Employer Concentration and Outside Options
(with Gregor Schubert and Bledi Taska)
Abstract: We study the effect of within-occupation employer concentration and outside-occupation job options on wages in the US, identifying outside-occupation options using new occupational mobility data from 16 million resumes. Using shift-share instruments to identify plausibly exogenous local variation, we find that moving from the median to 95th percentile of employer concentration reduces wages by 3.9% on average and by 11.3% for the occupations in the lowest quartile of outward mobility -- those for whom the local occupation is a good approximation to their true labor market. We also find meaningful effects of changes in the value of outside-occupation job options on wages: an exogenous 1 percentage point higher wage in outside option occupations leads to a 0.1% higher wage in workers' own occupation. Our findings imply that employer concentration affects a non-trivial minority of workers, that policymakers should take the effects of employer concentration seriously for these workers, and that when identifying labor markets where employer concentration may be a concern, measures of employer concentration within an occupation should be considered alongside occupational mobility and the availability of outside-occupation options.
Related things:
Occupational mobility data set (updated version 2021/01/05. Please email if questions - & let us know if you're using this data, we'd love to hear what it's useful for. NB: you will need to unzip using 7-Zip or equivalent.)
Policy brief on employer concentration with the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, article at ProMarket, research summary by UCLA Anderson Management Review
Older versions (WCEG working paper Jan 2021,old Tweet thread summary)