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Essays On Labor Economics Dynamic Decision Making And The Role Of Gender
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Book Synopsis Essays on Labor Economics, Dynamic Decision Making and the Role of Gender by : Boryana Antonova Ilieva
Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics, Dynamic Decision Making and the Role of Gender written by Boryana Antonova Ilieva and published by . This book was released on 2023* with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Englische Version: The topic of this thesis is the heterogeneity in labor market outcomes over the life cycle and across gender. The thesis comprises three independent research papers (Chapters 2-4), which focus on complementary aspects of the overreaching research question: how do employment choices determine earnings, and what role does the gender component play? Chapter 1 introduces the topic of wage and gender gaps and how these stand related to employment choices. Chapter 2 analyzes data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the Panel's Innovation Sample and investigates the role of biases in beliefs. It relates misperceptions about the labor market remuneration of years spent working part-time to the women's propensity to engage in part-time employment and the consequent earnings losses. Chapter 3 adds the dimension of career development. It posits that part-time penalties in experience accumulation decrease the chances of being promoted and that promotions are important sources of wage growth. In sum, the analysis shows that part-time wage penalties have two key components - hampered career progression to higher-paying career levels and stagnating wage growth regardless of career level. The final chapter adds to the discussion on solutions to a longstanding challenge in empirical labor economics posed by the selection bias in wages observed by econometricians. It contributes a novel non-parametric estimator of the selection-free cumulative distribution wage function. This chapter leverages administrative data records from Germany to show how the estimator can be applied in estimating a selection-corrected distribution of gender wage gaps.
Book Synopsis Essays on the role of gender and groups in economic decision making by : Jay Alan Schwarz
Download or read book Essays on the role of gender and groups in economic decision making written by Jay Alan Schwarz and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Diverse Essays in Labor Economics by : Catherine Jean Weinberger
Download or read book Diverse Essays in Labor Economics written by Catherine Jean Weinberger and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Essays in Labor Economics by : Robert Scott Fletcher
Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Robert Scott Fletcher and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays on labor economics. In the first chapter, co-authored with Nicholas Bloom and Mihai Codreanu, we run randomized controlled trials on a panel of 7,300 small U.S. firms to test if we can improve their sales forecasting. At baseline, only 17.4% of entrepreneurs can forecast their firm's sales over the next three months within 10% of the realized value, with 1% of the mean squared error attributable to bias and the remaining 99% attributable to noise. Our first intervention rewards entrepreneurs up to $400 for accurate forecasts, our second requires respondents to review historical sales data, and our third provides forecasting training. Increased reward payments significantly reduce bias but do not affect noise, despite successfully making entrepreneurs spend more time thinking about their predictions. The historical sales data intervention does not affect bias but significantly reduces noise. Since bias is only a minor part of overall forecasting errors, we find that the reward payments have small effects on mean squared error, while the historical data intervention reduces it by 12.4%. The training intervention has negligible effects on bias, noise, and mean squared error. Our results suggest that while offering financial incentives that increase effort make forecasts more realistic, firms may not fully realize the benefits of having easy access to past performance data. The second chapter, co-authored with Nicholas Bloom and Ethan Yeh, uses survey data to assess the impact of COVID-19. We find a significant negative sales impact that peaked in Quarter 2 of 2020, with an average loss of 29% in sales. The large negative impact masks significant heterogeneity, with over 40% of firms reporting zero or a positive impact, while almost a quarter report losses of more than 50%. These impacts also appear to be persistent, with firms that reported the largest sales drops in mid-2020 still forecasting large sales losses a year later in mid-2021. In terms of business types, we find that the smallest offline firms experienced sales drops of over 40% compared to less than 10% for the largest online firms. Finally, in terms of the owners, we find female and black owners reported significantly larger drops in sales. Owners with a humanities degree also experienced far larger losses, while those with a STEM degree experienced the smallest impact. In the third chapter, I explore the extent to which American geographic political polarization is caused by internal migratory patterns, using a novel political campaigning dataset spanning the universe of American voting-age citizens. Contrary to popular belief that migration drives geographic polarization, I estimate that migration reduces it by mixing individuals across politically homogeneous areas. This effect is largely explained by regression to the mean - the United States has become geographically polarized beyond what even strong preferences for self-sorting can sustain. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the political beliefs of internal migrants tend to increasingly reflect the average political beliefs of their destinations the longer they live there. This effect amplifies the depolarizing effect of the migration patterns as individuals who move to less politically homogeneous areas adopt less polarized views.
