Advanced Labour Economics

Course goals

Learning objectives
At the end of the course, the student is able to:

• Are familiar with some of the major theoretical models in labour economics;
• Are familiar with some of the recent developments in research designs for causal inference.

Content

This course focusses on inequality and labour relations. This series of lectures starts with a discussion of one dimension of inequality that have received much attention in the literature recently: the declining labor share. Explanations for a decline in the labor share are technological progress and the reallocation of workers towards superstar firms, globalisatiation, the rise of price markups, and de-unionisation. The course ends with a discussion of recent static and dynamic models of monopsony, when firms have wage-setting power. Overall, this course develops some of the major theoretical models to understand today’s labour markets. It also discusses recent research designs to evaluate these models, including event-study and instrumented difference-in-differences, shift-share IV, high-dimensional fixed-effects regressions, and welfare simulations of dynamic general equilibrium models when markets are distorted. In doing so, students are introduced to Stata and/or R, and programming in Python and/or Matlab.

In case online access is required for this course and you are not in the position to buy the access code, you are advised to contact the course coordinator for an alternative solution. Please note that access codes are not re-usable meaning that codes from second hand books do not work, as well as access codes from books with a different ISBN. Separate or spare codes are usually not available.