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 secular increase in the demand for high-wage workers driven by skill-biased technological change (SBTC) has difficulties in explaining what happened to US and UK wage inequality in the 1990?'s. In particular, SBTC predicts a continuing increase in the relative wage and employment of high wage...

‘Monopsony and Labour Demand’ might strike many as a contradiction in terms as monopsony is often thought to mean an outcome on the labour supply and not the labour demand curve. This paper argues that, despite initial appearances to the contrary, there is no inevitable contradiction between...

This paper takes a simple imperfectly competitive macro model with increasing returns and shows how it can lead to nonexistence or multiplicity of equilibria. The consequences for government policy toward unemployment are explored and shown to be very different from the traditional model. It is...

In the UK the gender pay gap on entry to the labour market is approximately zero but ten years after labour market entry, there is a gender wage gap of almost 25 log points. This article explores the reason for this gender gap in early-career wage growth, considering three main hypotheses -...

Labour's share of GDP in most OECD countries has declined over the last two decades. Some authors have suggested that these changes are linked to deregulation of product and labour markets. To examine this we focus on a large quasi-experiment in the OECD: the privatization of many network...

We argue that models of oligopsony or monopsonistic competition provide insights and explanation for many empirical phenomena in labor markets. Using a simple model with job differentiation and preference heterogeneity, we illustrate how such models can be employed to explain the existence of...