Book Synopsis Essays on Labor Economics by : Lu Liu
Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics written by Lu Liu and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contributes towards our understanding of Labor Economics and Applied Econometrics. It consists of three chapters. The first two chapters shed light on the determinants of female labor supply behavior by connecting theory to household-level data. The third chapter studies the nonlinear generalized method of moments (GMM) in dynamic panels and its application to value-added models of learning. In Chapter 1, I propose that the rising sex ratio (number of males per female) imbalance has been an important factor in the recent feminization of rural-to-urban migration in China. To establish this connection, I first develop a three-player noncooperative household model in which both the parents and the daughter contribute time or money to improve the well-being of sons. The local sex ratio can affect the players' choices via two channels: either by influencing the preference towards sons, or by imposing negative impact on sons' welfare due to intensified marriage market competition. My model predicts that daughters are more likely to participate in migratory work when the local sex ratio is higher. Drawing on data from Rural-Urban Migration in China Survey, I then test the hypothesis by comparing unmarried rural women with brothers and those without brothers when conditioning on family size. My identification strategy exploits the exogenous variation in the number of brothers a rural woman has that comes from the randomness in parental sibling structure. I show that an increase in the local sex ratio significantly raises the probability of becoming a migrant worker for unmarried rural women who have brothers, while no significant effect is observed among those without brothers. The positive link is stronger for rural women who have a larger number of brothers or whose brothers are relatively younger. I also discover that around 40% of the increase in rural female labor migration rate from 1990 to 2000 could be explained by the changes in the sex ratio. I further find evidence in favor of the marriage market pressure mechanism. Chapter 2 (joint work with Zhongda Li) examines the intergenerational determinants of women's labor force participation decision. Existing studies have established a positive correlation between a married woman's work behavior and her mother-in-law's. Such linkage is attributable to the profound influence of maternal employment on son's gender role preferences or household productivity. In this chapter we investigate the relative importance of the two potential mechanisms using the Chinese survey data. We show that a substantive part of the intergenerational correlation is left unexplained even if we control for the husband's gender role attitudes. Instead, we find that the husband's household productivity is more crucial in the wife's work decision, suggesting the dominance of the endowment channel over the preference channel. Chapter 3 develops a novel framework for constructing nonlinear moment conditions in dynamic panel data models. I demonstrate that the nonlinear GMM estimator considerably mitigates the classical weak identification problem arising from two data generating processes: (i) the autoregressive parameter is close to the unit circle; (ii) the ratio of variances of individual heterogeneity and idiosyncratic errors diverges to infinity. I further derive analytical expressions for the bias term of the linear and nonlinear GMM estimators, and show that the use of nonlinear moments results in smaller finite sample bias. In simulation studies, the nonlinear GMM estimator performs well compared to both the difference and system GMM estimators. As an empirical illustration, I estimate the effect of class size reduction and private school attendance on student academic achievement using a value-added model with learning dynamics.
Book Synopsis Essays in Labor Economics on Marriage, Education, and Labor Supply by : Mary Ann Bronson
Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics on Marriage, Education, and Labor Supply written by Mary Ann Bronson and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation seeks to understand two main issues. The first issue concerns changes in the gender gaps in college attendance and choice of majors between 1960 and 2010. The second main issue concerns changes in the marriage rate in the US since the early twentieth century. The main objective of Chapters 1 and 2 is to answer the following two questions about educational choices: Why do women today invest in a college education at much higher rates than men, whereas fifty years ago men graduated more frequently? And given their high college attendance rates today, why do women continue to select disproportionately into lower-paying majors, with almost no gender convergence along this margin since the mid-1980s? In Chapter 1, I document first that changes in returns to skill over time and gender differences in wage premiums across majors cannot explain the observed gender gaps in educational choices. I then provide reduced-form evidence that two factors help explain the observed gender gaps: first, college degrees provide insurance against very low income for women, especially in case of divorce; second, majors differ substantially in the degree of "work-family flexibility" they offer, such as the size of wage penalties for temporary reductions in labor supply. Based on this reduced-form evidence, in Chapter 2 I construct and estimate a dynamic structural model of marriage, educational choices, and lifetime labor supply. I use the model to analyze the contribution of changes in wages and changes in the marriage market to the observed educational investment patterns over time. I estimate that the insurance value of the college degree for women in case of divorce is equivalent to about 31\% of the college wage premium. I also estimate that the share of women choosing high-return science and business majors would increase from 34\% to 45\% if wage penalties for labor supply reductions were equalized across occupations. Finally, I test the effects of two sets of policies on individuals' choice of major: a differential tuition policy that charges less for science and technical majors, as has been proposed in some states; and interventions intended to improve work-family flexibility. My results show that some family-friendly policies increase the share of women in science and business majors substantially, while others further widen both college gender gaps. Chapter 3, joint work with Maurizio Mazzocco, analyzes changes in U.S. marriage rates over nearly a century. We propose an explanation for these changes in three stages. First, we show that changes in cohort size alone can account for around 50 to 70\% of the variation in marriage rates since the 1930s for both black and white populations. Specifically, increases in cohort size reduce marriage rates, whereas declines in cohort size have the opposite effect. Using plausibly exogenous variation in access to oral contraceptives, and consequently the number of births, across states we provide evidence that the relationship between changes in cohort size and changes in marriage rates is causal. Next, we develop a dynamic search model of the marriage market that qualitatively generates this observed relationship, and derive a testable implication about cohort size's effect on spouses' age differences. Finally, we estimate the model and investigate its consistency with the data. We fail to reject it using the derived implication, and find that it can quantitatively explain much of the observed variation in marriage rates.
Book Synopsis Essays in Labor Economics by : Arpita Patnaik
Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Arpita Patnaik and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first chapter, I study the implications of short-term costs imposed by pricing structures on college major choice and the role of financial constraints. I examine the effect of major-specific pricing policies on major choice and on the distribution of low-income students across majors. Using the introduction of a surcharge policy in the Engineering and Business programs, I find that raising the program specific tuition by $1000 (11%) decreases the probability of graduating in Business by 33% and in Engineering by 12% and this is driven by the response of low-income students. I then exploit this price variation to identify the labor market returns to these majors. Using these estimates, I find that students are highly responsive to prices despite large earnings losses from switching majors. Motivated by the empirical evidence, I develop and estimate a structural model of college major choice that quantifies the importance of direct price effects and credit constraints. The model estimates suggest that credit constraints rationalize the sensitivity of students to changes in pricing structures. Complementing price differentials with expansions of borrowing limits and means-tested subsidies can minimize the distortion created by pricing. The second chapter characterizes remote work or work-from-home (WFH) jobs and quantifies the welfare gain from these work arrangements. Using data from the ATUS and CPS, I develop a measure of locational flexibility at work. Motivated by the patterns of sorting in the data, I then develop and estimate a generalized model of sectoral choice with amenities. The structural estimates point to differences by gender in the returns to education and experience, compositional differences as well as preferences. I also find that the gender wage gap persists in remote work at 3.9 dollars, most of which is determined by differences in the returns to observable characteristics. With the help of this framework, I find that women have higher valuation (WTP) of these jobs than men. On average, women are willing to pay 3.8 percent of the average hourly wage for locationally flexible jobs whereas men have a low willingness to pay (0.6 percent of hourly wage) for these jobs. Further, college graduates value remote work more than workers without college education with college educated women in particular valuing remote work the most at 4.3 percent of the hourly wage. In chapter three, we estimate a rich model of college major choice using a panel of experimentally derived data. Our estimation strategy combines two types of data: data on self-reported beliefs about future earnings from potential human capital decisions, and survey-based measures of risk and time preferences. We show how to use this data to identify a general life-cycle model, allowing for rich patterns of heterogeneous beliefs and preferences. Our data allow us to separate perceptions about the degree of risk or perceptions about the current versus future payoffs for a choice from the individual's preference for risk and patience. Comparing our estimates of the general model to estimates of models which ignore heterogeneity in risk and time preferences, we find that these restricted models are likely to overstate the importance of earnings to major choice. Additionally, we show that while men are less risk averse and patient than women, gender differences in non-pecuniary tastes, rather than gender differences in risk aversion and patience over earnings, are the primary driver of gender gaps in major choice.
