December 2007 - January 2008 (25)

Editor: Terence K. Huwe
Contributors: Dan Bellm, Elizabeth del Rocio Camacho, Stefanie Kalmin, Janice Kimball, Jenifer MacGillvary, Vibhuti Mehra, Dick Walker


IRLE News & Events
Call for IRLE Working Paper Series Contributions
Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society. Volume 46, no. 4, October 2007: Abstracts of Articles


IRLE Program News
The Labor Center
California Public Employee Relations
Center for the Study of Child Care Employment
Institute for Research on Labor and Employment Library
The Labor Project for Working Families

IRLE NEWS & EVENTS

Call for Working Papers: IRLE Working Paper Series

We are pleased to announce the Fall 2007 Call for Papers for IRLEs Working Paper series.

IRLE's series received over 50,000 downloads during the 2006-2007 academic year, which suggests broad, sustained interest in our areas of study. Papers are listed on the IRLE Web and are also available within the eScholarship Repository, at http://repositories.cdlib.org/iir.

IRLE hopes to receive working papers from faculty who have received support, as your research progresses. Terry Huwe will follow up with faculty individually to learn more about your current projects.

How to Submit a Paper

Please send an electronic copy (e.g., MS Word, .RTF) to Terry Huwe, thuwe@library.berkeley.edu. Associated files (e.g., MS Excel spreadsheets, JPEGs) may also be appended to the papers as needed.

Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society. Abstracts of Articles Published in Volume 46, No. 4

COMPARING THE EARNINGS OF COHABITING LESBIANS, COHABITING HETEROSEXUAL WOMEN, AND MARRIED WOMEN: EVIDENCE FROM THE 2000 CENSUS
Lisa K. Jepsen
Using data from the 2000 Census, I test the hypothesis that cohabiting lesbians have statistically different earnings from cohabiting and married heterosexual women. Cohabiting lesbians earn more than their heterosexual counterparts, even when differences in childrearing status are considered. Further, the results do not support differences in household specialization as an explanation for the lesbian earnings premium. JEL J71, J16

COMPETENT PRODUCTION SUPERVISORS
Arnaldo Camuffo and Fabrizio Gerli
While the manufacturing sector is vanishing in most European and North American regions, North East Italian firms have successfully contrasted global competition thanks to superior manufacturing capabilities grounded, among other things, on people’s competencies.
Applying non-parametric statistical analysis on data from 212 behavioral event and 44 repertory grid interviews, the research presented in this note investigates the nature of these competencies for production supervisors in North East Italian firms. We identify four threshold and nine distinctive competencies and offer insights on the relationship between these competencies and North East Italian firms’ manufacturing capability. We also suggest how to use competency tools to design skill development policies in industrial clusters and implement effective human resource management practices in small and medium sized enterprises.

DELIVERING SKILLS: APPRENTICESHIP PROGRAM SPONSORSHIP AND TRANSITION FROM TRAINING
Cihan Bilginsoy
Many open-shop contractors in the U.S. construction sector sponsor training cooperatively in unilateral multi-employer apprenticeship programs. Their proponents view these coordinated efforts as an alternative to the training organized jointly by a union and signatory contactors. This paper uses a new dataset to compare the performance of these program types in terms of the transition probabilities and durations of apprentices. It shows that in open-shop multiple employer programs: (1) the completion rate is higher but still lags behind that of the union-management programs; (2) quitters leave training before substantial build-up of skills; (3) the graduates complete requirements at a faster pace. While these results are disconcerting in view of the skilled labor shortage in construction, they are consistent with the open-shop sector’s preference to rely extensively on semi-skilled workers.

TESTING THE MONOPOLY UNION MODEL: A STOCHASTIC FRONTIER APPROACH
James Swanson and Kim Andrews
This study applies stochastic frontier analysis to test the monopoly union model. This approach allows use of a wider data set than has been previously employed. We fit a stochastic cost frontier to data from the U.S. manufacturing sector that include exogenous sources of potential inefficiency including unionization. Our findings suggest that over the 1972-1982 time period more heavily unionized industries in the U.S. manufacturing sector were more likely to operate off their labor demand curve. This result is inconsistent with the monopoly union model predictions.

MEASURING THE UNION-NONUNION WAGE GAY USING PROPENSITY SCORE MATCHING
Ozkan Eren
This paper examines the union wage effect among private sector wage and salary workers using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data. We estimate the average union premium by utilizing semi (non) parametric matching techniques, as well as by linear regression model. Our analysis reveals: (i) Conditioning linearly on covariates understate the union wage effect. In addition, matching results under the alternative support conditions indicate that selection on unobservables has at most a modest impact on average. (ii) Log wage estimations lead to an overstatement of the union wage effect. Solving these problems yield the union membership premium as 21.5 percent.