Two models of wage and employment determination in unionized markets are routinely exposited. According to one, wage and employment outcomes are on the firm's labor demand curve; according to the other, wages and employment are on the partie' contract curve. This paper spells out an empirical procedure that discriminates between these two models and applies this procedure to the particular case of the newspaper industry and the International Typographical Union. The labor demand curve model is inconsistent with our data, while the contract curve model comes closer to describing our observations.

The recent literature on employment contracts emphasizes that it is in the interests of the parties to produce institutional arrangements that lead to employment contracts that we have termed "strongly efficient." Strong efficiencyimplies that employment is set so as to equate the marginal revenue product of workers to their alternative wage. It follows that employment in such contracts fluctuates with the determinants of a worker's marginal revenue product and with the worker's alternative wage, but not with the observed contract wage. We have examined two kinds of evidence to test the strong efficiency hypothesis. Laboratory experiments by Siegel et al. indicate that this hypothesis is strongly confirmed when the bargaining parties are required to agree on price and quantity simultaneously and is strongly rejected when the parties are required to bargain by a system of price leadership. In our field data on the printing trades, we find no convincing evidence of strong efficiency. We have also examined the evidence in support of what we have called the "weak efficiency hypothesis." According to this hypothesis, both the contract wage and the alternative wage determine employment. We have found only mixed support for this hypothesis because our measures of the alternative wage available to workers are frequently positively related to employment, precisely the contrary to the hypothesized direction of this effect in a weakly efficient contract.

This paper presents a discrete-time version of Jovanovic's model of worker-firm matching. Descriptive evidence is presented that supports the notion that unobserved worker-firm heterogeneity is an important component in the intertemporal structure of wages for young workers. A structural econometric model of wage dynamics under worker-firm sorting is developed and estimated. Finally, a formal test of the matching model is carried out, and the matching structure on intertemporal covariances of wages is not rejected. My results indicate the necessity of jointly considering processes of turnover and wage growth when analyzing the labor market experiences of young workers.

This paper studies the processes of wage and employment dynamics within local labor markets. The theoretical context is a dynamic spatial equilibrium among locales that is supported by incentives to migrate to markets offering the greatest present value of future earnings. Thus costly migration arbitrages geographic wage differences. Using a time series of cross-sectional files from the Current Population Surveys of 1977-79, I find that wages are sensitive to interarea differences in market conditions. A positive relative shock to local labor demand increases relative wages within a locale, but expectations of future demand actually reduce current wages because of increased current migration. Thus wages are more flexible in response to transitory changes in local market conditions than to permanent ones. Consistent with theory, wages are most flexible among the least mobile demographic groups, who are inelastically supplied across geographic areas.

This paper describes the responses of index-linked wage rates to concurrent price increases for a sample of Canadian union contracts and then analyzes theseresponses in terms of a simple model of indexation to the aggregate price level. The model highlights the importance of aggregate price movements in conveying information about industry-specific prices. The empirical analysis confirms that industry-specific correlations between input and output prices and the consumer price index are important determinants of the flexibility of wages to prices across indexed contracts.

The sensitivity of the supply of labor to intertemporal variation in the wage is an important issue in macroeconomics, the analysis of social security and pensions, and the study of life-cycle patterns of work. This paper explores two approaches to the measurement of intertemporal substitution that have appeared in the literature. The first approach is to use consumption to control for wealth and unobserved expectations about future wages in the labor supply equation. The second approach is to estimate a first-difference equation for hours in which labor supply from the previous period serves as a control for wealth and wage expectations. The results indicate that intertemporal substitution elasticity for married men is positive but small.