This dissertation contains three empirical studies in economic history and labor economics. The first chapter discusses two sources of historical data on work stoppages in the United States: the Third Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor (1888) and the Tenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor (1896). It describes a new transcription of the strike tables, which includes all rows for the first time, and provides instructions for users. Four replication exercises illustrate the advantages of the new file. The second chapter uses the the data from the Third Report to test whether labor unions help workers win strikes. Unorganized workers were still responsible for two fifths of all strike activity in the United States in the early 1880s, which allows me to identify the effect of unions on strike outcomes. Because organized workers might attempt riskier confrontations than the unorganized, I construct an instrument for the involvement of a union in a strike from the location of the assemblies of the Knights of Labor. I estimate that unions raised strikers' success rate by 32 percentage points from a baseline of 38 percent; moreover, they decreased the incidence of job loss by 22 percentage points from a baseline of 56 percent. Although unions increased the probability that employers acceded to strikers' demands, I find no evidence of an impact on the size of those concessions. The third chapter evaluates how an increase in the supply of skilled labor affects task assignment within and between occupations. Guided by a simple theoretical framework, Francis Kramarz, Alexis Maitre and I exploit detailed information about individual workers' tasks from multiple surveys to examine the impact of a twofold rise in the share of university graduates in the French workforce between 1991 and 2013. Our identification strategy uses variation in the change in the graduate share across local labor markets. We find that higher average educational attainment is associated with more routine, fewer cognitive and fewer social tasks within occupations and with fewer routine, more cognitive and more social tasks across occupations.

Creator

• Bittarello, Luca

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-bnp1-ta32

Subject

• Economic history
• Economics

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:14721
• etdadmin_upload_669611

Date created

• 2019-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright