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Monopsonistic Discrimination and the Gender Wage Gap

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Abstract

Monopsonistic discrimination refers to a situation in which employers differentiate pay between groups of workers who exhibit different elasticities of labour supply. The concept of dynamic monopsony has revived the idea of monopsonistic discrimination in the labour market. As there are frictions in the job-to-job mobility of workers, firms may exercise market power even in labour markets with thousands of employers. If there are more frictions in the labour market for women than for men, a gender wage gap may arise as employers exploit this difference and segment their pay policy towards each gender.

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Barth, E. (2018). Monopsonistic Discrimination and the Gender Wage Gap. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_3010

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