scholarly journals Monopsony Power and Guest Worker Programs

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 540-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric M. Gibbons ◽  
Allie Greenman ◽  
Peter Norlander ◽  
Todd Sørensen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Market Competition ◽  
The United States ◽  
Guest Workers ◽  
Guest Worker ◽  
Full Extent ◽  
Monopsony Power ◽  
Program Data

Guest workers on visas in the United States may be unable to quit bad employers due to barriers to mobility and a lack of labor market competition. Using H-1B, H-2A, and H-2B program data, we calculate the concentration of employers in geographically defined labor markets within occupations. We find that many guest workers face moderately or highly concentrated labor markets, based on federal merger scrutiny guidelines, and that concentration generally decreases wages. For example, moving from a market with a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of zero to a market comprised of two employers lowers H-1B worker wages approximately 10%, and a pure monopsony (one employer) reduces wages by 13%. A simulation shows that wages under pure monopsony could be 47% lower, suggesting that employers do not use the full extent of their monopsony power. Enforcing wage regulations and decreasing barriers to mobility may better address issues of exploitation than antitrust scrutiny alone.

Double Disadvantage

2016 ◽  
Vol 666 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Durand ◽  
Douglas S. Massey ◽  
Karen A. Pren
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
The United States ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Real Wages ◽  
Illegal Migrants ◽  
Secondary Sector ◽  
Substantial Decline

From 1988 to 2008, the United States’ undocumented population grew from 2 million to 12 million persons. It has since stabilized at around 11 million, a majority of whom are Mexican. As of this writing, some 60 percent of all Mexican immigrants in the United States are in the country illegally. This article analyzes the effect of being undocumented on sector of employment and wages earned in the United States. We show that illegal migrants are disproportionately channeled into the secondary labor market, where they experience a double disadvantage, earning systematically lower wages by virtue of working in the secondary sector and receiving an additional economic penalty because they are undocumented. Mexican immigrants, in particular, experienced a substantial decline in real wages between 1970 and 2010 attributable to their rising share of undocumented migrants in U.S. labor markets during a time when undocumented hiring was criminalized.

Labor Monopsony in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 11-29
Author(s):  
Eric A. Posner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Market Power ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Market Concentration ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Low Wages

Most labor markets are monopsonistic, meaning that employers have market power and can suppress wages below the competitive rate. Among the various sources of market power is concentration: the usually small number of employers who compete to offer a type of job to workers. At one time, economists assumed that labor markets were competitive, and largely ignored the phenomenon of labor market concentration. Recent empirical work, relying on newly available databases, has established that labor market concentration is a serious problem in the United States and may account for a wide range of pathologies, including low wages, inequality, and stagnant economic growth.

scholarly journals Labor Market Segmentation and Immigrant Competition: A Quantal Response Statistical Equilibrium Analysis

Entropy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (7) ◽  
pp. 742 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noé M. Wiener
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Wage Inequality ◽  
Market Competition ◽  
Maximum Entropy Principle ◽  
The United States ◽  
Statistical Equilibrium ◽  
Equilibrium Analysis ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Quantal Response

Competition between and within groups of workers takes place in labor markets that are segmented along various, often unobservable dimensions. This paper proposes a measure of the intensity of competition in labor markets on the basis of limited data. The maximum entropy principle is used to make inferences about the unobserved mobility decisions of workers in US household data. The quantal response statistical equilibrium class of models can be seen to give robust microfoundations to the persistent patterns of wage inequality. An application to labor market competition between native and foreign-born workers in the United States shows that this class of models captures a substantial proportion of the informational content of observed wage distributions.

scholarly journals Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s

1993 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A Margo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Time Series ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Disaggregated Data ◽  
United States Labor Market ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Promising Source

Recent research on labor markets in the 1930s has shifted attention from aggregate to disaggregate time series and towards microeconomic evidence. The paper begins by reviewing the conventional statistics of the United States labor market during the Great Depression and the paradigms to explain them. It then turns to recent studies of employment and unemployment using disaggregated data of various types. The paper concludes with discussions of research on other aspects of labor markets in the 1930s and on a promising source of microdata for future work.

scholarly journals The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States

2013 ◽  
Vol 103 (6) ◽  
pp. 2121-2168 ◽  
Author(s):  
David H Autor ◽  
David Dorn ◽  
Gordon H Hanson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Labor Force Participation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Manufacturing Industries ◽  
Import Competition ◽  
Local Labor Markets ◽  
Industry Specialization ◽  
Market Effects

