Standard monopsony theory, old and new, lacks a realistic criterion to distinguish between monopsony and competitive prices. Consequently, prominent Austrian critics have by and large dismissed it. However, the idea that human action occurs in discrete steps, and consequently that the elasticity...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of the unions' bargaining power on production and wages. In our model a competitive final good is produced from two substitutable intermediate goods. One of them is produced in a unionized unskilled sector and the other in a unionized skilled...

We analyse recent proposals to shift the tax burden away from low-paid labour, assuming a dual labour market where the "good"high-paying jobs are rationed. A shift in the tax burden from low-paid to high-paid workers has an ambiguous effect on the level of aggregate employment while the...

Motivated by models of worker flows, we argue in this paper that monopsonistic discrimination may be a substantial factor behind the overall gender wage gap. On matched employer-employee data from Norway, we estimate establishment-specific wage premiums separately for men and women, conditioning...

The process leading to the setting of the minimum wage so far has been fairly overlooked by economists. This paper suggests that this is a serious limitation as the setting regime contributes to explain cross-country variation in the fine-tuning of the minimum wage, hence in the way in which the...

Recent empirical contributions in labor economics suggest that individual firms face upward sloping labor supplies. We rationalize this by assuming that diosyncratic non-pecuniary conditions interact with money wages in workers' decisions to work for specific firms. Likewise, firms supply...

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 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...

We use matched employer-employee data and firm balance sheet data to investigate the importance of firm productivity and firm labor market power in explaining firm heterogeneity in wage formation. We use a linear regression model with one interacted high dimensional fixed effect to estimate...

We review the literature on firm-level drivers of labor market inequality. There is strong evidence from a variety of fields that standard measures of productivity – like output per worker or total factor productivity – vary substantially across firms, even within narrowly-defined...