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For over thirty years, one of the most overt forms of employer opposition to unionization has been anti-union campaigns conducted by union avoidance consultants. As a result, both union and employer associations have attempted to influence the provisions of the LMRDA that cover consultant activities. This article provides the first comprehensive historical analysis of the LMRDA's reporting and disclosure requirements covering employers and consultants. The first section examines consultant reporting policy from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, a period when unions filed relatively few complaints and the DOL initiated few investigations, but the consultant industry expanded significantly. Section two examines developments in the 1980s – the period of greatest congressional and judicial activity on consultant reporting since the 1950s. The final section looks at post-1980s events and examines why organized labor has persisted with its campaign to reform government policy on consultant reporting, despite its inability to make progress on the issue over the past four decades.

Since the late 1970s, US employers have increasingly drawn upon legal temporary labor under the H-2 visa to address their labor needs in low-waged sectors. Ever since, what Clark calls migrant labor activism and conflict in the courts has similarly erupted. However, as she argues in this chapter, making “adversarial legalism” the H-2 way of law has also been a story of comparative state formation. For, the litigation largely reflects the structure of labor migration created after the demise of government-run migration. In this regard, activists wrestle with the problems created by the new role of global labor intermediaries in the recruitment process, absolute employer control over hiring and firing, and the coercion produced in the shadow of a now minimally interventionist state. Drawing upon archival research, interviews with legal professionals, and the entire case law docket in this area, this chapter puts “adversarial legalism” under the H-2 visa in its historical and political context.

Over the past few decades, the Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) has become one of the most controversial and politicized divisions of the Department of Labor. Republic and Democratic Administrations have adopted starkly different practices concerning both the allocation of resources and the focus of regulatory activities at the division. These differences have been brought into sharp focus during the Bush II and Obama Administrations. Under the Bush Administration, funding for OLMS increased significantly, and the DOL revised union financial reporting requirements, imposing a more onerous burden on unions in the name of promoting transparency and accountability. Section 1 of this paper provides a summary and analysis of the most significant changes and innovations at the OLMS under the Obama Administration. Section 2 of the paper provides a detailed summary of the Bush era reforms and their fate under the Obama OLMS, and an analysis of the impact of these reforms in the area of increasing union transparency and accountability. It argues that the Bush reforms did little or nothing to achieve greater accountability and may instead have been motivated largely by a desire to impose a more onerous administrative burden on reporting unions.

With the rise of employer-promulgated mandatory employment arbitration, scholars have become concerned that these policies may reduce the economic viability of lower value employment claims. Of particular worry are claims made under the Fair Labor Standards Act since the FLSA does not include punitive damages. This study empirically tests the relationship between 368 Fortune 1000 companies’ employment arbitration policies and their wage and hour violations discovered during the Department of Labor inspections. Surprisingly, firms that used arbitration were found to have fewer violations and lower back wages for those violation compared to firms that did not use arbitration. This suggests that viewing arbitration merely as a cost-reduction tool may cast the practice too narrowly and instead it may be part of a larger conflict management system that seeks to address conflict at the earliest possible stage.

European Union (EU) central and eastern economies have gone through a process of structural change since 1989, when the post-communist transition started. This process was afterwards reinforced by the three EU enlargement waves that took place in 2004, 2007 and 2013. Though exhibiting low levels of aggregate productivity, this group of countries joined the EU with higher levels of human capital than the southern member states, an advantage that should have accelerated real convergence towards the EU15. However, evidence to date suggests that the convergence process came to a halt in 2007–2008 when massive capital inflows stopped, highlighting the fragilities of the growth strategies implemented so far. In these peripheral countries, structural change has been characterised by an expanding services sector alongside growing income inequality. The two strands of literature on these issues highlight that: (a) an expanding services sector may not be detrimental for growth, quite the opposite, depending on services composition and on the capacity of services sub-sectors to incorporate information and communication technologies (ICTs); and (b) inequality is negatively related to growth through the fiscal policy, socio-political instability, borrowing constraints to investment in education and endogenous fertility channels and positively through the savings channel and incentives. We analyse the nexus between structural change, inequality and growth in this group of countries highlighting income inequality as a potential mechanism that connects the other two variables. We provide a descriptive quantitative analysis of the profiles of structural change and income inequality in our sample and apply dynamic panel methods to investigate the existence of causality among services sector expansion, inequality and aggregate productivity considering a maximum period between 1980 and 2010.

