The Levy Institute Microsimulation Model (LIMM) is a tool used for policy simulations to estimate ex-ante the employment and income effects of sectoral investments. In Istenes (2023), a simple implementation of the LIMM for New York State initially had difficulty producing realistic conditional...

As technological advances accelerate and labour demands shift, the ability of workers to reallocate across occupations will be crucial for shaping labour market dynamics, inequality, and effective policy design. In this paper, we develop a tractable equilibrium model of the labour market that...

Using register data, we document that the average German labor market, defined by hires in combinations of 3-digit occupations, requirement levels, and commuting zones, is highly concentrated (HHI=0.257). By EU antitrust thresholds, 56 percent of these labor markets feature moderate or high...

This study estimates and decomposes recruitment elasticity, a key measure of employer market power, across job-matching stages using data from Japan's largest job-matching intermediary. On average, recruitment elasticity is negative but not statistically significantly different from zero....

Labour turnover is a crucial element of contemporary economic life. It can improve productivity if more productive workers replace less productive ones. However, in the short run, it generates sizeable labour adjustment costs (LACs), including productivity losses. This paper sheds new light on...

In 2024, Austria's economic output shrank for the second year in a row (–1.2 percent). Companies suffered from weak demand at home and abroad, high energy prices and comparatively high unit labour costs. Private consumption declined despite rising real incomes. Manufacturing remained in...

What motivates individuals to become entrepreneurs and create jobs? We develop and estimate a dynamic structural microeconometric model that accounts for both employer and non-employer entrepreneurs. Individuals in each period choose to work as an employee, as one of the two entrepreneur types,...

This chapter reviews the theory of monopsonistic wage setting, its empirical implications, and some puzzles the framework has struggled to explain. We begin by examining the fundamentals of monopson- istic wage determination. The core of the theory is a mapping from the distribution of worker...

A growing body of research in economics shows that workers care about more than just pay, often seeking social status, career mobility, or meaningful work. This chapter introduces the work orientations framework-a concept from psychology - as a unifying lens for understanding these motivations....

Over the last thirty years, there have been significant changes in several empirical measures of local labor market monopsony power. A monopsonist has a profit incentive to offer lower wages to local workers. High skilled mobile workers can avoid these lower wages by moving to other more...

Labor economists increasingly work in empirical contexts with large numbers of unit-specific parameters. These settings include a growing number of value-added studies measuring causal effects of individual units like firms, managers, neighborhoods, teachers, schools, doctors, hospitals, police...

Recent research documents mounting evidence for sizable and persistent biases in individual labor market expectations. This paper incorporates subjective expectations into a general equilibrium labor market model and analytically studies the implications of biased expectations for wage...

Naidu and Yuchtman (2013) find that labor demand shocks in 19th-century Britain had an impact on master and servant prosecutions, as breaking an employee contract was a criminal offense until 1875. We first reproduce all regression tables in Naidu and Yuchtman (2013) and then test for robustness...

We develop a model in which large risk-neutral firms and individual risk-averse consumers compete to employ heterogeneous workers by posting compensation menus. Production takes time, and we analyze how screening motives interact with the desire to smooth consumption. There is a unique symmetric...

We develop a model in which large risk-neutral firms and individual risk-averse consumers compete to employ heterogeneous workers by posting compensation menus. Production takes time, and we analyze how screening motives interact with the desire to smooth consumption. There is a unique symmetric...

The neoclassical growth model assumes fixed labor supply and competitive labor markets. Is it harmless to ignore monopsonistic power in the neoclassical growth model? The paper argues that it is not, especially if a growth model needs to be consistent with the long-run dynamics of the labor...

We develop a tractable equilibrium model of the labour market, featuring heterogeneous labour supply elasticities across occupations that can be estimated in a baseline period using observed worker flows. We use this model to study the heterogeneous impact of subsequent demand shifts on wages...

This paper develops the nonparametric identification of models with production complementarities, worker-firm specific disutility of labour and search frictions. Mobility in the model is subject to preference shocks, and we assume that firms can write wage contracts. We develop a constructive...

Labor economics often assumes that wages w are equal to the marginal revenue product of labor MRP L. However, recent literature has shown that firms' market power allows them to pay wages substantially below marginal productivity. The markdown (MRP L - w)/w is our preferred measure of firms'...

This chapter traces the evolution of the study of gender in the labor market, focusing on how academic thinking on this topic has evolved alongside real world developments in gender inequality from the 1980s to the present. We present a simple model of female labor supply to illustrate how...

We model monopsony on the labor market using a separable matching model a la Choo and Siow (2006). We propose a simple method that estimates 1) the multidimensional determinants of productivity and non-wage preferences separately and 2) the variance of unobserved heterogeneity on both sides of...

Minimum wages decrease employment in competitive markets, but can increase it in monopsonistic markets so long as they do not exceed the marginal product of labour. We find evidence of non-monotonicity both by market structure and minimum wage level. Minimum wage hikes initially increase hours...