estimating the employer switching costs and wage responses of forward looking engineers this article estimates worker switching costs and how much the employer switching of experienced engineers responds to outside wage offers i use data on engineers across swedish private sector firms to estimate the relative importance of employer wage policies and switching costs in a dynamic programming discrete choice model of employer choice the differentiated firms are modeled in employer characteristic space and each firm has its own age wage profile a majority of engineers have moderately high switching costs and a minority of experienced workers are responsive to outside wage offers younger workers are more sensitive to outside wage offers

estimating the firm s labor supply curve in a new monopsony framework school teachers in missouri in the context of certain dynamic models it is possible to infer the elasticity of labor supply to the firm from the elasticity of the quit rate with respect to the wage using this property we estimate the average labor supply elasticity to public school districts in missouri we leverage the plausibly exogenous variation in prenegotiated district salary schedules to instrument for actual salary these estimates imply a labor supply elasticity of about 3 7 suggesting that school districts possess significant market power the presence of monopsony power in this teacher labor market may be partially explained by its institutional features

a search interpretation of male female wage differentials a general equilibrium search framework is used to examine the role of gender differences in labor market behavior patterns e g quit rates for personal reasons in determining gender wage differentials for samples of high school and college graduates from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy these behavioral patterns are found to be significantly different across the sexes and account for 20 30 of the wage differentials in particular they play a key role in explaining the male female wage differential that remains after controlling for the gender composition across occupations

national ownership requirements and transfer pricing abstract this paper examines the interaction between a national ownership requirement and transfer pricing it turns out that where indigenization implies managerial control by domestic owners it may result in greater retained profits and a more intensive use of domestic resources

the multinational firm direct investment is incorporated into a simple general equilibrium model of international trade the analysis focuses on an attempt to endogenize the internalization decision it is argued that a reasonable approach assumes that arm s length contracts must be simple so that complex arrangements require internalization the model relates direct investment to the degree of underlying uncertainty and to fundamental trade determinants such as relative factor endowments the behavior of the model contrasts sharply with that of the markusen helpman model which takes internalization for granted

labor market monopsony there has been a renewed interest in monopsony in labor markets in recent years that includes both the traditional static approach to monopsony ably reviewed by boal and ransom 1997 and the new approach to monopsony with more attention paid to dynamic issues developed in detail by manning 2003 the articles presented in this supplement highlight both approaches and illustrate the range of labor market settings in which the exercise of monopsony power may be important the first use of the term monopsony in economics is widely attributed to robinson 1969 robinson conceived of monopsony as analogous to monopoly whereas monopoly refers to the case of a single seller confronted in a market by many buyers monopsony refers to the case of a single buyer confronted in a market by many sellers just as the monopolist faces a downward sloping demand curve for his product and

monopsonistic competition low wage labour markets and minimum wages an empirical analysis abstractthis article investigates the degree of monopsony power of employers in different industries against the background of a statutory minimum wage introduction in germany in january 2015 a semi structural estimation approach is employed based on a dynamic model of monopsonistic competition the empirical analysis relies on a linked employer employee data set which allows to control for observed heterogeneity both on the worker and on the firm side the results show important differences in monopsonistic competition among low wage industries while retailing the hotel and restaurant industry as well as agriculture can be described as monopsonistic labour markets this is not true for other services and manufacturing of food products from a policy point of view the introduction of a uniform minimum wage may therefore lead to different employment reactions in industries with a similar minimum wage bite

the urban wage premium in imperfect labor markets mit administrativen verknupften betriebs beschaftigtendaten fur westdeutschland untersucht diese studie ob ein teil des urban wage premiums durch eine geringere lohnsetzungsmacht von arbeitgebern auf dichteren arbeitsmarkten erklart werden kann wir zeigen zunachst dass das arbeitsangebot an firmen in dichteren arbeitsmarkten lohnelastischer ist die lohnsetzungsmacht der arbeitgeber also weniger ausgepragt ist diese unterschiede lassen eine lohnpramie von 1 1 bis 1 6 prozent bei einem anstieg der bevolke rungsdichte um 100 log punkte erwarten anschliesend zeigen wir dass die geschatzte lohnpramie bei kontrolle fur unbeobachtete zeitkonstante personenheterogenitat um 1 1 bis 1 4 prozentpunkte fallt wenn wir auf die regionalen suchfriktionen bedingen unsere ergebnisse legen nahe dass ein wesentlicher teil des urban wage premiums auf geringere suchfriktionen in dichteren arbeitsmarkten zuruckzufuhren ist

