노동시장론 (Labor Market Theory)
What this domain tests
노동시장론 examines how wages and employment are determined, how workers search, and why unemployment persists. Expect graph-based reasoning, elasticity questions, and identification of which unemployment type or model applies.
Core rules and concepts
- Labor supply: the income effect and substitution effect can produce a backward-bending supply curve; the reservation wage is the minimum acceptable offer.
- Labor demand: derived demand based on marginal revenue product. Demand is more elastic when product demand is elastic, substitutes are available, and labor costs are a large share of total costs.
- Human capital: Becker distinguishes general training (portable) from firm-specific training (shared costs and returns).
- Signaling: Spence explains education as a signal when ability is unobserved.
- Compensating wage differentials: Adam Smith's idea that unpleasant or risky jobs pay more.
- Segmented labor markets: Doeringer and Piore's dual market; efficiency-wage models (Shapiro-Stiglitz) explain pay above equilibrium.
- Unemployment: frictional, structural, cyclical, and seasonal; natural rate; Okun's law; Beveridge curve; discouraged-worker effect.
Worked example
In a competitive labor market, a minimum wage above equilibrium reduces employment. In a monopsony, the employer faces an upward-sloping labor supply and marginal factor cost above the wage. A minimum wage set up to the competitive level can raise both wages and employment by limiting monopsonistic restriction. The reasoning: the minimum wage removes the employer's incentive to restrict hiring to hold wages down.
Traps that cost marks
Claiming minimum wages always destroy jobs; confusing the natural rate with cyclical unemployment; and mixing nominal and real wages when comparing over time.