How much power do employers have to suppress wages below marginal productivity? It depends on the firm-level labor supply elasticity. Leveraging data on job applications from the large job board CareerBuilder.com, we estimate the wage impact on workers' choice among differentiated jobs in the...

How does employer market power affect workers? We compute the concentration of new hires by occupation and commuting zone in France using linked employer-employee data. Using instrumental variables with worker and firm fixed effects, we find that a 10% increase in labor market concentration...

How does employer market power affect workers? We compute the concentration of new hires by occupation and commuting zone in France using linked employer-employee data. Using instrumental variables with worker and firm fixed effects, we find that a 10% increase in labor market concentration...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses had to close and unemployment skyrocketed. To help the unemployed, the CARES Act increased US unemployment benefits by $600 a week, which increased unemployment benefit replacement rates (benefit/wage) to unprecedentedly high levels, above 100% for...

Electricity is a general purpose technology and the catalyst for the second industrial revolution. Developing countries are currently making huge investments in electrification, with a view to achieving structural change. What does history say about its impact on the structure of employment? We...

Do racial disparities in the paid labor market also extend to the unpaid labor market? Using American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data, we find that Black people spend 13% less time at work than white people, and 17% less time in volunteering. Using an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, we show that...

Due to a lack of competition among employers in the labor market, employers have monopsony power, or power to pay workers less than what the workers contribute to the employers’ bottom line. Worker power is workers’ ability to obtain higher wages and/or better working conditions. While the...

The U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) system operates as a federal-state partnership, where states have considerable autonomy to decide on specific UI rules. This has allowed for systematically stricter rules in states with a larger Black population. We study how these differences in state rules...