wage differentials employer size and unemployment the unique equilibrium solution to a game in which a continuum of individual employers choose permanent wage offers and a continuum of workers search by sequentially sampling from the set of offers is characterized wage dispersion is a robust outcome provided that workers search while employed as well as when unemployed the unique nondegenerate equilibrium distribution of wage offers is constructed for three cases 1 identical workers and employers 2 identical employers and an atomless distribution of worker supply prices and 3 identical workers and an atomless distribution of job productivities copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the economics of joint ventures in less developed countries the paper examines the microeconomic partial equilibrium behavior of joint ventures established between transnational corporations and domestic partners in less developed countries it focuses on issues relating to resource allocation and profit distribution under various institutional scenarios the analysis places special emphasis on the role of bargaining power transfer pricing stock ownership and profit shares of the parties and the responsiveness of joint ventures to national development goals some of the results apply to wholly owned subsidiaries of transnational corporations local firms and licensing arrangements which emerge as special cases

fairness and frictions the impact of unequal raises on quit behavior we analyze how separations responded to arbitrary differences in own and peer wages at a large us retailer regression discontinuity estimates imply large causal effects of own wages on separations and on quits in particular however this own wage response could reflect comparisons either to market wages or to peer wages estimates using peer wage discontinuities show large peer wage effects and imply the own wage separation response mostly reflects peer comparisons the peer effect is driven by comparisons with higher paid peers suggesting concerns about fairness separations appear fairly insensitive when raises are similar across peers suggesting search frictions and monopsony are relevant in this low wage sector

foreign direct investment and host country policies a rationale for using ownership restrictions abstract this paper examines host governments motivation for restricting ownership shares of multinational firms mnfs in foreign direct investment fdi projects an mnf with a productivity advantage is willing to invest in a host country the host government wants to capture the mnf s surplus yet cannot observe it due to the mnf s private information about its firm specific advantage in contrast a joint venture jv partner might observe this surplus depending on its ownership share the host government can alleviate its informational constraints by using ownership restrictions to force a jv this calls into question the wisdom of calls for liberalizing fdi flows by the wholesale elimination of domestic jv requirements we show that the optimal mechanism involves ownership restrictions that decrease as the size of the mnf s firm specific advantage increases

an incentive compatible approach to the transfer pricing problem abstract this paper offers an alternative approach to regulating certain types of transfer pricing if the multinational enterprise s transfer price decision is not regulated it will manipulate the transfer price in order to maximize net global profit traditional approaches argue for ad hoc penalty schedules to mitigate manipulative transfer pricing in contrast this paper offers an incentive compatible approach which explicitly incorporates the informational asymmetries that encourage misreports the model has the desirous feature that the optimal regulatory policy has self enforcing properties that is the firm will find it profit maximizing to report true costs

do firms pay efficiency wages evidence with data at the firm level this study tests the efficiency wage hypothesis by estimating wage and quit equations with data from the employment opportunity pilot project survey of firms an efficiency wage model is derived that predicts effects of turnover costs and unemployment on wages as functions of first and second derivatives from the quit equation the model is tested by examining the relationships between the coefficients in the wage and quit equations the results are generally favorable to efficiency wage theory other important findings are that firm characteristics raising workers productivity tend to raise wages and that a rise in turnover costs reduces quits

the impact of segregation and sorting on the gender wage gap evidence from german linked longitudinal employer employee data for this study the author inspects the relationship between segregation in the workplace measured as the proportion female in job cells and the gender wage gap using linked longitudinal employer employee data from the german employment register he extends the literature by controlling for nonrandom sorting of workers into job cells establishments and occupations in line with previous studies the pooled least squares estimates show that the gender wage gap increases as the job cell level proportion of females increases this increase is attributable to the fact that women experience greater wage declines than men do when additional women enter their job cells controlling additionally for unobserved heterogeneity at the individual establishment occupation and job cell levels considerably reduces the size of the proportion female effects on women s wages while rendering the effects on men s wages insignificant or even positive the same controls also significantly decrease the proportion effects on the wage gap the related sorting analysis shows that a good deal of the proportion effects can be explained by unobserved individual ability and suggests that especially women working in job cells with small proportions of females show above average unobserved individual ability

monopsony mobility and sex differences in pay missouri school teachers we examine the sex differences in the pay of school teachers in missouri in missouri school districts pay is determined by a salary schedule that maps teaching experience and education level of an individual to a salary level in spite of this apparently mechanical rule for determining pay female teachers earn less than male teachers after controlling for experience and education we explore how such a difference could arise from differential job mobility and find some evidence to support this idea however within district differences in pay are a more important source of differences in pay between men and women

