Unions and Relative Real Wages
利用新数据和享乐价格法，估计工会与非工会工人的工资差异，发现差异约为10-15%，与Lewis和Weiss的估计一致，并检验了种族、性别、职业和地区的差异模式。
Much attention has been focused recently on the effects of unions on economic stability, resource allocation and income distribution. Almost always, the discussion begins with the effects of unions on labor earnings or wages.' Yet substantial agreement on the magnitude of the effect of unions on wages or earnings hardly seems close at hand. Among other studies on this subject, it is noted that the classic study by H. Gregg Lewis estimates a union/nonunion wage differential of about 10-15 percent in 1957-58; Leonard Weiss estimates about the same differential as Lewis; and Victor Fuchs, Frank Stafford, Adrian Throop, and Orley Ashenfelter and George Johnson estimate a much larger differential. The question such studies should attempt to answer is whether and how much union membership increases wages facing individuals, holding constant other things such as education, race, sex, age, and occupation. The studies mentioned above are not entirely appropriate to answer this question. For example, some suffer from a potentially severe aggregation bias in examining average wages or earnings and the percentage of the labor force unionized and/or fail to disaggregate by race and sex. Those that attempt to examine opportunities facing individuals are forced to employ data on earnings rather than wages and thereby build (at least partially) voluntary labor supply and demand decisions into their estimates. The purpose of this paper is to present new evidence on the relative wages of union and nonunion workers by applying recent advances in the hedonic method of price measurement to a new and rich source of data on individual workers. In Section I, an equation relating wages to personal characteristics is developed which focuses on union membership and its interaction with race, sex, occupation, and geographical area. The equation extends work in this area by Robert Hall. In Section II, a brief discussion of the data is presented together with empirical estimates of the union/nonunion wage differential. Formal tests are made of some interesting hypotheses about the pattern of the relative wages of union and nonunion workers by race, sex, occupation, and geographical area. The results are in much closer accord with the estimates of Lewis and Weiss than those of Fuchs, Stafford, and Throop. In Section III, some concluding remarks are offered, including some observations on the limitations of this type of study.