This paper quantifies employer market power in US manufacturing and how it has changed over time. Using administrative data, we estimate plant-level markdowns—the ratio between a plant’s marginal revenue product of labor its wage. We find most plants operate monopsonistic environment, with an average markdown 1.53, implying worker earning only 65 cents on the dollar generated. To investigate lo...

A common view in the literature is that the director labor market provides an ex post settling-up for past decisions by rewarding CEO ability and actions that are consistent with shareholder interests. In this paper we focus on large CEO acquisition decisions to investigate whether the director labor market offers ex post settling-up for value destroying decisions. Prior studies have found that...

Determining the effects of labor institutions on macroeconomic performance is a central concern of economic policymakers. Differences in labor institutions have been conjectured to be a key explanation for observed crosscountry differences in the level and persistence of unemployment, in the distribution of income and wealth, and in growth rates for labor productivity and GDP. European OECD cou...

In this paper, we examine whether the imperfections in the credit market spill over to the labor market. We examine the case of a country that experienced a very high degree of imperfections in the financial markets, but underwent substantial changes in 1992 due to the liberalization brought by the European unification and other institutional changes. Italy is therefore a good laboratory to stu...