Orley Ashenfelter
This paper summarizes the results of nearly a dozen new papers presented at the Sundance Conference on Monopsony in Labor Markets held in October 2018. These papers, to be published as a special issue of the Journal of Human Resources, study various aspects of monopsony and failures of competition in labor markets. It also reports on the new developments in public policies associated with widespread concerns about labor market competition and efforts to ameliorate competitive failures. The conference papers range from studies of the labor supply elasticity individual firms face to studies of local labor market concentration to studies of explicit covenants suppressing labor market competition. New policies range from private and public antitrust litigation to concerns about the effect of mergers and inter-firm agreements on labor market competition. We provide a detailed discussion of the mechanics of the Silicon Valley High Tech Worker conspiracy to suppress competition based on Court documents in the case. Non-compete agreements, which are not enforceable in three states already, have also come under scrutiny.
Based on hourly wage rates from nearly all McDonald’s restaurants, and prices of the Big Mac sandwich, we find an elasticity of the wage with respect to the minimum wage of 0.7. This elasticity does not differ between affected and unaffected restaurants because many restaurants maintain a constant wage ‘premium’ above the minimum wage. Higher minimum wages are not associated with faster adoption of touch-screen ordering, and there is near-full price pass-through of minimum wages. Minimum wages lead to higher real wages (expressed in Big Macs per hour) that are one fifth lower than the corresponding increases in nominal wages.
Using data on adult male workers we first investigate the
incremental effect of a year of schooling on unemployed hours,
and use this calculation to explain the difference in the pro-
portional effects of schooling on earnings and wages. Schooling
apparently reduces unemployed hours by reducing the incidence of
unemployment spells, but it does not significantly affect their
duration. We next test whether unemployed hours represent
real constraints on worker behavior. To do this we develop
and estimate life—cycle models of labor supply for workers with
and without spells of unemployment using longitudinal data. The
results imply that perhaps three-quarters of the unemployed hours
of male workers are part of the offer to sell labor.
This paper reviews Robert Lalonde's contributions to labor economics and introduces a set of papers that were written in his honor and presented to him in the spring of 2015 at a conference held in his honor in Chicago.