Concentration in US labor markets: Evidence from online vacancy data
By Jose Azar, Ioana Marinescu, Marshall Steinbaum, Bledi Taska. Labour Economics, 2020
257 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Using data on the near-universe of online US job vacancies collected by Burning Glass Technologies in 2016, we calculate labor market concentration using the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) for each commuting zone by 6-digit SOC occupation. The average market has an HHI of 3,953, or the equivalent of 2.5 recruiting employers. 54% of labor markets are highly concentrated (above 2,500 HHI) according to the DOJ/FTC guidelines. Highly concentrated markets account for 17% of employment. All plausible alternative market definitions show that more than 33% of markets are highly concentrated, suggesting that employers have market power in many US labor markets.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9bb5d4af4a68e7c228f354a23ad966b6b1d5d486
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In Economics and Econometrics
- Gene M. Grossman
- Ezra Oberfield
- Arnaud Costinot
- Pol Antràs
- Giovanni Peri
- Jonathan Vogel
- Esteban Rossi-Hansberg
- Richard E. Baldwin
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- The Elusive Explanation for the Declining Labor Share (2021, background): “Azar et al. (2020a, 2020b) use data from online job postings to show an inverse correlation between real wages and market concentration.”
- Engineering Value: The Returns to Technological Talent and Investments in Artificial Intelligence (2019, unknown): “More traditionally, monopsony power can be related to employer concentration (Azar et al. 2018; Benmelech, Bergman, and Kim 2018) and financial constraints also affect hiring decisions (Benmelech, Bergman, and Seru 2011).”