ARTICLES (slated for July 2008, 61:4)

Union Competition and Strikes:  The Need for an Analysis at the Sector Level     Agnes Akkerman

Strikes in Colonial India, 1921–1938     Susan Wolcott

The Dispersion of Employees' Wage Increases and Firm Performance     Christian Grund and Niels Westergaard-Nielsen

The Returns to Pencil Use Revisited     Alexandra Spitz-Oener

The Sexual Orientation Wage Gap:  The Role of Occupational Sorting and Human Capital     Heather Antecol, Anneke Jong, and Michael Steinberger

The Effect of Minimum Wages on Immigrants' Employment and Earnings     Pia M. Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny

The State Children's Health Insurance Program and Job Mobility:  Identifying Job Lock among Working Parents in Near-Poor Households     Cynthia Bansak and Steven Raphael

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BOOK REVIEWS

Globalization and the Future of Labour Law.  Edited by John D.R. Craig and S. Michael Lynk.  Reviewed by Kevin Kolben.

Homo Juridicus:  On the Anthropological Function of the Law.  By Alain Supiot.  Reviewed by Jerome Braun.

The Working Life:  The Labor Market for Workers in Low-Skilled Jobs.  By Nan L. Maxwell.  Reviewed by Fairris David.

Does Education Really Help? Skill, Work, and Inequality.  By Edward N. Wolff.  Reviewed by Edward C. Kokkelenberg.

Differential Diagnoses:  A Comparative History of Health Care Problems and Solutions in the United States and France.  By Paul V. Dutton.  Reviewed by Scott L. Greer.

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ARTICLE ABSTRACTS

The State Children's Health Insurance Program and Job Mobility:   Identifying Job Lock among Working Parents in Near-Poor Households

Cynthia Bansak and Steven Raphael

To assess whether near-poor parents' job mobility is reduced due to the non-portability of employer-provided health insurance---an effect termed job lock---the authors examine data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation for 1996 and 2001, years bracketing the introduction of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).  Among the working fathers whose children met the SCHIP eligibility criteria, those whose wives did not have their own employer-provided insurance were 5-6% more likely to separate from their current employer in the year before the later survey date than in the year before the earlier survey date, whereas those whose wives were insured exhibited no comparable change in mobility.  These results confirm the presence of job lock:  for men whose wives were uninsured, but not for those whose wives were insured, the authors argue, the SCHIP program presented a new opportunity to switch jobs without losing health insurance.

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The Sexual Orientation Wage Gap:   the Role of Occupational Sorting and Human Capital

Heather Antecol, Anneke Jong, and Michael Steinberger

Using data from the 2000 U.S. Census, the authors explore two alternative explanations for the sexual orientation wage gap:  occupational sorting, and human capital differences.  They find that lesbian women earned more than their heterosexual counterparts irrespective of marital status, while gay men earned less than similar married heterosexual men but more than similar cohabitating heterosexual men.  Results of a Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition indicate that the relative wage advantages observed for some groups of lesbians and gay men were mainly owing to their superior human capital accumulation (particularly education), while occupational sorting had little or no influence.  The relative wage penalties that were observed in other cases, however, cannot be attributed either to differences in occupational sorting or to human capital.  An analysis employing an alternative decomposition, one allowing for variation in the wage gap at different points along the wage distribution, broadly confirms these results, although with some variation.

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Union Competition and Strikes:   the Need for Analysis at the Sector Level

Agnes Akkerman

International comparative research has found that strike incidence is higher where two or more unions bargain with an employer ("multi-unionism"), as is common in most European countries, than where only one union does, all else equal.  Two proposed explanations for this relationship, both invoking inter-union rivalry as the main dynamic, are that under multi-unionism, unions (a) make propagandistic use of strikes to attract members, or (b) compete with each other by bidding up bargaining demands.  To date, the evidence bearing on these hypotheses has been equivocal because, the author argues, researchers have focused on activity at the national level rather than at the lower levels that are more commonly the nexus for strike formation.  The author performs empirical tests using industry-sector-level data for seven European countries for the years 1990-2006, and finds evidence clearly favoring the competitive bargaining hypothesis over the propaganda hypothesis.

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Strikes in Colonial India, 1921-1938

Susan Wolcott

Newly collected data on India's textile industry over the years 1921-38 show strike rates far higher than those observed in the British or U.S. textile industries when they were at a similar stage of development, despite an absence of formal union organization or state support for collective bargaining.  Colonial India's high strike frequency is hard to account for in terms of current theories of strikes and collective action in general.  The author believe that these data may point to the important role of social norms of cooperation in sustaining collective action.

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The Returns to Pencil Use Revisited

Alexandra Spitz-Oener

Many researchers believe that the observed positive association between computer use and wages simply reflects unobserved heterogeneity:  like pencils and other "white-collar" tools, computers are assigned to employees who possess productive attributes that would attract higher wages in any event.  This study evaluates that claim by identifying the mechanisms through which computers changed the wage structure in West Germany in the late 1990s.  The author finds that the spread of computers---but not of pencils---shifted the task composition of occupations toward analytical and interactive tasks that are complementary to computers' capabilities, and away from routine cognitive and manual tasks for which computers tend to substitute.  Employees possessing computer-complementary skills enjoyed wage increases because computers both raised the demand for their skills and increased their marginal product.  The estimates suggest that computer use, ceteris paribus, was associated with a wage premium of 8-15%.

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The Effect of Minimum Wages on Immigrants' Employment and Earnings

Pia M. Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny

This study examines how minimum wage laws affect the employment and earnings of low-skilled immigrants and natives in the United States.  Minimum wage increases might have larger effects among low-skilled immigrants than among natives because, on average, immigrants earn less than natives due to lower levels of education, limited English skills, and less social capital.  Results based on data from the Current Population Survey for the years 1994-2005 do not indicate that minimum wages had adverse employment effects among adult immigrants or natives who did not complete high school.  However, low-skilled immigrants may have been discouraged from settling in states that set wage floors substantially above the federal minimum.

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The Dispersion of Employees' Wage Increases and Firm Performance

Christian Grund and Niels Westergaard-Nielsen

Previous studies examining intra-firm wage dispersion and firm performance have focused on wage levels.  The authors of this study argue that for purposes of comparing wage dispersion's positive incentive effects with its adverse morale effects, the dispersion of wage increases is more revealing than the dispersion of wage levels.  It is reasonable to expect greater dispersion of wage increases to be associated with higher monetary incentives, but also with increased perceptions of unfairness.  The authors' analysis of linked employer-employee data from Denmark for the years 1992-97 shows that the dispersion of wage growth within firms generally had a negative association with firm performance.  The results are mainly driven by white-collar rather than blue-collar workers, perhaps because blue-collar wages are typically regulated by contracts and union rules that explicitly take account of fairness and equity.