wages and recruitment evidence from external wage changes in this article the author estimates the causal effect of the wage level on the recruitment rate in establishments during the 1990s the wage setting for certified teachers in norway was completely centralized with a state paid wage premium of about 10 at some schools with severe recruitment problems the empirical approach exploits within school variation in wage premium eligibility and that actual teacher supply is empirically observed at schools with excess demand for teachers in a difference in differences framework the wage premium increases the recruitment rate by 6 to 7 percentage points this finding is robust to model specification and indicates that the recruitment elasticity to the wage is equal to the separation elasticity in absolute terms the implied short run labor supply elasticity for individual establishments is about 1 4 it is also evidence of a diminishing return to scale in recruitment activity a central assumption in search theoretic models of imperfect competition in the la

classic or new monopsony searching for evidence in nursing labor markets the market for registered nurses rns is often offered as an example of classic monopsony while a new monopsony literature emphasizes that firm labor supply is upward sloping independent of market structure using data from multiple sources we explore the relationship between nursing wages in hospitals and measures of classic and new monopsony wage level analysis fails to provide support for classic monopsony the relative wages of rns in 240 u s labor markets being largely uncorrelated with hospital system concentration longitudinal analysis shows nursing wages declining with increases in hospital concentration we interpret these results as providing support for classic monopsony effects in the short run but question whether wage effects are sustained in the long run no relationship is found between nursing wages and a new monopsony measure of mobility but support for new monopsony is found for women elsewhere in the labor market rns display greater interemployer mobility than do women or men in general two conclusions follow first upward sloping labor supply need not imply monopsonistic outcomes second absent more compelling evidence nursing should not be held up as a prototypical example of monopsony classic or new

is job stability declining in germany evidence from count data models the macro evidence of increased adjustment pressure since the early 1970s suggests that job mobility should have increased hence retrospective and spell data from the german socio economic panel are combined in order to test the hypothesis that job stability for german workers declined between 1974 and 1994 using count data regression models in which we control for labour market experience various demographic factors and occupation we find that job stability did not decrease but if anything increased between 1974 and 1994 our finding suggests that labour market inflexibility is an important factor in explaining the european unemployment problem

a mechanism design approach to transfer pricing by the multinational firm abstract this paper is about how multinationals choose transfer prices and optimal production levels in the presence of differential corporate income tax rates and local ownership requirements a key featrure of the model is that there is an asymmetric information problem between a parent and its foreign subsidiary we examine the interaction between ownership structure corporate taxes and bargaining power transfer prices induce underproduction compared to the full information case when the parent has the bargaining ability when bargaining is controlled by the subsidiary overproduction obtains the model is used to illustrate how governmental objectives can be accomplished without direct regulation of the transfer price

the composition of wage differentials between migrants and natives we consider the role of unobservables such as differences in search frictions reservation wages and productivities for the explanation of wage differentials between migrants and natives we disentangle these by estimating an empirical general equilibrium search model with on the job search due to bontemps et al 1999 on segments of the labour market defined by occupation age and nationality using a large scale german administrative dataset the native migrant wage differential is then decomposed into several parts and we focus especially on the component that we label migrant effect being the difference in wage offers between natives and migrants in the same occupation age segment in firms of the same productivity counterfactual decompositions of wage differentials allow us to identify and quantify their drivers thus explaining within a common framework what is often labelled the unexplained wage gap

differences in labor supply to monopsonistic firms and the gender pay gap an empirical analysis using linked employer employee data from germany this article investigates women s and men s labor supply to the firm within a semistructural approach based on a dynamic model of new monopsony using methods of survival analysis and a large linked employer employee data set for germany we find that labor supply elasticities are small 1 9 3 7 and that women s labor supply to the firm is less elastic than men s which is the reverse of gender differences in labor supply usually found at the level of the market our results imply that at least one third of the gender pay gap might be wage discrimination by profit maximizing monopsonistic employers

optimal regulation of mnes and government revenues the paper analyses the optimal regulation of multinational enterprises mnes by a host government interested in maximizing tax revenues when the mne has private information about its benefits of controlling the enterprise it is shown that the optimal mechanism involves restricting the mnes ownership of the enterprise and setting a ceiling on the transfer price of an input that the mne provides that is above the known production cost of the input for low realizations of the benefits of control the mne transfers control to a domestic partner while for high realizations it retains control

