Monopsony in the Low-Wage Labor Market? Evidence from Minimum Nurse Staffing Regulations

Jordan Matsudaira

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2014, vol. 96, issue 1, 92-102

Abstract: This paper provides direct evidence on the extent of monopsony power in the low-wage labor market by estimating the firm-level elasticity of labor supply for nurse aides in the long-term care (nursing home) industry. Using exogenous variation in hiring induced by the passage of a state minimum nurse staffing law, I find that facilities initially out of compliance with the new law did not have to raise their wage offers relative to their competitors in order to hire more nurses. While this is consistent with perfect competition in simple monopsony models of the labor market, I discuss how the results may be more ambiguous in more complicated models. © 2014 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: monopsony; labor; nursing; wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I18 J0 J42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (60)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00361 link to full text PDF (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:tpr:restat:v:96:y:2014:i:1:p:92-102

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().