Conference Agenda

The nonprofit sector employs roughly 10% of the American workforce, many of whom work in the same industries as similar for-profit counterparts. To what extent do firms’ nonprofit tax status affect the pay of their employees? We construct a novel merge between firm tax and earnings records, covering the near-universe of US workers in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, to unpack the nature of nonprofit pay differences in the labor market. We first find that nonprofit workers typically have lower earnings than their for-profit counterparts. We then estimate an AKM worker-firm job ladder model to show that this “pay penalty” reflects causal differences in firm-level earnings premia, rather than differential selection of workers across sectors. We document rich heterogeneity in earnings premia and worker selection across industries, and show that nonprofit and for-profit earnings have been converging over time.

In December 2017, the government of Türkiye announced a comprehensive ban on the procurement of outsourced services by public institutions and mandated that all workers providing such services be transitioned into permanent public positions within six months. We study the labor-market consequences of this abrupt and large-scale policy change using an administrative, linked employer–employee dataset. We find that workers who transitioned into public employment experienced higher wages and improved job security. At the firm level, private service providers with greater exposure to the reform faced sharp employment contractions, declines in productivity and profitability. In contrast, municipal-owned enterprises that internalized service provision became more productive and profitable. We also document modest positive spillovers in local labor markets, including wage gains and reduced turnover among low-skilled private-sector workers. Overall, our results highlight that the outsourcing ban triggered a reallocation of rents away from private service providers toward workers and public employers.

This paper examines how a major Peruvian labor-market reform reallocates rents among firms, workers, and the state when employers possess wage-setting power and workers can exit into informality. It studies the shift from a preferential agrarian regime with low profit taxes and reduced non-wage labor costs to a more pro-worker package that raised taxes, strengthened benefits and protections, and curtailed outsourcing. First, I estimate difference-in-differences and event-study models using ENAHO and EEA to document changes in wages, employment, and the wage–benefit–amenity bundle, and to track worker reallocation across the special regime, the general formal regime, and informality. Second, I develop and estimate a structural model that combines oligopsonistic wage posting with a regime-level discrete-choice model of heterogeneous workers. The model recovers labor-supply elasticities, markdowns, and preference heterogeneity, then decomposes incidence and welfare effects by worker type and outside options. Counterfactuals compare observed outcomes to competitive wages and quantify revenue changes.

This paper leverages a large minimum wage reform in Uruguay to study the effects of minimum wages on the distribution of firm wage premia. The reform significantly decreased wage inequality, mainly by reducing between-firm inequality. AKM and time-varying AKM analyses reveal a large compression in the distribution of firm fixed effects after the reform, driven by an increase in the fixed effects of low-premium firms. Firm-level and worker-level difference-in-differences analyses document a causal effect of the reform on the compression of firm fixed effects. Results suggest minimum wages can increase the supply of “good jobs” by “making bad jobs better”.