This paper quantifies the extent to which the U.S. manufacturing labor market is characterized by employer market power and how such market power has changed over time. We find that the vast majority of U.S. manufacturing plants operate in a monopsonistic environment and, at least since the...

This paper analyzes a sorting model of labor contracts when workers have private information about their own productivities, and firms can test (monitor) workers. We show that sorting considerations alone generate steep wage-tenure profiles, high turnover rates of newly hired workers, and...

We subject our dual labor market model to a goodness of test fit and compare the results with those obtained using a single equation model with a complex error structure. The dual labor market does an excellent job of predicting the wage distribution except for failing to explain bunching at...

Efficiency wage models of the effort elicitation type have important implications for labor market dynamics. These models have a wide array of discontinuous sunspot equilibria driven by extraneous variables, in addition to well-behaved equilibria characterized by continuous, slowly adjusting...

I consider three views of the labor market. In the first, wages are flexible and employment follows the principle of bilateral efficiency. Workers never lose their jobs because of sticky wages. In the second view, wages are sticky and inefficient layoffs do occur. In the third, wages are also...

I revisit the General Theory's discussion of the role of wages in employment determination through the lens of the New Keynesian model. The analysis points to the key role played by the monetary policy rule in shaping the link between wages and employment, and in determining the welfare impact...

This paper exposits the modern theory of equalizing differences,viewed as optimal assignments of workers to jobs. The basic ideas are first illustrated in a simple model with binary choices of work attributes.Multinominal choices are briefly considered after that. Empirical implications are...

This paper describes EUROLAB, a labour supply-demand microsimulation model that relies on EUROMOD, the static microsimulation model for the European Union countries. EUROLAB is built on a multidimensional discrete choice model of labour supply and accounts for involuntary unemployment. The model...

Does identity influence economic behavior in the labor market? I investigate this question in rural India, focusing on the effect of caste identity on job-specific labor supply. In a field experiment, laborers choose whether to take up various job offers, which differ in associations with...

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...

We set up a model with on-the-job search in which firms infrequently post vacancies for which workers occasionally apply. The model nests the standard job ladder and stock-flow models as special cases, while remaining analytically tractable and easy to estimate from standard panel data sets. The...

The public sector hires disproportionately more educated workers. To rationalize this finding, we propose a model with a perfectly competitive private sector, and non-Walrasian public sector. Our economy also features heterogeneity across individuals and jobs, and a simple sorting mechanism that...

Der Nobelpreis für Wirtschaftswissenschaften geht 2021 an David Card für seine empirischen Beiträge zur Arbeitsökonomik sowie an Joshua Angrist und Guido Imbens für ihre methodischen Beiträge zur Analyse kausaler Zusammenhänge. Die Analyse kausaler Zusammenhänge in der empirischen...

Adam Smith alleged that secret employer collusion to reduce labor earnings is common. This paper examines an important case of such behavior: no-poach agreements through which technology companies agreed not to compete for each other’s workers. Exploiting the plausibly exogenous timing of a US...

We study whether there are improvements in worker-firm matching when employers and applicants can credibly signal their interest in a match. Using a detailed résumé dataset of more than 400 applicants from one university over five years, we analyze a matching process in which firms fill some...

Little is known yet about the impact of the COVID crisis on household income and jobs in absence of real time information on these variables. A recent literature strand has sought to overcome data limitations to assess the distributional impact of policy measures taken in the EU using various...

This study examines the labor-market returns of skill signals. We identify the labor-market effect of grade point averages (GPA) by leveraging a nationwide change in the scaling of grades in Danish universities. Results show that a reform-induced increase in GPA that is unrelated to ability...

In this paper, we explore the dynamics of working hours and wages in a model economy where a firm and its workforce are linked to each other by an implicit contract. Specifically, we develop a deterministic and a stochastic framework in which the firm sets its level of labour utilization by...

This study investigates where and when last-in-first-out permanent layoff policies seem to go hand in hand with compensation policies under which the net value of senior workers appears to be less than that of their junior peers. The investigation relies upon both the approximately 260 usable...

