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Widespread public-sector unionism emerged only in the 1960s, as individual states opened the door to collective bargaining for state and municipal workers. In this study, the author exploits differences in timing of legislative reforms across states to construct estimates of the causal effects of public-sector collective bargaining rights on pay, benefits, and employment for teachers, firefighters, and police. Perhaps surprisingly, estimates that allow for state fixed effects and state-specific trends show little effect on teachers' pay, benefits, or employment, despite significantly increasing union presence among teachers. For firefighters, the results show a substantial positive effect on wages. For police, the wage effect was more modest but the workweek was significantly shortened.

We introduce a test of the rank invariance or rank similarity assumption common in treatment effects and instrumental variables models. The test probes the implication that the conditional distribution of ranks should be identical across treatment states using a regression-based test statistic. We apply the test to data from the Tennessee STAR class-size reduction experiment and show that systematic slippages in rank can be important statistically and economically.

This article develops a nonparametric approach to identification and estimation of treatment effects on censored outcomes when treatment may be endogenous and have arbitrarily heterogenous effects. Identification is based on an instrumental variable that satisfies the exclusion and monotonicity conditions standard in the local average treatment effects framework. The article proposes a censored quantile treatment effects estimator, derives its asymptotic distribution, and illustrates its performance using Monte Carlo simulations. Even in the exogenous case, the estimator performs better in finite samples than existing censored quantile regression estimators, and performs nearly as well as maximum likelihood estimators in cases where their distributional assumptions hold. An empirical application to a subsidized job training program finds that participation significantly and dramatically reduced the duration of jobless spells, especially at the right tail of the distribution.

Identification in censored regression analysis and hazard models of duration outcomes relies on the condition that censoring points are conditionally independent of latent outcomes, an assumption which may be questionable in many settings. This article proposes a test for this assumption based on a Cramer-von-Mises-like test statistic comparing two different nonparametric estimators for the latent outcome cdf: the Kaplan-Meier estimator, and the empirical cdf conditional on the censoring point exceeding (for right-censored data) the cdf evaluation point. The test is consistent and has power against a wide variety of alternatives. Applying the test to unemployment duration data from the NLSY, the SIPP, and the PSID suggests the assumption is frequently suspect.

Abstract Conventional tests of the regression discontinuity design’s identifying restrictions can perform poorly when the running variable is discrete. This paper proposes a test for manipulation of the running variable that is consistent when the running variable is discrete. The test exploits the fact that if the discrete running variable’s probability mass function satisfies a certain smoothness condition, then the observed frequency at the threshold has a known conditional distribution. The proposed test is applied to vote tally distributions in union representation elections and reveals evidence of manipulation in close elections that is in favor of employers when Republicans control the NLRB and in favor of unions otherwise.

We bound the distribution of treatment effects under plausible and testable assumptions on the joint distribution of potential outcomes, namely that potential outcomes are mutually stochastically increasing. We show how to test the empirical restrictions implied by those assumptions. The resulting bounds substantially sharpen bounds based on classical inequalities. We apply our method to estimate bounds on the distribution of effects of attending a Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter school on student achievement, and find that a substantial majority of students' math achievement benefited from attendance, especially those who would have fared poorly in a traditional classroom.

Widespread public-sector unionism emerged only in the 1960s, as individual states opened the door to collective bargaining for state and municipal workers. In this study, the author exploits differences in timing of legislative reforms across states to construct estimates of the causal effects of public-sector collective bargaining rights on pay, benefits, and employment for teachers, firefighters, and police. Perhaps surprisingly, estimates that allow for state fixed effects and state-specific trends show little effect on teachers' pay, benefits, or employment, despite significantly increasing union presence among teachers. For firefighters, the results show a substantial positive effect on wages. For police, the wage effect was more modest but the workweek was significantly shortened.

Using a regression discontinuity design, the authors of this article examine the effects of nursing home unionization on several labor, establishment, and consumer outcomes. They find negative effects of unionization on staffing levels and no decline in care quality, suggesting positive labor productivity effects. Some evidence suggests that nursing homes in less competitive local product markets and those with lower union density at the time of election experienced stronger union employment effects. Unionization appears to raise wages for a given worker while also shifting the composition of the workforce away from higher-earning workers. By combining credible identification of union effects and firm- and worker-level outcomes over time with measures of market-level characteristics, this study provides important new evidence on many controversial questions in the economics of unions. It also generates evidence from the service sector, which has grown in importance and where evidence has been thin.

We propose a nonparametric test for the exclusion and monotonicity assumptions invoked in instrumental variable (IV) designs based on the random assignment of cases to judges. We show its asymptotic validity and demonstrate its finite-sample performance in simulations. We apply our test in an empirical setting from the literature examining the effects of pretrial detention on defendant outcomes in New York. When the assumptions are not satisfied, we propose weaker versions of the usual exclusion and monotonicity restrictions under which the IV estimator still converges to a proper weighted average of treatment effects.

We propose a \"common-agency\" model for explaining inefficient contracting in the US healthcare system. Common-agency problems arise when multiple payers seek to motivate a provider to invest in improved care coordination. We highlight the possibility of \"sticking points,\" that is, Pareto-dominated equilibria in which payers coordinate around contracts which give weak incentives to the provider. Sticking points rationalize three hard-to-explain features of the US healthcare system: widespread fee-for-service arrangements; problematic care coordination; and the historical reliance on single-specialty practices to deliver care. The model also analyzes the effects of policies promoting more efficient contracting between payers and providers.