Labor market impact of the proposed Sprint–T-Mobile merger

In this paper, we draw upon a nascent but fast-growing empirical economics literature on the earnings effect of labor market concentration to estimate how the Sprint–T-Mobile merger would affect earnings of workers at the US stores that sell the wireless services of the merging firms and their competitors. We find that the merger would reduce earnings in the affected labor markets. Specifically, in the 50 most affected labor markets, we predict that weekly earnings will decline by $63 on average (across markets) using the specification with the largest magnitude, and $10 on average using the smallest-magnitude specification. These weekly earnings declines correspond to annual earnings declines of as high as $3,276 (or $520 under the smallest-magnitude specification).