@ Ger...

Relacionado com uma conversa que tivemos na passagem de ano:

(...)Moreover, in the perfect competition model, no single firm has the power to determine the wage; it simply accepts the wage that the market as a whole has determined, and that is what it offers to its workers. In this model, workers are extremely wage-sensitive, so much so that if any single firm cuts wages by even one cent, all the workers at that firm will immediately quit and find employment elsewhere.
In the monopsony model, however, the theory is that the employer has what is known as "market power," and therefore is not a "wage-taker" (i.e., doesn't have to offer the market wage). In this model, it is assumed that it's the employer, not the market, which sets the wage. Therefore, in the monopsony case, the employer will offer below-market wages. And moreover, it's assumed that the source of the firm's market power are forces that bind an employee to an employer, so that if wages were cut, at least some of the employees would stay.
What are the forces -- or frictions -- that prevent workers from automatically quitting if wages were cut? Frictions include the search costs of getting a new job, incomplete information about what other jobs might be available, mobility costs (the costs of traveling to a new job), personal preferences (such as strongly preferring a certain type of work, or one's co-workers, or a benefit offered by the job), and the firm-specific training and skills that a worker may have.
If you ask me, the monopsony model is clearly a better fit for the way the world works than perfect competition is. The assumptions of the perfect competition model -- complete information, zero mobility costs, employees being so wage-sensitive that they'd all quit even if their employer cut their wages by only one cent -- seem unreasonable (and I say that knowing that, yes, for simplicity's sake, all models have features that seem unrealistic. Even so . . . ) On the other hand, the assumptions of the monopsony model -- that employers set wages, and that there are important frictions in the labor market -- seem highly plausible, at least in the case of most employment situations.
It's a far more persuasive model, I think, and here's the reason: it models power, in this case, the power that employers have over employees. The Achilles heel of neoclassical economics is that the concept of power is almost never incorporated into its theories and models. And that is just a huge intellectual shortcoming. In the standard labor market model, for example, the employer/employee relationship is seen as symmetric, with neither being more powerful than the other. Each has the equivalent power to terminate the relationship if a better offer comes along. Which is just so wrong, on so many levels.(...)


Retirado daqui via o indespensável vento sueste

Já agora, uma breve explicação da crise dos mercados financeiros por um matemático