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The Effects of Labor Market Power: A Firm Exit Approach
December 2024 [pdf]
This paper investigates how employer concentration affects wages using restricted‐access Census microdata. I draw on the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) to measure establishment‐level attributes, then will link those records to the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program at the establishment level via probabilistic merging on location, payroll, and employment in order to see worker-level earnings and characteristics. The theoretical framework is a granular search model in which higher concentration increases monopsony power, thereby putting downward pressure on wages. Empirically, I exploit exit events as an instrument for local labor market concentration: when a multi‐establishment firm exits, this exogenous shift alters local employment concentration but is plausibly orthogonal to contemporaneous labor‐demand shocks. By using LBD‐identified multi‐establishment exits to instrument concentration, and controlling for time‐varying local demand factors, I isolate the causal impact of concentration on surviving establishments’ wages. Leveraging Census microdata overcomes endogeneity concerns common to monopsony settings. The resulting estimates will clarify the magnitude of wage effects stemming from variations in employer concentration and contribute to understanding how market structure shapes worker outcomes.