This article presents a theory of labor discrimination based on the behavior of economic agents that maximize utility and profits. The article makes use of a monopsony that hires workers that have the same labor productivity, to focus on perfect discrimination; discrimination by quantities of...

In a market economy, human work is offered and sought in the labor market. It is valued because of the level of demand for it and the rarity of the required qualifications. At the same time, because of the different contexts and conditions, there are many labor markets that are defined as the...

To measure labor market power in the US economy, we develop a tractable quantitative, general equilibrium, oligopsony model of the labor market. We estimate key model parameters by matching the firm-level relationship between labor market share and employment size and wage responses to state...

The paper proposed setting up of a National Labor Exchange along the lines of National Stock Exchange, Bombay Stock Exchange and Commodity Exchanges Worldwide in order to promote efficiency in the labor market, full employment and generating wealth and positive contributions to GDP. The paper...

This paper investigates the role of outside options in the executive labor market on earnings management decisions. To proxy for executives’ outside options, we use the number of times other firms cite the executive’s firm as a compensation peer. We find that executives with more citations...

We study positive and normative aspects of steady-state equilibrium in a market where firms of endogenous size experience idiosyncratic shocks and undergo a costly search process to hire their workers. The stylized model we propose highlights interactions between job-security provisions and...

This paper show analytically that introducing diminishing returns to labor at the firm level into the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model, followed by recalibration, does not change aggregate dynamics of unemployment and vacancies. This invariance result holds for several standard calibration...

Firms' inability to monitor their employees' search effort forces a tradeoff between risk-bearing and incentive considerations when designing employment-related insurance. Since the provision of insurance against firm-specific shocks adversely affects workers' incentives to find better jobs, the...

This paper examines how collective bargaining through unions and workplace co-determination 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...

Immigration is not evenly balanced across groups of workers that have the same education but differ in their work experience, and the nature of the supply imbalance changes over time. This paper develops a new approach for estimating the labor market impact of immigration by exploiting this...

We provide a unified discussion of the relations among flows of workers, changes in employment and changes in the number of jobs at the level of the firm. Using the only available set of data (a nationally representative sample of Dutch firms in 1988 and 1990) we discover that: 1) Nearly half of...

We attempt to explain employment practices in internal labor markets using models that combine job assignment, on-the-job human-capital acquisition, and learning. We show that a framework that integrates these familiar ideas captures a number of recent empirical findings concerning wage and...

This paper examines the macroeconomic properties of imperfectly competitive economies. The focus is on the coordination failures that might arise in these economies, a study of alternative policies and the comparative static properties of these models. This paper differs from others in this area...

Over the last 30 years, researchers have disputed the mixed evidence of the effect of the minimum wage on teenage employment in the United States. Whenever the minimum wage has positive or no effects on employment, they appeal to monopsony models to explain their results. However, very few of...

To explain the high and persistent unemployment rate in the U.S. during and after the Great Recession, this effort develops and estimates a DSGE model with search and matching frictions and shocks to unemployment benefits and matching efficiency. It finds that the unemployment benefits play an...

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 consider a model of monopolistic competition with several heterogeneous sectors and endogenous labor supply. For low (high) values of the labor supply elasticity, we show that there is always a unique equilibrium. For medium values of the labor supply elasticity, the set of equilibria (if...

H. Gregg Lewis did fundamental research outlining the economic effects of trade unions and considering how to measure them carefully. He also laid out the theory of the supply and demand for labor in careful detail that has underlain economists' thinking about these outcomes. Aside from...

The path breaking work of Card and Krueger (1993), showing higher minimum wage can increase employment turned the age-old conventional wisdom on its head. This paper demonstrates that this apparently paradoxical result is perfectly plausible in a competitive general equilibrium production...

This paper examines the manner in which owner-occupiers housing costs are incorporated in the official inflation index. In particular, the focus is on the net acquisitions and the payments approach, which are currently used by the Central Statistics Office (CSO). The paper provides a detailed...