Thesis
A Balancing Act: An Empirical Analysis of Unions and Monopsony Power in US Labor Markets
In my senior year of undergrad, I joined the Economics Department’s highly selective honors thesis program. Advised by Dr. Ethan Kaplan, I embarked upon an investigation of CPS MORG data and what light it could shed on the differences in the union wage premium in monposonistic vs competitive labor markets.
The first empirical examination of unions and monoposony using US data.
Abstract
This paper empirically examines the intersection of recent literature regarding the effect on wages of both labor market concentration and unionization. It estimates that union members in a perfectly concentrated labor market encounter a wage premium 21 percentage points higher than their counterparts in a perfectly competitive labor market. This analysis uses a fixed-effects model controlling for both occupation and geographical area, applied to a combination of 2016 Current Population Survey data and labor market concentration data derived from the universe of online job postings in the United States. These results can inform union strategy and provide evidence for the effectiveness of unions in counteracting concentration-related wage declines.
