Michael Rubens is an Assistant Professor of Economics at UCLA. He works in the fields of industrial organization and labor economics.
His research agenda aims to increase the understanding of the drivers and consequences of market power in vertically related industries and on factor markets.
Working Papers
(7) Welfare Effects of Buyer and Seller Power (with Mert Demirer)
February 2025 – PDF – NBER Working Paper 33371
(6) Estimating Factor Price Markdowns using Production Models (with Yingjie Wu and Mingzhi Xu)
February 2025 – PDF
(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 – NBER Working Paper 30586
Publications
(3) Colluding Against Workers (with Vincent Delabastita)
July 2024 – Forthcoming, Journal of Political Economy
(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 )