among the states. It finds that tougher licensing does not improve outcomes, but it does raise prices for consumers and the earnings of practitioners. These results cast doubt on the principal public interest argument in favor of more stringent state licensing practices.

Analyzing the Extent and Influence of Occupational Licensing on the Labor Market

This study examines occupational licensing in the United States using a specially designed national labor force survey. Estimates from the survey indicated that 35% of employees were either licensed or certified by the government and that 29% were licensed. Another 3% stated that all who worked in their job would eventually be required to be certified or licensed, bringing the total that are or eventually must be licensed or certified by government to 38%. We find that licensing is associated with about 18% higher wages but that the effect of governmental certification on pay is much smaller.

Do unions make enterprises insolvent

This study investigates the impact of unionization on closures of firms, business lines, and establishments. Analyzing data from two major data sets—one (from the COMPUSTAT files) on the union status of solvent and insolvent enterprises and business lines, and one (obtained by matching files from the Current Population Survey) on the union status of workers who have lost their jobs due to permanent plant closures or business failures—the authors find little support for the hypothesis that unionization increases the insolvency of firms. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that unions behave in an economically rational manner, pushing wages to the point where union firms may expand less rapidly than nonunion firms, but not to the point where the firm, plant, or business line closes down.

Providing Business Information to Production Workers: Correlates of Compensation and Profitability

This study investigates some of the effects of a companys providing production workers with information on its financial condition, productivity, and relative standing in the labor market. Analyzing survey responses of business executives from 106 firms together with financial data on the companies from COMPUSTAT II for 1984, the authors find that information-sharing was positively related to the level of wages and benefits and unrelated to productivity in both union and nonunion businesses, and that it had a significant negative relationship to profits and cash flows in nonunion businesses.

Works Councils and Unionization: Lessons from South Korea

This study analyzes the impact of effective works councils and unions in large South Korean firms. Following a brief review of economic theory on works councils and the institutional environment of Korean industrial relations, we describe the unique data set used to analyze Korean firm-level labor relations and economic performance. The results of the multivariate analysis show that both effective works councils and unions enhance employee voice on several key personnel practices. In addition, the estimates show that unionization increases wages and reduces turnover, but effective works councils are associated with higher levels of employee satisfaction and somewhat higher productivity. These estimates are consistent with theoretical models that find that carefully designed works councils can enhance employee voice and may increase productivity.

Adoption and Termination of Employee Involvement Programs

Using an interview survey of manufacturing establishments that provide 10 years of retrospective data on labor practices, we investigate factors associated with the adoption and termination of employee involvement programs and the relation between these and other human resource policies. In the period studied, more firms introduced than terminated such programs but a sufficiently large number chose to eliminate such programs to indicate that employee involvement does not fit in all business settings. Our results show that business strategy and the use of other complementary human resource policies affect the dynamics of employee involvement use in US manufacturing establishments.

Stages of Occupational Regulation: Analysis of Case Studies

Kleiner examines occupations that are at various stages of regulation to determine to what extent regulation has influenced the individuals in the occupations, consumers, and related occupational practitioners.

The Effect of Two-Tier Collective Bargaining Agreements on Shareholder Equity

This study uses an event-time methodology to examine the impact of two-tier agreements on shareholder equity from 1981 through 1986. Following announcements of two-tier agreements, about half of the firms in the sample had negative abnormal returns (returns with values below the expected market returns) and half had positive abnormal returns. Because the positive returns exceeded the negative returns in absolute value, however, there was a statistically significant increase in mean firm value. The abnormal returns averaged between + 2% and + 4% over a 10- to 12-week period following the announcement, a figure that approximately equals the transactions cost of a stock purchase. The authors speculate that this rather low average gain may help explain the marked decline of new two-tier agreements during the latter half of the 1980s.

Organizational and Individual Learning and Forgetting

Researchers of industrial relations issues in manufacturing have long recognized that careful study of production has significant implications for labor productivity. Recent theory and analysis has shown the large influence of organizational forgetting. The authors of this study demonstrate that forgetting by workers in an establishment or line of production as a substantive characteristic of actual production processes is overstated and that alternative, simpler theoretical and empirical explanations have at least as good explanatory power. Using inside-the-firm analysis, they find that the omitted-variable bias in other studies due to data limitations has the potential for spurious estimates of large forgetting rates by lines of work. Further, they find that forgetting, although important and interesting, is not as influential as previous work for labor productivity has suggested. Further analysis of the production function and the role of organizational forgetting needs to be fully specified in a model to include internal production and labor relations characteristics, like those in this study, to be a plausible model of the production process within manufacturing establishments.

Analysis of alternative labor-force population migration forecasting models

This study evaluates the ability of a model using economic and demographic variables to predict migration patterns. The regression model tested is based on an analysis of migration hypotheses, operationalized on a past time period, and evaluated with the method used by the Bureau of the Census. Dollar value estimates using recent Federal revenue sharing allocations are made with the alternative forecasting methods for one State in each of the Bureau of the Census regions. The results show that the model that is developed provides a firmer basis for projection confidence than does one which relies solely on trend extrapolation.