Wage and Employment Determinants Under Trade Unionism: The Internationaltypographical Union

34 Pages Posted: 27 Mar 2001 Last revised: 23 Jan 2022

See all articles by J.N. Dertouzos

J.N. Dertouzos

affiliation not provided to SSRN

John H. Pencavel

Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR); IZA Institute of Labor Economics

Date Written: October 1980

Abstract

This paper represents the first empirical application of a model of trade union behavior that has been discussed in the literature for over thirty years. The wages and employment o 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 employer's labor demand function. Our functional form assumptions permit investigation of some familiar special cases of union behavior. We find the parameter implications of both the wage bill maximization hypothesis and the rent maximization hypothesis to provide inferior explanations of the movement of wages and employment of these workers compared with our more general formulation.

Suggested Citation

Dertouzos, J.N. and Pencavel, John H., Wage and Employment Determinants Under Trade Unionism: The Internationaltypographical Union (October 1980). NBER Working Paper No. w0570, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=264406

J.N. Dertouzos

affiliation not provided to SSRN

John H. Pencavel (Contact Author)

Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) ( email )

579 Serra Mall at Galvez St.
Stanford, CA 94305-6015
United States
650-723-3712 (Phone)
650-725-0293 (Fax)

IZA Institute of Labor Economics

P.O. Box 7240
Bonn, D-53072
Germany

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
31
Abstract Views
1,064
PlumX Metrics