The authors provide at least a partial reconciliation of industry and individual level examinations of the influence of concentration on wages. They find that neither aggregation per se nor use of different wage measures accounts for the general failure of industry level studies to confirm a...

It is frequently asserted, although never directly tested, that firms in more monopolistic industries hire better-qualified workers. This paper presents two new results. First, worker quality (education in particular) is a strong determinant of whether a worker is employed in a concentrated...

A variance components model explains wage dispersion with a specific version of generalized least squares. The estimation preserves individual data while examining the influence of union penetration on dispersion in both the union and nonunion sectors. Controlling for both individual and...

In the presence of job matching, the returns to education signals are shown to decline in value as additional work experience allows more direct observation of productivity. This is tested by estimating sheepskin effects across five age cohorts of nonminority males in 1991. The effects are large...

This paper uses a unique data set of unemployed semi-skilled workers to examine the relationship between reservation wages and the decision to queue for a union sector job. Estimation of selected reservation wage equations indicates that the failure of all previous estimates to model the queuing...

A theoretical model demonstrates that when minority workers are subject to discrimination in the nonunion sector they will comprise a disproportionate share of the pool waiting for union jobs. This results because the union sector--with its uniform wages--offers minority workers substantially...

This paper builds on the successive monopoly literature and demonstrates that fixed proportions technology downstream and inelastic final demand are not sufficient to eliminate the incentive for vertical control. As long as downstream marginal costs increase, the incentive remains. Moreover, if...

This paper presents the first examination of the effect of unionisation on the distribution of nonunion wages in the UK. We test a hypothesis that has received considerable attention in the US: that the threat of unionisation leads nonunion firms to increase the earnings of their lowest paid...