Monopsony Power and Wages: Evidence from the Introduction of Serfdom in Denmark

Kathryn Gary, Peter Jensen, Mats Olsson (), Cristina Victoria Radu, Battista Severgnini and Paul Sharp

The Economic Journal, 2022, vol. 132, issue 648, 2835-2872

Abstract: We exploit a large historical shock to the Danish labour market to provide evidence of how restrictions on labour mobility increase monopsony power and thereby reduce wages. By severely limiting the possibility of the rural population to work beyond their place of birth, the reintroduction of serfdom in 1733 aimed to increase monopsony power and secure cheaper labour in the countryside. Using a unique data source based on the archives of estates from the eighteenth century, we test whether serfdom affected the wages of farmhands more strongly than other groups in the labour market, and results based on a difference-in-differences approach reveal evidence consistent with a strong negative effect following its introduction. This is confirmed when we use a different control group from the Swedish province of Scania. We also investigate whether one mechanism was that boys with rural backgrounds were prevented from taking up apprenticeships in towns and find suggestive evidence that this was indeed the case.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/ueac037 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:econjl:v:132:y:2022:i:648:p:2835-2872.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Economic Journal is currently edited by Francesco Lippi

More articles in The Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press () and ().