Monopsony in the US Labor Market
利用行政数据估算美国制造业工厂的加价率，发现多数工厂存在买方垄断，工人仅获得其边际产出的65%；提出总量加价率指标，显示1970年代末至2000年代初下降，之后急剧上升。
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 and its wage. We find most manufacturing plants operate in a monopsonistic environment, with an average markdown of 1.53, implying a worker earning only 65 cents on the marginal dollar generated. To investigate long-term trends for the entire sector, we propose a novel, theoretically grounded measure for the aggregate markdown. We find that it decreased between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, but has been sharply increasing since.