Models of "modern monopsony" based on job differentiation and/or search frictions seem to give employers non-negligible market power over their workers while avoiding the assumption of "classical monopsony" that employers are large in relation to the size of the labour market that many labour economists find implausible. But, this paper argues that this is somewhat of an illusion because modern theories of monopsony do assume that labour markets are "thin", although in a more subtle way than the classical models. The paper also argues that there is evidence that labour markets are "thin" in a way that gives employers some market power over their workers. It presents a model that combines both the job differentiation and search models of modern monopsony and derives predictions about the relationship between wages and commuting. The paper uses UK data to argue that there is good evidence for these predictions: that there is a robust correlation between wages and commuting distance that is the result of worker job search in a thin labour market, that those with longer commutes are not, on average, fully compensated for them and that there is substantial "wasteful" commuting.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Centre for Economic Performance, LSE in its series CEP Discussion Papers with number
dp0564.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Small, K.A. & Gomez-Ibanez, J.A., 1996.
"Urban Transportation,"
Papers
95-96-4, California Irvine - School of Social Sciences.
Other versions:
Small, Kenneth A. & Gomez-Ibanez, Jose A., 1999.
"Urban transportation,"
Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics,
in: P. C. Cheshire & E. S. Mills (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 46, pages 1937-1999
Elsevier.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Jan K. Brueckner & Jacques-FranÁois Thisse & Yves Zenou, 2002.
"Local Labor Markets, Job Matching, and Urban Location,"
International Economic Review,
Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 43(1), pages 155-171, February.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.