Collaborative Research: Macroeconomic Implications of Economic Policy in Imperfectly Competitive Labor Markets

该项目衡量不完全竞争劳动力市场的宏观经济后果。在2022年美国经济学会主席演讲中，大卫·卡德认为劳动力市场的不完全竞争是普遍存在的。少数几家公司主导着许多当地劳动力市场，这使它们有能力设定工资，并向工人支付低于其边际产量的工资。工人们通常不愿意找新工作，这进一步加强了企业的市场力量。什么样的政策可以改善劳动力市场的结果，它们的宏观经济效应是什么？这个项目包括一个研究议程，重点是这个问题。本项目建立在一个经过测试的劳动力市场不完全竞争定量框架的基础上，然后将该框架扩展到(i)考虑应用微观经济学研究的经验证据和我们自己的经验贡献，然后（ii）分析政策。本项目制定的框架将产生若干公共产品。首先，这些框架使经济学家、法律学者和政策制定者能够更好地了解最低工资政策、合并指导方针和最优税收。其次，作为本项目研究合并的分布后果的持续努力的一部分，本项目将在十年一次的人口普查、LEHD和LBD之间建立一套新的人口普查数据库链接，以研究跨种族、性别、职业和其他与政策相关的工人特征合并的影响。在这个项目中开发的模型代码将在网上提供，人口普查局为所有未来的研究人员维护一个我们的实证分析库。最后，本项目开发的模型提供了一套理论和计算工具，使研究人员能够快速有效地求解寡头垄断模型。我们的议程建立在我们久经考验的针对劳动力市场不完全竞争的量化框架之上。我们提出了四个子项目，应用和扩展具有丰富工人和企业异质性的寡头垄断模型：(i)了解最低工资政策弥补劳动力市场中工资设定权造成的部分效率损失的能力；（ii）研究反垄断政策在产出生产率提高与更大的垄断权造成的效率损失之间的权衡；（iii）描述和分析所得税政策设计与劳动力市场效率之间的新联系，同时为分析垄断的分配后果制定一个完整的框架；（iv）在一个框架内重新审视所有三项政策，该框架允许由于偏好异质性而产生的“经典”垄断和由于在工作阶梯设置中搜索而产生的“摩擦”垄断而产生的市场力量。在每种情况下，我们要么(i)提供新的实证事实来检验我们的新理论，要么（ii）让新理论对应用微观经济学文献中最新的实证证据负责，在定量和实证工作之间架起一座桥梁。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project measures the macroeconomic consequences of imperfectly competitive labor markets. In his 2022 AEA Presidential Address, David Card argued that imperfect competition in the labor market is pervasive. Few firms dominate many local labor markets giving them the ability to set wages and pay workers less than their marginal product. Workers are often reluctant to search for a new job, further reenforcing firms' market power. What types of policies can improve outcomes in the labor market and what are their macroeconomic effects? This project consists of a research agenda focused on this question. This project builds on a tested quantitative framework for imperfect competition in labor markets and then extends this framework to (i) account for empirical evidence from applied microeconomic studies and our own empirical contributions and then (ii) analyze policy. The frameworks developed in this project will generate several public goods. First, the frameworks allow economists, legal scholars, and policymakers to better inform minimum wage policy, merger guidelines, and optimal taxation. Second, as part of this project's ongoing efforts to study the distributional consequences of mergers, this project will develop a new set of Census database linkages between the Decennial Census, the LEHD, and the LBD in order to study the effects of mergers across race, gender, occupation and other policy-relevant characteristics of workers. The codes for the models developed in this project will be available online, and the Census maintains a repository of our empirical analysis for all future researchers. Lastly, the models developed in this project provide a set of theoretic and computational tools that enable researchers to solve models of oligopsony quickly and efficiently.Our agenda builds on our tested quantitative framework for imperfect competition in labor markets. We propose four sub-projects that apply and extend oligopsony models featuring rich worker and firm heterogeneity to: (i) understand the capacity of minimum wage policy to retrieve a portion of the efficiency losses due to wage setting power in the labor market, (ii) study the trade-offs for antitrust policy in terms of productivity improvements in output versus efficiency losses due to greater monopsony power, (iii) describe and analyze a novel link between the design of income tax policy and labor market efficiency while laying out a complete framework for analysis of distributional consequences of monopsony, (iv) revisit all three policies within a framework that allows for market power due to both `classical' monopsony via preference heterogeneity, and `frictional' monopsony due to search in a job ladder setting. In each case we either (i) provide new empirical facts to test our new theory, or (ii) hold the new theory accountable to the most up-to-date empirical evidence from the applied microeconomics literature, building a bridge between quantitative and empirical work.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.