This paper investigates the behaviour of employers' monopsony power and workers' wages over the business cycle. Using German administrative linked employer--employee data for the years 1985--2010 and an estimation framework based on duration models, we construct a time series of the firm-level...

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...

In this paper, I examine whether higher product market power can affect labor earnings through its effect on overall labor demand in distinct markets, as a set of dominant firms replaces employment by competitors. To identify relative labor demand shifts, I focus on variations in the spatial...

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 random timing of a US...

Employees have been quitting at higher rates over the past years, leading to what has been deemed “the great resignation.” This has happened alongside wages stagnating for those in the bottom quintile of the wage distribution, leading to a significant number of US workers earning below a...

This paper provides direct evidence on the extent of monopsony power in the low-wage labor market by estimating the firm-level elasticity of labor supply for several types of nurses in the long-term care (nursing home) industry. In 1999, California passed legislation requiring all licensed...

What role do community norms play in the diffusion and persistence of new organizational practices? We explore this question through an examination of the widespread practice of wage arrears, the late and non-payment of wages, in Russia during the 1990s. Existing research on wage arrears most...

We present a model of neighborhood effects in wage payment delays. Positive feedback arises because each employer?s arrears affect the late payment costs faced by other firms in the same local labor market, resulting in a strategic complementarity in the practice. The model is estimated on panel...

We analyze a model of wage delay in which strategic complementarity arises because each employer's costs of violating its contracts decrease with the arrears in its labor market. The model is estimated on panel data for workers and firms in Russia, facilitating identification through fixed...

We present a model of neighborhood effects in wage payment delays. Positive feedback arises because each employer's arrears affect the late payment costs faced by other firms in the same local labor market, resulting in a strategic complementarity in the practice. The model is estimated on panel...