This study analyzes the trends and patterns of strategic and innovative macroeconomic variables during recession or slowdown periods of 10 countries – Brazil, the United States, UK, Germany, France, China, Japan, India, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea for the period 1980–2018, which includes major recessions like the 1982 debt crisis, 1991 economic crisis, 1997 Asian Financial crisis, and 2008 Sub-prime crisis. This study devised two models – Logistic Regression and a Range-based Custom-Made Recession-cum-Economy State indicator, based on Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) model parameters. Results for the logistic regression model show that most of the marginal effect values are positive for variables linked with globalization indicating that increase in adverse impact on such variables increases the probability of recession. The custom-made statistical index provides an individual country-wise range, along with a global range for the weighted total of the variables, the weights for which are derived from the DOLS model, which has a 59.66% accuracy in estimating the condition of an economy. The recent worldwide experience indicates that probability of recessions has decreased, and slowdowns have increased over a period. This is evident from the Cumulative Trend of Economic State analysis that indicates that the recession probabilities of countries have decreased 1990 and that of slowdown have become highly volatile.

In this chapter, we study the asymptotic distributions for ordinary least squares (OLS), fully modified OLS (FMOLS), and dynamic OLS (DOLS) estimators in cointegrated regression models in panel data. We show that the OLS, FMOLS, and DOLS estimators are all asymptotically normally distributed. However, the asymptotic distribution of the OLS estimator is shown to have a non-zero mean. Monte Carlo results illustrate the sampling behavior of the proposed estimators and show that (1) the OLS estimator has a non-negligible bias in finite samples, (2) the FMOLS estimator does not improve over the OLS estimator in general, and (3) the DOLS outperforms both the OLS and FMOLS estimators.

We take a differential game approach to study the optimal choices of managerial firms concerning efforts in product a process innovation. We find the Nash equilibria under the open-loop and closed-loop information structure, and we compare the steady state allocations with the corresponding equilibria of markets populated by standard profit-maximising firms. We find that the managerial incentive leads firm to underinvest in product differentiation and to overinvest in process innovation, as compared to standard profit-maximising firms.

The presence of economic power of BRICS nations could be felt from the late of nineteenth and beginning of twentieth century and during this period inflow of FDI also began to go up and spread across all the sectors. FDI has not only looked to capture the huge market of these economies, but while doing so, it has helped these nations in their economics progress. Our main contribution in this paper consists of analyzing both short-run and long-run interactions between status of knowledge and FDI in the form of inflow of FDI and proportion of GDP used for R&D activities accounting for possible development of knowledge in BRICS nations. For this purpose, our work is based on a sample of these five nations during the period 2006–2017. By the help of panel data analysis and having performed all the necessary tests, we have introduced both dynamic OLS and fully modified OLS to get the efficient long-run impact of FDI on knowledge. Our empirical results support long-run and short-run causality running from FDI to knowledge in all BRICS nations. Our policy recommendation includes encouragement of more FDI in development of knowledge-related activities as well as increase in proportion of GDP spent on R&D in BRICS nations.

Why are some social movement organizations (SMOs) more likely to participate in coalitions than other SMOs? Drawing on findings from a comparative study of 47 organizations in the women's movement in Buenos Aires, Argentina that were active during the first 20 years of the contemporary democratic period (1983–2003), I examine factors related to participation in coalitions. Using qualitative comparative analysis, I identify three paths for coalition participation that account for 90% of the cases where SMOs participated in coalitions. I find that SMOs cooperated with other groups when they engaged in confrontational protest, when they had broad goals and involved non-members in their work, or when they were inclusive and had a formal division of labor that made it possible to send representatives, as is often necessary in formal coalition work. Along with ethnographic evidence, these findings suggest that scholars should pay more attention to the combinations of organizational factors that influence coalition participation, and the strategic motivations, structural features, and cultural aspects of movement organizations that facilitate cooperation between SMOs.