discrimination and skill differences in an equilibrium search model in this paper we analyze an equilibrium search model with three sources for wage an d unemployment differentials among workers with the same observed human capital but differen t appearance race unobserved productivity skill search in tensities and discrimination becker 1957 due to an appearance based employer disutility factor because they affect the earnings distributions differently empirical identification of these potential sources for the explanation of wage an d unemployment differentials is possible we show that the structural parameters of the model including the firm s disutility from certain workers are identifiab le using standard labor market survey data we demonstrate identification using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth estimation of these parameters by matching moments from a sample of black and white high school graduate s implies a blacks have a 9 lower productivi ty level than whites b the disutility factor in employer s preferences is one third of the white s productivity level and c 50 of firms have a disutility factor in their utility toward blacks

oligopsony and monopsonistic competition in labor markets 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 wage dispersion the persistence of labor market discrimination market failures in the provision of training and the anomalous employment effects of minimum wages

the drivers of income inequality in rich countries rising income inequality has recently come centre stage as a core societal concern for rich countries the diagnosis of the forces driving inequality upwards and their relative importance remains hotly contested notably with respect to the roles of globalization versus technology and of market forces versus institutions and policy choices this survey provides a critical review and synthesis of recent research the focus is on income inequality across the entire distribution rather than only on what has been happening at the very top we pay particular attention to including what has been learned from the analysis of micro data to ensuring that the coverage is not unduly us centric and to analyses of the interrelations between the different drivers of inequality the marked differences in inequality trends across countries and time periods reflect how global economic forces such as globalisation and technological change have interacted with differing national contexts and institutions major analytical challenges stand in the way of a consensus emerging on the relative importance of different drivers in how income inequality has evolved in recent decades

multinational firms and government revenues abstract underinvoicing of intrafirm exports by a multinational firm mnf can increase the exporting country s revenue overinvoicing can increase the importing country s revenue when its tariff rate is higher than its profit tax rate and both countries revenues may change in the same direction transfer pricing increases the mnf s global tax burden unambiguously when the home profit tax rate is not smaller than the foreign and the mnf overinvoices and can increase it in other cases this last result arises when increase in the level of intrafirm trade which accompanies transfer pricing and or non wholly owned subsidiary are considered

on input market frictions and estimation of factors demand in this article we explore the impact of imperfectly competitive input markets on production function estimation first order profit maximizing conditions are altered when frictions in input markets cause the elasticity of input supply to the firm to be finite a consequence of this is that the standard econometric model used for production function estimation will be misspecified we prove that in all nontrivial cases finite elasticities of supply to the firm will lead to inconsistent estimates of production function parameters monte carlo simulations show that the resulting bias can be economically significant

do employers have more monopsony power in slack labor markets this article confronts monopsony theory s predictions regarding workers wages with observed wage patterns over the business cycle using german administrative data for the years 1985 to 2010 and a

lingering illness or sudden death pre exit employment developments in german establishments using a large administrative data set for germany this article compares employment developments in exiting and surviving establishments applying a matching approach we find a clear shadow of death effect reflecting lingering illness in both west and east germany establishments shrink dramatically already several years before closure employment growth rates differ strongly between exiting and surviving establishments and this difference becomes stronger as exit approaches moreover we provide first evidence that prior to exit the workforce becomes on average more skilled more female and older in exiting compared to surviving establishments these effects are more clearly visible in west than in east germany

training systems and labor mobility a comparison between germany and sweden the mobility effect of general and specific training is a key issue in the debate on the design of educational systems using data from two retrospective life history surveys we compare general school based vocational training and specific apprenticeship training with regard to inter firm inter occupational and inter industrial mobility the results show that workers with school based degrees display greater occupational mobility while no difference in firm and industrial mobility can be discerned this suggests that apprenticeships do not eliminate job search at labor market entry that they reduce occupational mobility and that responsiveness to structural change is similar under both training systems

monopsony in the labor market this paper surveys recent theoretical and empirical research on monopsony in labor markets broadly defined as upward sloping labor supply to an employer we compare older monopsony models based on small numbers of employers with newer models based on labor market frictions such as moving costs and search we also compare older econometric approaches that focus on static wage concentration relationships with newer approaches that focus on dynamics our review of empirical estimates suggests that monopsony power based on small numbers of employers is probably rare but occasionally large while monopsony power based on frictions is probably widespread but small on average

an empirical equilibrium search model of the labor market in structural empirical models of labor market search the distribution of wage offers is usually assumed to be exogenous however because in setting their wages profit maximizing firms should consider the reservation wages of job seekers the wage offer distribution is essentially endogenous we investigate whether a proposed equilibrium search model in which the wage offer distribution is endogenous is able to describe observed labor market histories we find that the distributions of job and unemployment spells are consistent with the data and that the qualitative predictions of the model for the wages set by employers are confirmed by wage regressions the model is estimated using panel data on unemployed and employed individuals we distinguish between separate segments of the labor market and we show that productivity heterogeneity is important to obtain an acceptable fit to the data the results are used to estimate the degree of monopsony power of firms further the effects of changes in the mandatory minimum wage are examined

