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) Labor Market Power and Factor-Biased Technology Adoption
July 2024 – PDF
Published and Accepted
(4) Exploiting or Augmenting Labor? (with Yingjie Wu and Mingzhi Xu)
American Economic Review: Insights, Conditionally Accepted Pending Replication, March 2025
(3) Colluding Against Workers (with Vincent Delabastita)
Journal of Political Economy, 133(6) pp. 1796-1839, June 2025
(2) Market Structure, Oligopsony Power, and Productivity
American Economic Review, 113(9) pp. 2382-2410, September 2023
PDF Appendix Replication VoxDev Article
(1) Management, Productivity, and Technology Choices: Evidence from U.S. Mining Schools
RAND Journal of Economics, 54(1), pp. 165-186 , March 2023
In Progress
Conduct in U.S. Labor Markets (with Bradley Setzler and Chen Yeh )