This paper uses a quasi-experimental framework provided by recent changes in Russian corporate law to study the effect of investor protection on the value of shares. The legal change analyzed involves the empowerment of preferred (non-voting) shareholders to veto unfavorable changes in their...

When employers face a trade-off between growing large and paying low wages that is, when they have monopsony power some productive employers will decide to acquire fewer customers, forgo sales, and remain small. These decisions have adverse consequences for aggregate labor productivity. Using...

This paper examines how collective bargaining through unions and workplace codetermination through works councils shape labour market imperfections and how labour market imperfections matter for employer wage premia. Based on representative German plant data for the years 1999-2016, we document...

We study the relationship between offshoring and the prevalence and intensity of labor market imperfections at the firm level in Belgium and the Netherlands. Wage-markup pricing stemming from workers' monopoly power is more prevalent than wage-markdown pricing originating from firms' monopsony...

We develop a procedure for adjudicating between models of firm wage-setting conduct. Using data on workers' choice sets and decisions over real jobs from a U.S. job search platform, we first estimate workers' rankings over firms' non-wage amenities. We document three key findings: 1) On average,...

Using data on the near-universe of online US job vacancies collected by Burning Glass Technologies in 2016, we calculate labor market concentration using the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) for each commuting zone by 6-digit SOC occupation. The average market has an HHI of 3,953, or the...

Adam Smith alleged that employers sometimes secretly collude to reduce labor earnings. This paper examines an important case of such behavior: illegal no-poaching agreements through which information-technology companies agreed not to compete for each other's workers. Exploiting the plausibly...

We evaluate the impact of the Washington State Attorney General's enforcement campaign against employee no-poaching clauses in franchising contracts, which unfolded from 2018 through early 2020. Implementing a staggered difference-in-differences research design using Burning Glass Technologies...

We show theoretically that when larger firms pay higher wages and are more likely to becaught defaulting on labour taxes, then large high-wage firms will be in the formal sector andsmall low-wage firms will be in the informal sector...

We analyze optimal taxation in an economy with monopsonistic labor markets. Theindividuals, whose only decisions are whether to work, or not, have heterogeneousproductivities and opportunity costs of work. Given its preferences for redistribution, thegovernment, which does not observe the...