I've been teaching undergraduate labor economics for some 20 years. The majority of my students are majoring in Labor and Industrial Relations and had very little background in economics.
The Ehrenberg and Smith text is one of better orthodox texts, but, I wouldn't suggest using it with students who have little or no economics background. The text is heavy on the modeling, and my students have a great deal of difficulty understand it. If you do use that text, Michael Reich, at Berkeley, has a useful set of class notes based on the book and his critic of it. A good orthodox alternative is Hyclak, Johnes, Thornton, Fundamentals of Labor Economics. It does all the technical stuff; it is strong on the empirical literature (better than any other text); and it has in depth discussions of the "liberal" topics like dynamic monopsony, imperfect information, the minimum wage debate, efficiency wage models, job search models, principle agent problems, etc. My students like the McConnell, Brue, Macpherson text best. They claim it is the easiest to read and understand. I agree: this text does explain the orthodox view with words, and lists of causal factors (which students like to memorize), better than Ehrenberg and Smith. But its explanation of the models is weaker and the book's political view is most frustrating; it presents the subject as if there is only one truth (like all other McConnell and Brue texts). So I keep returning to Kaufman and Hotchkiss. Reynolds' "classic" text is also still available: Labor Economics and Labor Relations (11th Edition) by Lloyd G. Reynolds, Stanley H. Masters, Colletta H. Moser. This text offers the best coverage of institutional labor economics (for a textbook). Because my students have whole classes in collective bargaining, labor relations law, labor history, etc., this book is not good for me. But, with a different group of students, I'd use it. Of course, the trade off is that it will not be as strong on the orthodox material. Another book to consider is Blau, Ferber & Winkler, The Economics of Women, Men, and Work. This book has a good amount of rigor, lots of data and, most important, it has lots of topics that work well for discussions. The theory chapters all focus on labor supply topics (nothing on demand), so it doesn't cover labor economics, per se. But if you want to cover gender issues in some depth, this is a useful book. On the matter of the Cambridge controversies; That topic is covered in Howard M. Wachtel, Labor and the Economy. Unfortunately the text is out of print, but a few used copies are available at Amazon.com. One thing I've been doing in recent years is to assign different chapters from different textbooks. These could be made available in the library, or, as I do, scanned copies are posted in a course management system. (My administrators tell me that I can post as many as three chapters from any one book so long as they are password protected.) To may mind the orthodox view of the labor market is this (as taken from Ehrenberg and Smith): <quote> From the standard model arises the law of one price, which states that, in equilibrium, all firms in the market for workers of the same skill will pay the same wage rate, as long as conditions of employment are the same. Two points must be made concerning the law of one price. First, a major implication of this law is that, with the exception of compensating differentials for employment conditions of one sort or another, wages will be determined by workers’ human capital characteristics. All firms would have to pay the market wage for each skill group regardless of their level of profitability, their industry, or their size. Under this model, then, employer characteristics do not influence wages except when either favorable or unfavorable employment conditions give rise to compensating wage differentials. Second, worker mobility is what generates the one price for labor of a given skill. If workers of equal skill were paid different wages by employers with comparable working conditions, the standard, competitive model asserts that the lower-paid ones would quit their job and seek employment with higher-paying firms. Wages in the lower-paying firms thereby would be driven up, while wages in the higher-paying firms would be driven down, by worker mobility. The standard model, with its horizontal labor supply curve facing each firm, implicitly assumes that mobility is costless and that the quit rate among workers is infinitely elastic with respect to wages (that is, if a firm were to cut its wages below those paid elsewhere, all its workers would quit). <end-quote> So, a chapter on (1) competitive wage determination, (2) human capital, (3) compensating differentials, and (4) job search and mobility covers the core of the mainstream stuff. The rest of the class is why this ain't so from any number of perspectives. A useful collection of readings for the Institutialist perspective is Michael J. Piore, Unemployment and Inflation: Institutionalist and Structuralist Views. The first part of this collection has some of the classic Institutionalist papers, like Art Ross on orbits of coercive comparisons, Robert Livernash on job clusters, John Donlop on wage contours, and Lester Thurow's job competition model which is used in the Kaufman and Hotchkiss book. Some of the books I mentioned above follow: http://www.cengage.com/cengage/instructor.do?product_isbn=9780395923627 http://catalogs.mhhe.com/mhhe/viewProductDetails.do?isbn=0073375950 http://www.amazon.com/Labor-Economics-Relations-11th/dp/0132633108/ http://www.amazon.com/Labor-Economics-Relations-11th/dp/0132633108/ http://www.amazon.com/Labor-Economy-Howard-M-Wachtel/dp/0030965446/ Michael Nuwer Marshall Feldman wrote: _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