monopsony power pay structure and training although interest in monopsonistic influences on labor market outcomes has revived in recent years only a few empirical studies provide direct evidence on this topic in this article the authors analyze the effect of monopsony power on pay structure using a direct measure of labor market thinness the authors find evidence of monopsony power as firms facing fewer local competitors offer lower wages to skilled labor and trainees but not to unskilled labor the findings have important implications for the economic theory of training as most recent models assume monopsonistic pay setting for skilled labor but not for trainees

do labour supply and demand curves exist the objective of this paper is to show that circumstantial and empirical evidence for the existence of labour supply and demand curves is at best inconclusive and at worst casts doubt on their existence because virtually all orthodox models of labour markets simple and complex are built upon the foundation stones of labour supply and demand curves these models lack empirically supported foundations orthodox labour economists must therefore either provide stronger evidence or stop using labour supply and demand curves as the foundation stones of their models the conclusion discusses implications for future orthodox and heterodox labour economics

regulating a monopolist with unknown costs we consider the problem of how to regulate a monopolistic firm whose costs are unknown to the regulator the regulator s objective is to maximize a linear social welfare function of the consumers surplus and the firm s profit in the optimal regulatory policy prices and subsidies are designed as functions of the firm s cost report so that expected social welfare is maximized subject to the constraints that the firm has nonnegative profit and has no incentive to misrepresent its costs we explicitly derive the optimal policy and analyze its properties in their classic papers dupuit 2 and hotelling 5 considered pricing policies for a bridge that had a fixed cost of construction and zero marginal cost they demonstrated that the pricing policy that maximizes consumer well being is to set price equal to marginal cost and to provide a subsidy to the supplier equal to the fixed cost so that a firm would be willing to provide the bridge this first best solution is based on a number of informational assumptions first the demand function is assumed to be known to both the regulator and to the firm while the assumption of complete information may be too strong the assumption that information about demand is as available to the regulator as it is to the firm does not seem unnatural a second informational assumption is that the regulator has complete information about the cost of the firm or at least has the same information about cost as does the firm this assumption is unlikely to be met in reality since the firm would be expected to have better information about costs than would the regulator as weitzman has stated an essential feature of the regulatory environment i am trying to describe is uncertainty about the exact specification of each firm s cost function in most cases even the managers and engineers most closely associated with production will be unable to precisely specify beforehand the cheapest way to generate various hypothetical output levels because they are yet removed from the production process the regulators are likely to be vaguer still about a firm s cost function 12 p 684 as this observation suggests it is natural to expect that a firm would have better information regarding its costs than would a regulator the purpose of this paper is to develop an optimal regulatory policy for the case in which the regulator does not know the costs of the firm one strategy that a regulator could use in the absence of full information about costs is to give the firm the title to the total social surplus and to delegate the pricing decision to the firm in pursuing its own interests which would then be to maximize the total social surplus the firm would adopt the same marginal cost pricing strategy that the regulator would have imposed if the regulator had

is there monopsonistic discrimination against immigrants the authors investigate immigrants and natives labor supply to the firm within an estimation approach based on a dynamic monopsony framework applying duration models that account for unobserved worker heterogeneity to a large administrative employer employee data set for germany they find that immigrants supply labor less elastically to firms than do natives under monopsonistic wage setting the estimated elasticity differential predicts a 7 7 log points wage penalty for immigrants thereby accounting for the entire unexplained native immigrant wage differential of 5 8 to 8 2 log points when further distinguishing immigrant groups differing in their time spent in the german labor market their immigration cohort and their age at entry the authors find that the observed unexplained wage differential is larger for those groups that show a larger elasticity differential relative to natives these findings not only suggest that search frictions are a likely cause of employers more pronounced monopsony

teacher mobility responses to wage changes evidence from a quasi natural experiment low mobility responses to wage changes imply rents associated with existing employment relationships for example continued employment after a wage cut all else equal reflects rents in the hand of the worker at the outset and symmetrically voluntary quits after a

new market power models and sex differences in pay in the context of certain models it is possible to infer the elasticity of labor supply to the firm from the elasticity of the quit rate with respect to the wage we use this strategy to estimate the elasticity of labor supply for men and women workers at a chain of grocery stores identifying separation elasticities from differences in wages and separation rates across different job titles within the firm we estimate that women have lower elasticities so a robinson style monopsony model can explain reasonably well the lower relative pay of women in the retail grocery industry