Anecdotal, empirical, and experimental evidence suggests that offering extrinsic rewards for certain activities can reduce people's willingness to engage in those activities voluntarily. We propose a simple rationale for this 'crowding out' phenomenon, using standard economic arguments. The...

Using linked employer-employee data, I compute firm-level measures of the labor supply elasticity facing each private non-farm firm in the US. I provide the first direct evidence of the positive relationship between a firm's labor supply elasticity and the earnings of its workers. I also...

This paper examines an economy with a large number of industries, each producing a different good. Technological change follows a Poisson process where firms improve their productivity through investment in R&D. The less there are firms in the economy or the more they can coordinate their...

This paper examines an economic union where oligopolistic firms produce by skilled and unskilled labor and do in-house R&D by skilled labor. The planner of the union accepts new members to the union, regulates the labor market through a minimum wage for unskilled labor and supports firms by...

In oligopsonistic labour markets, firms have some market power, and a wedge is created between wages and marginal product. When oligopsonistic firms' production technology requires generally trained workers, firms may therefore receive part of the returns to general training and be willing to...

What are the welfare implications of labor market power? We provide an answer to this question in two steps: (1) we develop a tractable quantitative, general equilibrium, oligopsony model of the labor market, (2) we estimate key parameters using within-firm-state, across-market differences in...

The fall of labor's share of GDP in the United States and many other countries in recent decades is well documented but its causes remain uncertain. Existing empirical assessments of trends in labor's share typically have relied on industry or macro data, obscuring heterogeneity among firms. In...

Do firms reduce employment when their insiders (established, incumbent employees) claim higher wages? The conventional answer in the theoretical literature is that insider power has no influence on employment, provided that the newly hired employees (entrants) receive their reservation wages....

The recent fall of labor's share of GDP in numerous countries is well-documented, but its causes are poorly understood. We sketch a "superstar firm" model where industries are increasingly characterized by "winner take most" competition, leading a small number of highly profitable (and low labor...

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...