Search Results
Large, Dominant Firms Depress Local Wages; Housing Costs Help Offset Lower Pay
Concern has increased about the ability of very large firms to exert market power and hold down wages in localities where they dominate.
Working Paper
Monopsony in Spatial Equilibrium
An emerging labor economics literature studies the consequences of firms exercising market power in local labor markets. These monopsony models have implications for trends in earnings inequality. The extent of this market power is likely to vary across local labor markets. In choosing what market to live and work in, workers trade off wages, rents and local amenities. Building on the Rosen/Roback spatial equilibrium model, we investigate how the existence of local monopsony power affects the cross-sectional spatial distribution of wages and rents across cities. We find an employment-weighted ...
Journal Article
From John Lindsay to Rudy Giuliani: the decline of the local safety net?
This paper was presented at the conference "Unequal incomes, unequal outcomes? Economic inequality and measures of well-being" as part of session 4, "Economic inequality and local public services." The conference was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on May 7, 1999. The authors contend that the future scope of city-based redistributive policies is limited. An important way in which policymakers work to reduce inequality is by redistributing income from the wealthy to the poor, channeling income tax revenue into spending on welfare and other services. The authors suggest, ...
Working Paper
Long-Term Macroeconomic Effects of Climate Change: A Cross-Country Analysis
We study the long-term impact of climate change on economic activity across countries, using a stochastic growth model where labor productivity is affected by country-specific climate variables?defined as deviations of temperature and precipitation from their historical norms. Using a panel data set of 174 countries over the years 1960 to 2014, we find that per-capita real output growth is adversely affected by persistent changes in the temperature above or below its historical norm, but we do not obtain any statistically significant effects for changes in precipitation. Our counterfactual ...