scholarly journals Can Market Power Influence Employment, Wage Inequality and Growth?

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Bucci ◽  
Fabio Fiorillo ◽  
Stefano Staffolani
Keyword(s):  
1995 ◽  
Vol 110 (4) ◽  
pp. 1075-1110 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. J. Borjas ◽  
V. A. Ramey

2021 ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Eric A. Posner

Recent research indicates that labor market power has contributed to wage inequality and economic stagnation. Although the antitrust laws prohibit firms from restricting competition in labor markets as in product markets, the government does little to address the labor market problem, and private litigation has been rare and mostly unsuccessful. This is a particular problem for mergers, which the government has never reviewed for labor market effects. One reason is that the analytic methods for evaluating labor market power in antitrust contexts are less sophisticated than the legal rules used to judge product market power. To remedy this asymmetry, the government can draw on insights from labor economics and use tools that have been developed for measuring labor market concentration.


2003 ◽  
Vol 54 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 129-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Bucci ◽  
Fabio Fiorillo ◽  
Stefano Staffolani
Keyword(s):  

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Gibson

Despite what we learn in law school about the “meeting of the minds,” most contracts are merely boilerplate—take-it-or-leave-it propositions. Negotiation is nonexistent; we rely on our collective market power as consumers to regulate contracts’ content. But boilerplate imposes certain information costs because it often arrives late in the transaction and is hard to understand. If those costs get too high, then the market mechanism fails. So how high are boilerplate’s information costs? A few studies have attempted to measure them, but they all use a “horizontal” approach—i.e., they sample a single stratum of boilerplate and assume that it represents the whole transaction. Yet real-world transactions often involve multiple layers of contracts, each with its own information costs. What is needed, then, is a “vertical” analysis, a study that examines fewer contracts of any one kind but tracks all the contracts the consumer encounters, soup to nuts. This Article presents the first vertical study of boilerplate. It casts serious doubt on the market mechanism and shows that existing scholarship fails to appreciate the full scale of the information cost problem. It then offers two regulatory solutions. The first works within contract law’s unconscionability doctrine, tweaking what the parties need to prove and who bears the burden of proving it. The second, more radical solution involves forcing both sellers and consumers to confront and minimize boilerplate’s information costs—an approach I call “forced salience.” In the end, the boilerplate experience is as deep as it is wide. Our empirical work should reflect that fact, and our policy proposals should too.


The objective of this study was to empirically evaluate the returns to education of rural and urban labour markets workers in Tamil Nadu using the IHDS data with appropriate Econometric models. First, the present study estimated the earning functions of the rural and urban market's workers by OLS technique and standard Mincerian earning functions. Secondly, the quantile regression method was also used to examine the evolution of wage inequality. The findings of the study showed that the effects of education and experience on the log of hourly wages were positive, and these coefficients were statistically significant. The returns to education increased with the level of education and differed among the workers of rural and urban labour markets. The results showed that the rates of returns to primary, middle and higher secondary were higher in the urban market, whereas those of secondary and graduation were higher in the rural market. The study revealed that the effect of education was not the same across the rural and urban wage distribution. The rate of returns differed considerably within education groups across different quantiles of the wage distribution.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document