The Distribution of Strike Size:Empirical Evidence from Europe and North America in the 19th and 20th Centuries

We study the distribution of strike size, which we measure as lost person days, for a long period in several countries of Europe and America. When we consider the full samples, the mixtures of two or three lognormals arise as very convenient models. When restricting to the upper tails, the Pareto power law becomes almost indistinguishable of the truncated lognormal.