劳动力市场力量、出口价格与传递效应
No2025-15 – November Labor Market Power, Export Pricesand Pass-through Malik Curuk,Jérôme Héricourt & Gonzague Vannoorenberghe Highlights Estimating the effects of goods and labor market power on firm pricing behavior is difficult since firm-leveloutput and employment are jointly determined. We separately identify the effects of goods and labor market power on pass-through rates. We present a theoretical framework in which multi-destination exporters are oligopolists in their goodsmarkets and oligopsonists in their local labor market. Combining firm-level export data per product-destination with establishment-level balance sheet data andemployment zone identifiers for the universe of French firms from 1995 to 2015, we construct theoreticallysound proxies for labor and goods market power and jointly estimate their effects on export prices using We provide robust evidence that firms with stronger labor market power have a lower pass-through ofchanges in their effective exchange rate into export prices conditional on their goods market power in the Abstract Estimating the effects of goods and labor market power on firm pricing behavior is difficult since firm-level output andemployment are jointly determined. We exploit the variation in the sets of destination countries across exporting firms,which enables us to separately identify the effects of goods and labor market power on pass-through rates by reducingthe comovement of firm size across specific sales markets and in its local labor market. We present a theoreticalframework in which multi-destination exporters are oligopolists in their goods markets and oligopsonists in theirlocal labor market. Combining firm-level trade data per product-destination with establishment-level balance sheetdata and employment zone identifiers for the universe of French firms from 1995 to 2015, we construct theoretically Keywords Labor Market Power, Goods Market Power, Exchange Rate, Pass-through. JEL F16, F31, J42. Working Paper Labor Market Power, Export Prices and Pass-through Malik CurukJ´erˆome H´ericourt 1Introduction There has been a recent surge of interest in the implications of labor market power on firm-level outcomes and recent macroeconomic trends (Syverson (2024)).Oligopsonistic labormarkets imply that dominant firms pay wages lower than the marginal revenue product of labor and that the transmission of productivity gains into wages is incomplete.Hence,changes in labor market power may have sizable effects on the labor share, allocative ef-ficiency, inequality, and wage dynamics (Berger et al. (2022), Deb et al. (2022, 2024)).1 In this paper, we combine French customs data on firm-level exports per product-destinationpair with local labor market identifiers for the universe of French firms from 1995 to 2015.We observe firms’ prices (unit values) and relative sales shares in different export markets, CEPII Working Paper proxying for goods market power, as well as employment shares in their local labor market,proxying for labor market power.In our setup, the differences in the degree of export in-tensity and the set of sales markets across exporting firms limit the correlation between therelative size of the firm in the labor market and in a particular export market. Hence, we To guide our empirical analysis, we present a theoretical framework highlighting thedeterminants of the pricing decisions of multidestination exporters, which operate in imper-fectly competitive goods and labor markets. Our model rests on three main pillars. First,workers self-select into firms based on their comparative advantage `a la Roy (1951), leading to upward-sloping labor supply curves for each firm. Second, local labor markets are partiallysegmented and oligopsonistically competitive. The level and elasticity of the markdowns areincreasing in the employment share of a firm in its local labor market (cf. MacKenzie (2021); Berger et al. (2022)). Third, firms engage in oligopolistic competition in the goods marketsas in Atkeson and Burstein (2008) and the markup is increasing in the sales share of a firmin a particular export market. In this setup, the responses of firm prices to demand shocksare correlated across different sales markets via the common cost component due to upward- To assess the prevalence of oligopsony in the labor markets, we use micro-level admin-istrative data from 1995 to 2015 on the exports of French manufacturing firms for eachproduct-destination pair, combined with employment data at the establishment level.We proxy thelabor market powerof a firm by its employment share in its sector-employmentzone pair as implied by our model.3The share of exports of a firm in the total French exports labor market power pass-through firm-leveleffective exchange rateshocks into their exportprices to a lower extent conditional on their goods market power. We find that a monop-sonist in its local labor market with a negligible share in its sales mark
