Empirical essays on employment and labor-management relations

This dissertation consists of three essays concerned with the broadly-defined topics of employment and labor-management relations in the United States.; The fast two chapters examine how prejudices and social nouns regarding race and gender relations in the workplace affect labor market decisions of employers and employees. These chapters analyze human resource data from a large U.S. service-sector employer with over 700 workplaces and over 100,000 employees.; Chapter one examines whether managers are more likely to hire employees who share their own race, ethnicity or gender. I estimate models with workplace fixed effects to identify the effects of manager demographics on workforce demographics, controlling for unobserved differences across workplaces. I find that white, Hispanic, and Asian managers hire significantly more whites and fewer blacks than do black managers. However, there appears to be little discrimination among whites, Asians and Hispanics. There are also no measurable gender-based hiring biases.; Chapter two examines the effects of demographic differences between managers and employees on quits and dismissals. Estimates from a competing risks Cox proportional hazard model suggest that: (1) race and gender dissimilarity, but not age dissimilarity, predict higher quit rates; (2) dismissal rates are lower when the manager-subordinate relationship conflicts with social roles for race and age; (3) the loss of a hiring manager raises quit rates, but not dismissal rates; and (4) the effect of manager turnover on quit rates does not depend on whether or not the hiring manager was similar to the employee.; Chapter three of the dissertation examines the effect of the rise in import competition on unionization in the U.S. manufacturing industries over the past quarter century. I analyze a combination of individual-level data from the Current Population Survey and industry-level data on trade and production for a sample of 67 three-digit manufacturing industries for the period from 1977–1994. Estimates from models with industry fixed effects suggest that increases in import penetration explain about nine percent of the total decline in union density between 1977 and 1994. Import competition also put downward pressure on the union wage premium, particularly during the latter half of this period.