“What do we know about job loss in the United States?: Evidence from the Displaced Workers Survey, 1984-2004", June 2005 by Henry S. Farber. Journal of Economic Perspectives

A defining characteristic of the U.S. labor market is its fluid nature. Half of all new jobs end in the first year and, at any point in time, about 20% of workers have been with their current employer for less than one year. The goal of this article is to characterize the level of job loss and the costs to job losers over the 1981-2003 period, and to look for changes over time, both cyclical and secular, in the types of workers who lose jobs and the costs borne by various types of job losers.

“Union Success in Representation Elections: Why Does Unit Size Matter?” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, January, 2001.

Four important trends emerge from this study of representation elections supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over the period 1952-98: (1) election activity fell sharply and discontinuously beginning in the mid-1970s, after increasing for two decades; (2) unions' election win rate declined less sharply, though continuously, over the entire period; (3) a 'size gap' characterized unions' win rate throughout the period, with a lower win rate in large units than in small ones; and (4) the size gap widened substantially between 1958 and 1998. A simple optimizing model of the union decision to hold a representation election can explain the first three facts. Two possible interpretations for the fourth fact include differing behavior by employers in different size classes and purely statistical explanations. Results of empirical tests using NLRB election data for 1952-98 suggest that those two explanations together can largely account for the observed patterns.