Exploiting or Augmenting Labor?

We show that existing “production approaches” to markdown estimation do not separately identify factor price markdowns from factor-augmenting productivity levels. We propose a method to overcome this challenge and apply it to study the effects of ownership liberalization in Chinese nonferrous metal industries. We find that private firms have much higher labor-augmenting productivity levels than state-owned enterprises (SOEs). However, we also find that private firms exert higher monopsony power over their workers than SOEs, although this only holds for domestically owned firms. This suggests that privatization policies imply a trade-off between increased productivity and monopsony power. (JEL D24, F23, J42, L33, L61, L72, P31)