Measuring and Modeling Market Power in the Labor Market
The labor market is in the forefront of research on market power and imperfect competition. It is also receiving newfound attention from antitrust regulators. Labor market frictions, job differentiation, employer concentration, and employer collusion have become central, and often competing, considerations in the study of wage markdowns, variation in the labor share, earnings inequality, and the allocative efficiency of the labor market. While there is a rapidly growing body of research on these questions, it is siloed. Researchers in labor economics, industrial organization, and macroeconomics each bring their own questions, methods, and even language to these topics.
To encourage conversation across these sub-fields within economics and to support progress toward a synthesis of measuring and modeling labor market power, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) will host a one-day meeting in Cambridge, MA, on Friday, May 14, 2027. NBER affiliates David Berger, Allan Collard-Wexler, and Gregor Jarosch (Duke University) and Thibaut Lamadon (University of Chicago) will organize the program. The conference will begin with a dinner on the preceding evening, Thursday, May 13.
Topics of particular interest for the conference include, but are not limited to:
- The sources of imperfect competition in the labor market: specialized worker skills, search frictions, job differentiation and amenities, mobility costs, and information frictions.
- The measurement of competition in the labor market: wage markdowns, labor supply elasticities and concentration, firm conduct, market definition, worker flows and labor market tightness.
- The incidence of competition in the labor market: its consequences for market efficiency, wages, inequality, the labor share, and rent sharing between workers and firms.
- Policy responses to labor market power, including minimum wages, unions, antitrust enforcement, and promotion of other sources of countervailing power.
The organizers welcome submissions of both empirical and theoretical research, including papers by scholars who are early in their careers and who are not NBER affiliates. Authors who would like their papers considered for inclusion on the program should upload them by 11:59pm EST on Wednesday, January 13, 2027, via the following link:
Papers that will be published by May 2027 are not eligible for presentation. Please be aware that papers presented at NBER conferences may not make policy recommendations or offer normative judgements on policy. The NBER will notify the authors of papers that will be on the program by February 5, 2027, and it will invite all co-authors to attend the conference. Please address questions about this conference to confer@nber.org.