Overview
Alan Manning is a professor of economics at the London School of Economics (LSE) and one of the leading labor economists in the UK and globally. He is best known for developing the modern economics of monopsony in labor markets, particularly through his book Monopsony in Motion (2003), which revived and extended monopsony theory to explain a wide range of labor market phenomena including job search frictions, wage dispersion, and employer market power. He has also contributed extensively to the economics of the minimum wage, immigration, and wage inequality.
Key Contributions / Features
- Author of Monopsony in Motion: Imperfect Competition in Labor Markets (Princeton UP, 2003), the foundational modern treatment of labor market monopsony.
- Co-authored Autor, Manning, and Smith (2016), reassessing Lee (1999)'s OLS estimate of the minimum wage's contribution to US wage inequality using IV methods; showed the OLS estimate is severely upward-biased due to transitory shock and omitted variable bias.
- Extensive work on the UK National Minimum Wage, including evaluation of its employment and distributional effects.
- Research on immigration and labor market adjustment, job search models with employer wage-setting power, and gender wage gaps.
- Former head of the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at LSE.
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