Job Market Paper

Labor Market Concentration Does Not Explain the Falling Labor Share

Using U.S. administrative data, this paper shows that the employment-weighted average labor market concentration has been declining since 1980 - the opposite of the change needed to explain the falling labor share. The relationship between wages and labor market concentration has also attenuated over that time. Together, these results make labor market concentration an implausible driver of the falling labor share despite a strong, negative relationship between labor market concentration and wages.

Also available from IDEAS/RePEc here.

Other Working Papers

The Economic and Social Effects of Private Equity Over the Cycle (with Steven J. Davis, John Haltiwanger, Kyle Handley, Josh Lerner, and Javier Mirdanda)

This paper examines multiple indications of the social impact of private equity investments, including changing employment levels, reallocation of jobs, wages and productivity, and how they vary over the economic cycle. We focus on roughly 5100 transactions involving 6.4 million employees between 1980 and 2011 in the United States. There are few differences in employment levels and wages between the target firms and similar control firms, except in buyouts that are followed by substantial stock market drops, in which cases employment declines more at the bought-out firms. Buyouts introduce significantly greater employment churn, but these effects are ameliorated when economic conditions deteriorate.

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