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Report
Firm Wage Setting and On-the-Job Search Limit Wage-Price Spirals
We develop a novel, tractable New Keynesian model where firms post wages and workers search on the job, motivated by microeconomic evidence on wage setting. Because firms set wages to avoid costly turnover, the rate that workers quit their jobs features prominently in the model’s wage Phillips curve, matching U.S. empirical evidence. We then examine the response of wages to cost-of-living shocks, i.e., shocks that raise the price of household’s consumption goods but do not affect the marginal product of labor. Such shocks pass through to wages only to the extent that higher cost of living ...
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 ...
Report
Wage Growth and Labor Market Tightness
Good measures of labor market tightness are essential to predict wage inflation and to calibrate monetary policy. This paper highlights the importance of two measures of labor market tightness in determining wage growth: the quits rate and vacancies per effective searcher (V/ES)—where searchers include both employed and non-employed job seekers. Amongst a broad set of indicators of labor market tightness, we find that these two measures are independently the most strongly correlated with wage inflation both in aggregate time series data and in industry-level panel data, and also predict ...
Briefing
Developments in Antitrust Policy Against Labor Market Monopsony
Antitrust policies have traditionally focused on merger-induced damages to consumers caused by monopoly. Recently, a literature on monopsony has flourished, particularly when applied to labor. As a result, it would be natural to think about the harm to workers caused by mergers. In this article, we survey how the literature and empirical evidence on labor market power has evolved and how this has led to proposals of regulatory tools that can be used to analyze merger-induced harm on workers.