Michael Rubens is an Assistant Professor of Economics at UCLA and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research covers topics related to vertical contracting, monopsony/oligopsony power, and firm-level productivity.
Working Papers
(7) Welfare Effects of Buyer and Seller Power (with Mert Demirer)
(6) Estimating Factor Price Markdowns using Production Models (with Yingjie Wu and Mingzhi Xu)
February 2025 – PDF – Revise and Resubmit, International Journal of Industrial Organization (Special Issue EARIE 2024)
(5) Exploiting or Augmenting Labor? (with Yingjie Wu and Mingzhi Xu)
March 2025 – PDF Appendix – Conditionally Accepted, American Economic Review: Insights
(4) Labor Market Power and Factor-Biased Technology Adoption
July 2024 – PDF
Publications
(3) Colluding Against Workers (with Vincent Delabastita)
June 2025 – Journal of Political Economy, 133(6)
(2) Market Structure, Oligopsony Power, and Productivity
September 2023 – American Economic Review, 113(9) pp. 2382-2410
PDF Appendix Replication VoxDev Article
(1) Management, Productivity, and Technology Choices: Evidence from U.S. Mining Schools
March 2023 – RAND Journal of Economics, 54(1), pp. 165-186
In Progress
Conduct in U.S. Labor Markets (with Bradley Setzler and Chen Yeh )