Are excessively concentrated markets inequitable as well as inefficient? We explore this issue by analyzing the degree of market concentration in the industries where Australia's wealthiest made their fortunes. Compared with the economy at large, we find that top wealth holders have tended to...

Using register data, we document that the average German labor market, defined by hires in combinations of 3-digit occupations, requirement levels, and commuting zones, is highly concentrated (HHI=0.257). By EU antitrust thresholds, 56 percent of these labor markets feature moderate or high...

We investigate the impact of labor market concentration on stayers' wages, where stayers are defined as individuals who were already employed in the same firm the year before. Using administrative data for France, we show that the elasticity of stayers' wages to labor market concentration ranges...

How does employer market power affect workers? We compute the concentration of new hires by occupation and commuting zone in France using linked employer-employee data. Using instrumental variables with worker and firm fixed effects, we find that a 10% increase in labor market concentration...

We investigate the impact of labour market concentration on two dimensions of job quality, namely wages and job security. We leverage rich administrative linked employer-employee data from Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain in the 2010s to provide the first comparable...

We investigate the impact of labor market concentration on average wages and decompose it into its effects on new hires and incumbents, where incumbents are defined as individuals who were already employed in the same firm the year before. Using administrative data for France, we find that...

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...

How much can employers in low and middle-income countries suppress wages below marginal productivity? Using plant and customs data from Colombia, we exploit pre- determined variation across plants in sales export destination combined with variation in exchange rates to generate plant-specific...

This paper shows that self-employment opportunities shape the market power of employers in low-income countries, with implications for industrial development. Using data from Peru, we document substantial employer concentration and high self-employment rates across manufacturing local labor...

Although market concentration is one of the main impediments to productivity growth globally, data constraints have limited its analysis to developed countries or cross-country studies based on definitions of market concentration across nations and industries. This paper takes advantage of a...