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Labor Market Monopsony And Wage Inequality: Evidence From Online Labor Market Vacancies, Samuel I. Thorpe
Labor Market Monopsony And Wage Inequality: Evidence From Online Labor Market Vacancies, Samuel I. Thorpe
Undergraduate Economic Review
This paper estimates the effects of employer labor market power on wage inequality in the United States. I find that inequality as measured by interdecile range is 23.7% higher in perfectly monopsonistic labor markets than in perfectly competitive markets, even when controlling for commuting zone and occupation fixed effects. I also decompose these results into 50/10 and 90/50 ratios, finding much larger impacts on inequality among low earners. These results suggest that monopsony power has significant and policy-relevant impacts on wage inequality, and particularly harms the lowest earning subsets of the labor force.