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The Effects of Labor Market Power: A National Firm Exit Approach
June 2026 [pdf]
This paper studies how labor market concentration affects wages using firm exit as a laboratory by separating two channels: a market-structure channel, by which higher concentration widens employer markdowns, and an aggregate-demand channel, by which the loss of a producer shifts the marginal revenue product of labor at surviving firms. Using the oligopsony model of Berger, Herkenhoff, and Mongey (2022), I show that the wage decomposes additively into these components, and that because both scale with the exiting firm’s size, estimators that do not hold demand fixed attribute demand-driven wage changes to market power. The mechanical change in concentration implied by pre-exit shares provides variation in market structure that is orthogonal to the demand shock once the exiter’s employment share is controlled for; instrumenting concentration with this predicted change identifies the market-structure effect. A Monte Carlo exercise confirms the strategy recovers the structural elasticity where naive estimators do not. I then describe its application to restricted-access U.S. Census microdata featuring national firm exits. Empirical results are pending disclosure review.