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How Would a Permanently Refundable Child and Dependent Care Credit Affect Eligibility, Benefits, and Incentives?
Monopsony in the U.S. Labor Market
This paper quantifies the extent to which the U.S. manufacturing labor market is characterized by employer market power and how such market power has changed over time. We find that the vast majority of U.S. manufacturing plants operate in a monopsonistic environment and, at least since the early 2000s, the labor market in U.S. manufacturing has become more monopsonistic. To reach this conclusion, we exploit rich administrative data for U.S. manufacturers and estimate plant-level markdowns—the ratio between a plant’s marginal revenue product of labor and its wage. In a competitive labor market, markdowns would be equal to unity. Instead, we find substantial deviations from perfect competition, as markdowns average 1.53. This result implies that a worker employed at the average manufacturing plant earns 65 cents on each dollar generated on the margin. To investigate long-term trends in employer market power, we propose a novel measure for the aggregate markdown that is consistent with aggregate wedges and also incorporates the local nature of labor markets. We find that the aggregate markdown decreased between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, but has been sharply increasing since
Grease or Grit?: International Case Studies of Occupational Licensing and Its Effects on Efficiency and Quality
The book provides a comprehensive approach to whether a dominant governmental institution in the labor market-occupational licensing-greases, which enhances, or on the other hand results in grit, which diminishes the efficient workings of labor and service markets in parts of Europe and the United States. The detailed case studies in the book indicate that an increase in the availability of service providers or enhanced competition does not have negative effects on the quality of the services provided, prices, or survey measures of consumer satisfaction.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1288/thumbnail.jp