Abstract. The recent development of reliable guidelines for discourse structure annotation, and the resulting availability of corpora annotated for discourse structure, have made it possible to subject to rigorous empirical testing the claims of seminal theories about the impact of discourse structure on anaphora. We carried out an empirical investigation of the claims made in two models of the Global Focus-Grosz and Sidner's stack model and Walker's cache model-using a corpus of tutorial dialogues annotated according to Relational Discourse Analysis. We studied how these two models affect both the accessibility of the antecedents and the ambiguity of both pronouns and definite descriptions, examining a variety of stack and cache update strategies and of cache sizes, and paying special attention to the problem of antecedents contained in embedded segments. The best results for the stack model were obtained when dsps were only associated with intentional relations (i.e., excluding informational relations) and allowing embedded segments to remain on the stack as long as the superordinate segment was open. With the cache model, we found that cache size matters (if the size is less than 10, the model is too restrictive) and that the cache replacement strategy matters even more.

We propose a theory of how market power affects wage inequality. We ask how goods and labor market power jointly affect the level of wages, the Skill Premium, and wage inequality. We then use detailed microdata from the US Census between 1997 and 2016 to estimate the parameters of labor supply, technology and the market structure. We find that a less competitive market structure lowers the wage level, contributes 7% to the rise in the Skill Premium and accounts for half of the increase in between-establishment wage variance.

Wages for the vast majority of workers have stagnated since the 1980s while productivity has grown. We investigate two coexisting explanations based on rising market power: 1.Monopsony, where dominant firms exploit the limited mobility of their own workers to pay lower wages; and 2. Monopoly, where dominant firms charge too high prices for what they sell, which lowers production and the demand for labor, and hence equilibrium wages economy-wide. Using establishment data from the US Census Bureau between 1997 and 2016, we find evidence of both monopoly and monopsony, where the former is rising over this period and the latter is stable. Both contribute to the decoupling of productivity and wage growth, with monopoly being the primary determinant: in 2016 monopoly accounts for 75% of wage stagnation, monopsony for 25%.

Wages for the vast majority of workers have stagnated since the 1980s while productivity has grown. We investigate two coexisting explanations based on rising market power: 1. Monopsony, where dominant firms exploit the limited mobility of their own workers to pay lower wages; and 2. Monopoly, where dominant firms charge too high prices for what they sell, which lowers production and the demand for labor, and hence equilibrium wages economy-wide. Using establishment data from the US Census Bureau between 1997 and 2016, we find evidence of both monopoly and monopsony, where the former is rising over this period and the latter is stable. Both contribute to the decoupling of productivity and wage growth, with monopoly being the primary determinant: in 2016 monopoly accounts for 75% of wage stagnation, monopsony for 25%.