There is a growing conviction expressed by many persons that the ability of an individual employee is no longer of much significance in determining his status. The policies developed through collective bargaining are attacked on the ground that there is no incentive for a man to use his initiative when he is restricted in advancement by seniority rules and practices, that seniority provisions m...

We develop a new concept of rural technology diffusion influenced by labor mobility and business relations. The technology gain effect of labor mobility increases technology diffusiveness, whereas the technology drain effect decreases it. The concept is applied to survey data from the Mekong region, a new geographic area in this context. In the econometric analysis that takes spatial correlatio...

This study of workers' altitudes compares data from International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) surveys for former commuiiisi countries in Europe with ISSP data for Western countries over the period 1987-93, which covers the beginning of the transition to a market economy for the former communist countries. Omsistent with their hypothesis that communist-run economies left an altiiiidinal "lega...

I study asset prices in a two-agent production economy in which the worker has private information about her labor productivity. The shareholder offers an incentive compatible long-term labor contract, which partially insures the worker against labor income risk. I compare the model’s performance to settings with a competitive labor market, and with static labor contracts. My model successfully...

We are attentive to labor practices in foreign lands but as the quotations above indicate, we are unsure about the lessons to be drawn from these practices. Will something that works `over there' work here, or will it fail to `fit' our ways of doing things? Which practices will adapt or evolve into something different in a different setting? Which may catalyse forces that will change our entire...

This paper reviews changes occurring in the U.S. industrial relations system at the workplace, in collective bargaining, and at the level of strategic decision making within business and labor organizations. By relating these current developments to longer term pressures on the post New Deal industrial relations system, we suggest that the system is undergoing fundamental transformation. To ada...