Recent empirical work on the effects of minimum wages has called into question the conventional wisdom that minimum wages invariably reduce employment. We develop a model of \emph{monopsonistic competition} with \emph{free entry} to analyze the effects of minimum wages, and our predictions fit...

A number of theories (search and efficiency wages) have been developed, in part, to explain why identically able workers are often paid different wages. However, when there is a minimum wage, they do not explain the resulting ``spike" in the wage distribution. Our model's predictions are...

We reconsider the employment effect of a minimum wage on employment in a symmetric model of monopsonistic competition, where each employer competes equally with every other employer. The employment effect depends on the degree of distortion in the labor market. If fixed costs are high (low), the...

We analyze models of product differentiation with perfect price discrimination and free entry. With a fixed number of firms, and in the absence of coordination failures, perfect price discrimination provides incentives for firms to choose product characteristics in a socially optimal way....

We analyze models of product differentiation with perfect price discrimination and free entry. Although perfect price discrimination ensures efficient output decisions given product characteristics, coordination failures may prevent efficiency in the choice of product characteristics. More...

We analyze models of product differentiation with perfect price discrimination and free entry. With a fixed number of firms, and in the absence of coordination failures, perfect price discrimination provides incentives for firms to choose product characteristics in a socially optimal way....

A number of theories (search and efficiency wages) have been developed, in part, to explain why identically able workers are often paid different wages. However, when there is a minimum wage, they do not explain the resulting "spike" in the wage distribution. Our model's predictions are...