This paper models three stages of the union organizing drive, using a new dataset covering more than 22,000 drives that took place between 1999 and 2004. The correlated sequential model tracks drives through all of their potential stages: holding an election, winning an election, and reaching first contracts. Only one-seventh of organizing drives that filed an election petition with the NLRB managed to reach a first contract within a year of certification. The model, which controls for the endogeneity of unfair labor practice (ULP) charges, finds that a ULP charge was associated with a 30% smaller cumulative chance of reaching such a contract. ULP charges had less effect on the votes cast than on the decision to hold an election and the ability to reach a first contract. A sequential model such as this one could be extended to test between some competing theories about the determinants of union organizing.

In this article, we attempt to resolve the tension between two sets ofconflicting hypothesizes about the role of specialization in workers’careers. Some scholars argue that specialization is a net benefit thatallows workers to get ahead, while others argue that broad experienceacross several domains is the only way to be truly exceptional. We useremarkably rich longitudinal data on the careers of Indian AdministrativeService officers, members of the Republic of India’s elite bureaucraticservice, to test both these hypotheses. We find that specializationbenefits officers throughout their career. However, multiple theoreticalaccounts are consistent with this effect. One account suggests thatspecialization benefits workers because it gives them skills that make themmore productive, while another suggests that specialization is a signal ofability and promise. Our analysis indicates that both accounts are valid,but apply at different stages of officers’ careers. The skills acquiredthrough specialization matter more in the later career; in the earlycareer, specialization is mainly a signal.

This paper models three stages of the union organizing drive, using a newdataset covering more than 22,000 drives that took place between 1999 and2004. The correlated sequential model tracks drives through all of theirpotential stages: holding an election, winning an election, and reachingfirst contracts. Only one-seventh of organizing drives that filed anelection petition with the NLRB managed to reach a first contract within ayear of certification. The model, which controls for the endogeneity ofunfair labor practice (ULP) charges, finds that a ULP charge was associatedwith a 30% smaller cumulative chance of reaching such a contract. ULPcharges had less effect on the votes cast than on the decision to hold anelection and the ability to reach a first contract. A sequential model suchas this one could be extended to test between some competing theories aboutthe determinants of union organizing.

Women engage in less commercial patenting and invention than do men, which may affect what is invented. Using text analysis of all U.S. biomedical patents filed from 1976 through 2010, we found that patents with all-female inventor teams are 35% more likely than all-male teams to focus on women’s health. This effect holds over decades and across research areas. We also found that female researchers are more likely to discover female-focused ideas. These findings suggest that the inventor gender gap is partially responsible for thousands of missing female-focused inventions since 1976. More generally, our findings suggest that who benefits from innovation depends on who gets to invent.

Prior work has considered the properties of individual jobs that make them more or less likely to survive in organizations. Yet little research examines how a job's position within a larger job structure affects its life chances and thus the evolution of the larger job structure over time. In this article, we explore the impact of technical interdependence on the dynamics of job structures. We argue that jobs that are more enmeshed in a job structure through these interdependencies are more likely to survive. We test our theory on a quarter-century of personnel and job-description data for the non-academic staff of one of Americas largest public universities. Our results provide support for our key hypotheses: jobs that are more enmeshed in clusters of technical interdependence are less likely to die. At the same time, being part of such a cluster means that a job is more vulnerable if its neighbors disappear. And the "protection" of technical interdependence is contingent: it does not hold in the face of strategic change or other organizational restructurings. We offer implications of our analyses for research in organizational performance, careers, and labor markets.