Book Synopsis Essays in Labor Economics by : Brian Lucking
Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Brian Lucking and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "Essays in Labor Economics, " includes three chapters investigating the role of innovation and technological change in shaping labor markets. The first chapter, "Do R\& D Tax Credits Create Jobs?", studies the employment effects of state tax credits for research and development (R& D), a large and widely-used policy tool. Using confidential micro data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I show that state R& D tax credits increase state employment growth. The increased in-state employment growth is not due to R& D-performing firms shifting employment across states in response to differential tax incentives. Rather, total employment growth at these firms increases. Additionally, greater in-state employment growth does not come at the expense of neighboring states. This is surprising in light of previous research which found that the credits increase in-state R& D spending but that all of the increase is offset by decreased R& D spending in neighboring states. I find no similar effect with respect to employment growth. A plausible explanation for my results is that state R& D tax credits cause increased innovation in the states which offer them, as the tax credits are associated with higher R& D investment and patenting, and lead to increased productivity growth. The second chapter, "Do Innovative Firms Offshore Less?", provides causal evidence of a link between innovation and offshoring. Linking confidential U.S. Census micro data on foreign trade transactions, production, and R& D expenditures, and using R& D state tax credits to instrument for firm R& D investment, I find that over the past 20 years more R& D-intensive firms engage in less offshoring. I provide evidence that the operative mechanism is quality-upgrading -- innovative firms produce higher quality products using more expensive and higher quality intermediate inputs which are complementary to domestic production. The third chapter, co-authored with Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and John Van Reenen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is titled "Have R\& D Spillovers Changed?". Slow growth over the last decade has prompted policy attention towards increasing R& D spending, often via the tax system. In this essay, we examine the impact of R& D on firm performance, both by the firm's own investments and through spillovers from other firms. Analysing panel data on US firms over the last three decades, and allowing for interactions in both technology space and product market space. We show that the magnitude of R& D spillovers remains as large in the second decade of the 21st Century as it was in the mid-1980s. The marginal social return and marginal private return to R& D have been largely stable during this time period. Consequently, the ratio between marginal social returns to R& D and marginal private returns has changed little since the 1980's, with the marginal social return exceeding the marginal private return by a factor of 4. This implies that there remains a strong case for public support of R& D. Positive spillovers appeared to increase in the 1995-2004 digital technology boom.
