Monopsony models imply that wages must be raised whenever additional workers are hired, and firms have permanent vacancies at existing wages. There is no evidence for this in low-wage markets, and our case study indicates a permanent queue of applicants, so one popular explanation for the...

Although interest in monopsonistic influences on labour market outcomes has revived in recent years, only a few empirical studies provide direct evidence on it. This paper analyses empirically the effect of monopsony power on pay structure, using a direct measure of labour market ÔthinnessÕ....

This paper shows, using data from both the US and the UK, that average plant size is larger in denser markets. However, many popular theories of agglomeration spillovers, cost advantages and improved match quality predict that establishments should be smaller in cities. The paper proposes a...

A key feature of monopsony is that a single firm pays its workers a wage ( w) less than the marginal revenue product (MRP ). Ever since its creation by Joan Robinson (1933), this feature has been explained as a symbol of the monopsonistic firm exploiting its workers. By using a simple standard...

Extending the literature on monopsony in academic labor markets, we find that faculty pay is inversely related to seniority in both cross-sectional and longitudinal data sets for a large public university in the United States. Fixed-effects results indicate that the negative relationship cannot...

This paper shows, using data from both the US and the UK, that average plant size is larger in denser markets. However, many popular theories of agglomeration – spillovers, cost advantages and improved match quality – predict that establishments should be smaller in cities. The paper...

This paper uses a firm-specific method for measuring monopsonistic behavior developed by Brummund (2012) using data for Chilean manufacturing plants for the period 2001-2006. We find that there is significant heterogeneity in labor market power across plants and that nearly a quarter of the...

This paper analyzes the effects of the minimum wage on wage inequality, relative employment and over-education. We show that over-education can be generated endogenously and that an increase in the minimum wage can raise both total and low-skill employment, and produce a fall in inequality....

This paper explores a simple though neglected mechanism linking land inequality and inefficiency: market power. In underdeveloped economies with serious constraints on labour mobility, high ownership concentration will endow landowners with market power in local labour markets. The resulting...

This paper measures the potential degree of monopsony power that Wal-Mart can exert over retail workers using a dominant-firm model and nationwide, county-level data, presenting for the first time a measure of the company's potential anti-competitive behavior and detailed spatial impacts on...