Tag: labor-markets
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How Trade Unions Changed Labor Markets
Examine trade unions as economic institutions — why workers organize given employer monopsony and information asymmetry, the economic effects of unionization on wages and productivity, how union density peaked and declined, and what union history reveals about when workers successfully bargain versus when union power dissipates.
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The History of Minimum Wage Laws
Minimum wage laws have existed for over 130 years. The economic arguments for and against them have changed far less than the evidence warrants. A history of policy, ideology, and labor market reality.
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The Economics of the Black Death
The Black Death killed between 30 and 50 percent of Europe's population in five years, and the resulting labor scarcity triggered a wage explosion, the collapse of serfdom, and a divergence between western and eastern European institutions that shaped the next five centuries. This is the economic history of how demographic catastrophe became economic revolution.