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.

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Working Papers

(7) Welfare Effects of Buyer and Seller Power (with Mert Demirer)

February 2025 – PDF NBER WP

(6) Estimating Factor Price Markdowns using Production Models (with Yingjie Wu and Mingzhi Xu)

February 2025 – PDFRevise 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

PDF Appendix

(3) Colluding Against Workers (with Vincent Delabastita)

Journal of Political Economy, 133(6) pp. 1796-1839, June 2025

PDF Appendix Replication

(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

PDF Appendix Replication

In Progress

Conduct in U.S. Labor Markets (with Bradley Setzler and Chen Yeh )