The workhorse of urban labor theory in development economics is the formal/informal model of labor market segmentation and its variants. The seminal Harris-Todaro model has been extended over the years to cope with various empirical puzzles not explained in the original framework. However, one...

We propose a simple model of wage dispersion arising from oligopsonistic competition in the labor market. Our model has workers who are equally able but who have heterogeneous preferences for non-wage characteristics, while employers have heterogeneous productivity characteristics. We completely...

We set out a model of monopsonistic competition, where each employer competes equally with every other employer. The employment effects of minimum wages depend on the degree of distortion in the labor market. If fixed costs per firm are high then the labor market is relatively non-competitive...