Profiles of union organizers from manufacturing and service unions

This study uses data on 229 organizers from eight unions to assess differences in characteristics of organizers employed by manufacturing and service unions. The results suggest that a new breed of organizer is entering the labor movement through service unions-organizers who are younger, more highly educated, more socially mobile, and have less experience in the union movement than organizers from manufacturing unions. This article is based on data collected for a dissertation written at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. I gratefully acknowledge the support of committee members David Lewin, James Kuhn, Casey Ichniowski, and Seymour Spilerman of Columbia and Charles A. O’Reilly III of the University of California at Berkeley. I thank John Delaney for his many helpful insights and suggestions during the course of my research and Shannon Ratcliff and Rick Fuentes for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. This research was financially supported by the Industrial Relations Research Center and the Management Institute at Columbia University and the Department of Management at Texas A&M University.     

Improvement of Highway Safety I: Identification of Causal Factors Through Fault-Tree Modeling1

As the first article of a two-part series, the purpose of this paper is to examine the functional factors that contribute to automobile accident occurrence and to model the causation structure in the form of a fault-tree. The fault-tree model provides an intuitive framework for qualitatively decomposing possible pathways to accident occurrence. Fault-tree analysis also provides a statistical representation of how interacting driver, vehicle, and environmental factors contribute to the likelihood of automobile accident occurrence. The application of this model facilitates pinpointing those factors that most contribute to accident causation and subsequently enables the identification and comparison of potential crash avoidance technologies.     

Associations among altruism, burnout dimensions, and organizational citizenship behaviour

Most studies of burnout have focused on lack of resources, prevalence of burnout, and negative outcomes. In contrast, this study examined the relationships among altruism, burnout and a positive outcome, namely, the engagement in organizational citizenship behaviour. Web questionnaires were distributed to employees in three professional organizations. The results from the 178 respondents indicated that altruism is related to organizational citizenship behaviour. Of the three dimensions of burnout, only reduced personal accomplishment was (negatively) associated with engagement in organizational citizenship behaviours. Implications of the results are discussed and directions for future research are offered.     

The Prison Industry: Carceral Expansion and Employment in U.S. Counties, 1969–1994*

Objectives. Despite the interest that social scientists have displayed in the rising rate of incarceration, little attention has been devoted to understanding its consequences for local areas. This is an important omission because prison construction has become a component of state and local economic development schemes. Indeed, there is a widespread belief that prison construction provides significant economic benefits to local areas. Methods. We analyze data on all existing and new prisons in the United States since 1960 and examine the impact of these prisons on the pace of growth (as measured by public, private, and total employment growth) in U.S. counties from 1969 to 1994. To our knowledge, our study is the first comprehensive and longitudinal assessment of the impact of prison construction on local areas. Results. We find no evidence that prison expansion has stimulated economic growth. In fact, we provide evidence that prison construction has impeded economic growth in rural counties that have been growing at a slow pace. Conclusion. Despite sharp ideological and intellectual differences, the critics and the advocates of the prison construction boom share the assumption that prisons can contribute to local growth, especially in hard‐pressed local areas. This belief flies in the face of mounting evidence that state and local initiatives rarely have a significant impact on growth; this belief is also contradicted by our analyses.     

Testing the Martingale Difference Hypothesis

In this paper we consider testing that an economic time series follows a martingale difference process. The martingale difference hypothesis has typically been tested using information contained in the second moments of a process, that is, using test statistics based on the sample autocovariances or periodograms. Tests based on these statistics are inconsistent since they cannot detect nonlinear alternatives. In this paper we consider tests that detect linear and nonlinear alternatives. Given that the asymptotic distributions of the considered tests statistics depend on the data generating process, we propose to implement the tests using a modified wild bootstrap procedure. The paper theoretically justifies the proposed tests and examines their finite sample behavior by means of Monte Carlo experiments.