Research

• Unions, Industrial Concentration, and Economic Rents: How the Wagner Act increased wages during the 1930s

The Wagner Act changed the relative bargaining power between firms and workers which allowed workers to capture economic rents generated by frictions in both labor and product markets. The Wagner Act caused wages for production workers to increase and reduced wage inequality between production workers and management in highly concentrated industries.

• Monopsony power in the United States: Evidence from the Great Depression. 2024. Explorations in Economic History, 92 (April): 101570. 

Using plant-level data from the Census of Manufactures between 1929 and 1935, I construct a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of local labor market concentration at the State-Economic-Area-by-industry-by-occupation level. I find that local labor market concentration has a negative relationship with wages which is consistent with labor market monopsony power. 

• Estimates of employment gains attributable to beer legalization in spring 1933.  2022. Explorations in Economic History, 84 (April): 101427. (with Eline Poelmans, Jason E. Taylor, and Samuel Raisanen)

In April 1933, eight months prior to the end of Prohibition, states within the US gained the ability to legalize 3.2 percent alcohol beer. We estimate that around 5.6 percent of nationwide non-agricultural spring employment gains, and around 15 percent of April job gains, were associated with beer legalization, when the nation emerged from the trough of the Great Depression.