Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-22-2019

Publication Title

The Antitrust Bulletin

Volume

64

Issue

4

Publisher Name

Sage

Abstract

Guest workers on visas in the United States may be unable to quit bad employers due to barriers to mobility and a lack of labor market competition. Using H-1B, H-2A, and H-2B program data, we calculate the concentration of employers in geographically defined labor markets within occupations. We find that many guest workers face moderately or highly concentrated labor markets, based on federal merger scrutiny guidelines, and that concentration generally decreases wages. For example, moving from a market with a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of zero to a market comprised of two employers lowers H-1B worker wages approximately 10%, and a pure monopsony (one employer) reduces wages by 13%. A simulation shows that wages under pure monopsony could be 47% lower, suggesting that employers do not use the full extent of their monopsony power. Enforcing wage regulations and decreasing barriers to mobility may better address issues of exploitation than antitrust scrutiny alone.

Comments

Author Posting © Sage, 2019. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Sage for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Antitrust Bulletin, Volume 64, Issue 4, September 2019. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003603X19875040

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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