Economists increasingly refer to monopsony power to reconcile the absence of negativeemployment effects of minimum wages with theory. However, systematic evidence for themonopsony argument is scarce. In this paper, I perform a comprehensive test of monop-sony theory by using labor market...

In this paper, I study the wage a firm sets to attract high abilityworkers (hipo's) in situationsof unemployment. I show that the higher unemployment, the larger afirm's incentives to sorthigh and low ability workers. Moreover, workers will signal their(high) ability in situationsof (high)...

Workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage. In particular, low-paid workers underestimate wages elsewhere. We document this anchoring bias by eliciting workers' beliefs in a representative survey in Germany and comparing them to measures of actual outside...

Most "wage curve" studies treat local labour markets as independent "islands" in the national economy. However, when a local labour market is in close proximity of other labour markets, a local shock that increases unemployment may not lead to lower pay rates if employers fear outward migration...

On the 1st of January 2016 the Irish National Minimum Wage increased from €8.65 to €9.15 per hour, an increase of approximately six percent. We use a difference-in-differences estimator to evaluate whether the change in the minimum wage affected the hours worked and likelihood of job loss of...

The implications of a binding minimum wage law on employment have been the subject of a lively and ongoing debate. Estimation of employment effects may be hindered by the non-random manner in which minimum wage laws are created. To overcome this, we explore the employment implications of the...