By Matthew E. Kahn and Joseph Tracy: Over the last thirty years, there has been a rise in several empirical measures of local labor market monopsony power. The monopsonist has a profit incentive to offer lower wages to local workers. Mobile high skill workers can avoid the lower monopsony wages by moving to other more
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By Matthew E. Kahn and Joseph Tracy:
Over the last thirty years, there has been a rise in several empirical measures of local labor market monopsony power. The monopsonist has a profit incentive to offer lower wages to local workers. Mobile high skill workers can avoid the lower monopsony wages by moving to other more competitive local labor markets featuring a higher skill price vector. We develop a Roy Model of heterogeneous worker sorting across local labor markets that has several empirical implications. Monopsony markets are predicted to experience a “brain drain” over time. Using data over four decades we document this deskilling associated with local monopsony power. This means that observed cross-sectional wage gaps in monopsony markets partially reflects sorting on worker ability. The rise of work from home may act as a substitute for high-skill worker migration from monopsony markets.
Here is the full NBER working paper. Many university faculty of course are subject to monopsony power…
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Economics