We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets, exploiting cross-market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization and instrumenting for US imports using changes in Chinese imports by other high-income countries. Rising imports cause higher unemployment, lower labor force participation, and reduced wages in local labor markets that house import-competing manufacturing industries. In our main specification, import competition explains one-quarter of the contemporaneous aggregate decline in US manufacturing employment. Transfer benefits payments for unemployment, disability, retirement, and healthcare also rise sharply in more trade-exposed labor markets. (JEL E24, F14, F16, J23, J31, L60, O47, R12, R23)

scholarly journals Work Integration Social Enterprises in the United States: Operating at the Nexus of Public Policy, Markets, and Community

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 435-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Cooney
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Workforce Development ◽  
Market Integration ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Enterprises ◽  
Organizational Models ◽  
Work Integration

AbstractWork integration social enterprises (WISEs) in the United States represent a market based approach for workforce development and labor market integration that offer employment and training opportunities as well as bridges to the mainstream labor market. Historically developed to create separate spaces of work for populations considered less able to compete in mainstream labor markets, such as people with physical and developmental disabilities, as this article will show, WISEs have evolved to target other disadvantaged and marginalized communities such as individuals suffering from homelessness, youth disconnected from both school and labor markets, formerly incarcerated individuals seeking reentry into employment, and welfare recipients required to work for benefits or as benefits are timed out. This article traces the historic evolution of the WISE sector. The review highlights the ways in which the organizational model has been adapted in response to shifting social constructions about appropriate level of integration and employment norms for disadvantaged groups as well as the changing nature of jobs in the entry level labor market. Further, this paper illustrates that newer (non-disability related) WISE organizational models have different resource generation strategies compared to the older WISE models, may be more exposed to market forces in their social business niches, and must contend with the increased vulnerabilities faced by workers in an era of welfare safety net erosion.

scholarly journals Ambassadors in Overalls

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 31-44
Author(s):  
Matt Garcia
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
The United States ◽  
Farm Labor ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Guest Workers ◽  
Guest Worker ◽  
Bracero Program ◽  
Bilateral Agreement ◽  
The Future

In “Ambassadors in Overalls: Mexican Guest Workers and the Future of Labor,” Matt Garcia explores this the legacy of the Bracero Program, a bilateral agreement initiated in 1942 between the United States and Mexico that invited male Mexican nationals to do mostly farm labor in California and throughout the rest of the nation. Presumed to have ended in 1964, Garcia explores how guest worker programs of this type have continued to the present in multiple forms and in numerous countries. In the United States, they are often proposed as a solution to the problem of our broken immigration system in spite of a record of failure to ensure safe and fair working conditions for participants. Increasingly, Garcia argues, these programs are shaping the way we all live, work, and belong in this world.

Japanese Labor Economics as Economic Analysis

1972 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-609
Author(s):  
M. Bronfenbrenner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Economic History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Standard Analysis ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
History Of

A review article on two books, each of which proposes to apply standard economic anlaysis to an aspect of economic life (labor markets) and a society (Japan) where years of conventional wisdom has suggested that such analysis may be out of place. Robert Evans, Jr.'s Labor Economies of Japan and the United States compares numerous aspects of the allegedly impersonal labor market of the United States; he finds the differences surprisingly small and the parallels surprisingly large. Koji Taira's Economic Development and the Labor Market in Japan is primarily a series of studies in the quantitative economic history of Japan, concentrating upon the labor market. The two books overlap to a great extent, and combine to question if not overthrow the anti-economic notion that standard analysis is out of place in dealing with labor problems even in a country with the anti-economic traditions of pre-Meiji Japan.

Time’s Up! Shorter Hours, Public Policy, and Time Flexibility as an Antidote to Youth Unemployment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Eva Maich ◽  
Jamie K. McCallum ◽  
Ari Grant-Sasson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Youth Unemployment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Employment Relationships ◽  
Gig Economy ◽  
Hours Of Work ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Work Scheduling

This chapter explores the relationship between hours of work and unemployment. When it comes to time spent working in the United States at present, two problems immediately come to light. First, an asymmetrical distribution of working time persists, with some people overworked and others underemployed. Second, hours are increasingly unstable; precarious on-call work scheduling and gig economy–style employment relationships are the canaries in the coal mine of a labor market that produces fewer and fewer stable jobs. It is possible that some kind of shorter hours movement, especially one that places an emphasis on young workers, has the potential to address these problems. Some policies and processes are already in place to transition into a shorter hours economy right now even if those possibilities are mediated by an anti-worker political administration.

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