Language, Laws, and Labor Contracts in the 20th Century

这项研究将有助于我们理解公司和工人是如何分配权力的，以及如何组织这一权力以提高生产率和减少冲突。这些问题可以追溯到罗纳德·科斯和赫伯特·西蒙，以及劳动经济学的制度主义学派。在经济学之外，我们的结果将涉及劳动和法律历史、社会学和美国政治发展方面的大量文献，这些文献本身关注法律在劳动合同中的作用。我们新集成的劳动法和劳动合同数据集将对对计算语言学、合同、法律和20世纪美国工会历史感兴趣的定性和定量研究人员都有价值。与成功的公司-工人关系相关的生产率提高不仅取决于书面协议的条款，还取决于解释、执行和制定此类协议的背景法律机构。这项研究的目的是通过构建和分析关于集体谈判协议的新数据集来探索法律和合同的互补作用。在将合同数据与法律和公司的数据合并后，我们使用自然语言处理工具来提取法规、法院案件和合同的文本特征，这些文本特征对经济结果至关重要。然后，我们将讨论两个核心问题。首先，法律是否影响书面合同？第二，合同会影响经济表现吗？

This resaerch will contribute to our understanding of how firms and workers allocate authority, and how this can be organized to increase productivity and reduce conflict. These questions go back to Ronald Coase and Herbert Simon, as well as the institutionalist school of labor economics. Outside of economics, our results will relate to the large literature in labor and legal history, sociology, and American political development that has concerned itself with the role of the law in the labor contract. Our new integrated data set of labor laws and labor contracts will be of value to both qualitative and quantitative researchers interested in computational linguistics, contracts, law, and the history of U.S. labor unions in the 20th century. The productivity gains associated with successful firm-worker relationships rely not only on the terms of written agreements, but also on the background legal institutions that interpret, enforce, and elaborate such agreements. The purpose of this research is to explore the complementary roles of laws and contracts through the construction and analysis of a new data set on collective bargaining agreements. After merging the contract data with data on laws and firms, we use natural language processing tools to extract those textual features of statutes, court cases, and contracts that matter for economic outcomes. We then address two central questions. First, does the law affect written contracts? Second, do contracts affect economic performance?