IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cep/cepdps/dp0158.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Are Workers Paid their Marginal Product? Evidence from a Low Wage Labour Market

Author

Listed:
  • Stephen Machin
  • Alan Manning
  • S Woodland

Abstract

Because of labour market frictions, the supply of labour to a firm does not fall instantaneously to zero if an employer cuts wages. This gives employers some monopsony power. In the absence of trade unions, minimum wages and efficiency wage considerations a profit-maximising employer will set a wage below the marginal revenue product of labour so that workers are, to use the terminology of Hicks and Pigou, exploited. This paper presents a method for computing the rate of exploitation. This method is then applied to a unique data set on workers in residential homes for the elderly on England's sunshine coast. We conclude that, on average, firms pay workers about 15% less than their marginal product.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephen Machin & Alan Manning & S Woodland, 1993. "Are Workers Paid their Marginal Product? Evidence from a Low Wage Labour Market," CEP Discussion Papers dp0158, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp0158
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Machin, Stephen & Manning, Alan, 2002. "The structure of wages in what should be a competitive labour market," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 20080, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    2. Giupponi, Giulia & Machin, Stephen, 2022. "Company wage policy in a low-wage labor market," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 117983, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    3. Machin, Stephen & Manning, Alan & Rahman, Lupin, 2002. "Where the minimum wage bites hard: the introduction of the UK national minimum wage to a low wage sector," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 20070, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    4. Richard Dickens & Stephen Machin & Alan Manning, 1994. "The Effects of Minimum Wages on Employment: Theory and Evidence from the US," NBER Working Papers 4742, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Ahlfeldt, Gabriel & Roth, Duncan & Seidel, Tobias, 2018. "The regional effects of Germany’s national minimum wage," CEPR Discussion Papers 13005, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    6. Margarita Katsimi & Sarantis Kalyvitis & Thomas Moutos, 2009. ""Unwarranted" Wage Changes and the Return on Capital," CESifo Working Paper Series 2804, CESifo.
    7. Dickens, Richard & Machin, Stephen & Manning, Alan, 1999. "The Effects of Minimum Wages on Employment: Theory and Evidence from Britain," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 17(1), pages 1-22, January.
    8. Ahlfeldt, Gabriel M. & Roth, Duncan & Seidel, Tobias, 2018. "The regional effects of Germany’s national minimum wage," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 172(C), pages 127-130.
    9. Gabriel Ahlfeldt & Duncan Roth & Tobias Seidel, 2018. "The Regional Effects of a National Minimum Wage," CESifo Working Paper Series 6924, CESifo.
    10. Stephen Machin & Alan Manning, 2004. "A Test of Competitive Labor Market Theory: The Wage Structure among Care Assistants in the South of England," ILR Review, Cornell University, ILR School, vol. 57(3), pages 371-385, April.
    11. Duncan Watson, 2000. "UK wage underpayment: implications for the minimum wage," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 32(4), pages 429-440.
    12. Peter Sunley & Ron Martin, 2000. "The Geographies of the National Minimum Wage," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 32(10), pages 1735-1758, October.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp0158. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/discussion-papers/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.