This paper brings together the modern literatures on monopsony power and labor unions by empirically examining the effects of unionization on the dynamics of worker earnings across differently concentrated markets. Exploiting tax reforms to union due deductions as exogenous shocks to...

The US experienced two dramatic changes in the structure of education in a fifty year period. The first was a large expansion of educational attainment; the second, an increase in test score gaps between college bound and non-college bound students. We study the impact of these two trends on the...

Theories of market failures and targeting motivate the promotion of entrepreneurship training programs and generate testable predictions regarding heterogeneous treatment effects from such programs. Using a large randomized evaluation in the United States, we find no strong or lasting effects on...

What happens when employers would like to screen their employees but only observe a subset of output? We specify a model in which heterogeneous employees respond by producing more of the observed output at the expense of the unobserved output. Though this substitution distorts output in the...

Unemployment in the United Kingdom has fallen from high European-style levels to US levels. I argue that the key reasons are the reform of monetary policy, in 1993 with the adoption of inflation targeting and in 1997 with the establishment of the independent Monetary Policy Committee, and second...

This paper analyses the impact of immigration on the welfare of the native population in an economy that consists of skilled and unskilled workers. Due to unionisation, the wage rate in the market for unskilled labour is above the competitive level. For a given skill endowment of the native...

The paper introduces a model of enterprise formation in a unionized economy with labor protection and wage bargaining. Enterprise formation is subject to future market risk and is shaped by labor market institutions in the post-entry stage. The predictions of the model are tested in...

This paper shows that labor market institutions are important for the formation of new enterprises. The effects of labor market institutions on entrepreneurship, wage determination, and firm size are analysed analytically and illustrated numerically. The main result is that an increase in union...

The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy’s best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into managerial and non-managerial positions in the public and private sector, using a model of a...

Apprenticeship systems are essentially based on the voluntary participation of firms that provide (and usually also finance) training positions, often incurring considerable net training costs. One potential, yet under-researched explanation for this behavior is that firms act in accordance with...