Ihsaan Bassier

About

I am a postdoctoral research economist working with Alan Manning at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I work in the field of labour, mainly on firm wage-setting power and inequality. I will be starting as a lecturer (assistant professor) at the University of Surrey in September 2024.

My job market paper (currently R&R at JEEA) investigates how collective bargaining affects the broader wage structure, using a decade of matched tax data in South Africa merged with a novel dataset of bargaining council agreements. I find sizeable direct effects on covered firms as well as wage spillovers on non-covered firms, and frame this in a model of monopsonistic competition in local labor markets. 

I have several co-authored works in progress, which follow a research agenda on firm wage-setting power. My work has been published in the Journal of Human Resources, the Journal of Development Economics, and World Development. I am broadly interested in the role of firms in wage inequality, including its measurement and implications for unions, development, and group inequality. 

I am also an affiliate of SALDRU at the University of Cape Town, where I have conducted policy work for the South African presidency. I received my PhD (Sept. 2017-2022) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, under my primary advisor Arindrajit Dube.