Book Synopsis Essays on Labor Economics by : Joanne Tan
Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics written by Joanne Tan and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis examines the themes of sorting, inequality and the impact of technological change on the labor market. In particular, it addresses the questions of how workers sort within and between firms and how this influences labor market inequality, both in the workforce as a while, as well as between demographic and skill groups. It also considers how changes in technology affects the labor market conditions faced by workers and firms. These questions are tackled over three chapters. The first chapter, entitled `Multidimensional heterogeneity and matching in a frictional labor market - an application to polarization' deals with the sorting of workers to firms along multidimensional characteristics and quantifies the impact of technological change on the evolution of sorting patterns, wages and employment outcomes of different skill and demographic groups. I construct a model of directed search with two-sided multidimensional heterogeneity and estimate the model on US data. I find that production complementarities between cognitive and interpersonal skills and tasks have increased, relative to hat between manual skills and manual tasks. This change in production technology accounts for a large part of wage and job polarization in the US. Also, despite being gender-blind, the model can explain a substantial fraction of the narrowing of gender wage and job rank gaps from the 1980s to the present day. The second chapter, entitled `Intra-firm hierarchies and gender gaps' and coauthored with Nicolo Dalvit and Aseem Patel, studies the sorting of women into layers of hierarchy within firms, using administrative French data, and examines the incidence of gender wage and employment gaps across hierarchies over time. Further, by exploiting a policy on corporate board quotas in France, it assesses the impact of an increase in female leadership on gender wage and employment outcomes within firms. We find that hierarchies matter in gender wage and employment gaps. Gender wage and employment gaps increase with each layer of firm hierarchy, even if these gaps narrow more over time in the upper layers. In addition, improvements in top female leadership has differing impacts across hierarchies. While a greater share of female corporate board members narrows the gender wage gap in top layers of hierarchy, it has no such impact on lower layers. Instead, it increases the share of women in lower layers working part-time, at the expense of full-time employment. The opposite is true for women in upper layers. The third chapter, `Occupational Shortage and Labor Market Adjustments: a Theory of Islands', coauthored with Riccardo Zago, addresses the incidence of occupational shortage, and assesses whether it leads to wage and employment adjustments. Using a unique dataset on reported vacancies that firms find difficult to fill, we document the incidence of shortage across regions, industries and occupation groups. We find that shortage only leads to wage and employment adjustments in non-routine occupations, but not in routine occupations. We show how the secular decline of the routine occupations, caused by technological change, can account for the persistence in shortage in the routine sector and its inability to adjust.
Book Synopsis Essays on Labor Economics and Inequality by : Meng-Chien Su (Ph.D.)
Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics and Inequality written by Meng-Chien Su (Ph.D.) and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Chapter 1, I develop a random search model incorporating marriage decisions, fertility shocks, and human capital accumulation to examine the mechanisms underlying wage and employment differences between men and women over their life-cycles. The model assumes that men and women are mostly identical, with women bearing child-rearing responsibilities in a gender-heterogeneous labor market. When single, workers search for jobs and marriage partners individually; when married, they search for jobs jointly as a household. The household search and exogenous fertility shocks are the primary factors contributing to the life-cycle employment patterns observed in the NLSY97 data. Child-rearing responsibilities amount to approximately 39.83 hours per week, a significant portion of the 80 hours available to each worker, leading to a decline in women's employment rates and full-time working status. Initial gender wage gaps stem from gender-specific wage offer distributions, with human capital accumulation as the main factor widening these gaps over time. Counterfactual policy experiments indicate that a gender-neutral hiring process could eliminate wage gaps, while 10 hours of government-funded childcare services per week could eliminate employment differences. In Chapter 2, I investigate the impact of prejudiced sentiments on wage disparities between homosexual and heterosexual men. I develop a random search model that incorporates taste-based prejudice, bargaining, and migration. The findings reveal that prejudice significantly contributes to predicting empirical earnings and employment patterns. Despite homosexual workers exhibiting the same conditional mean productivity as their heterosexual counterparts, they earn less than 80% of their productivity value due to prejudice. This prejudice results in an average monetary loss of 4 dollars per hour for homosexual workers. Based on the estimates, a modest tax of 0.09 dollars per hour of work on heterosexual men is determined to be sufficient to compensate for this loss.
Book Synopsis Essays in Empirical Labor Economics and the Economics of Gender (computer-use, Workgroup's Gender Composition and Motherhood) by : Laura Alejandra Ripani
Download or read book Essays in Empirical Labor Economics and the Economics of Gender (computer-use, Workgroup's Gender Composition and Motherhood) written by Laura Alejandra Ripani and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Essays in Labor and Family Economics by : Maxwell Chenming Rong
Download or read book Essays in Labor and Family Economics written by Maxwell Chenming Rong and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of four essays on labor economics with a particular focus on the causes and consequences of major life cycle choices such as marriage, occupational choice, and retirement. How do the consequential decisions that individuals make in these dimensions affect the kinds of risks they will face throughout their life, and how can they insure themselves against them? I study these questions with a mix of survey and administrative data, using a variety of structural and reduced-form methods. In the first chapter I study how sharing a workplace with one's spouse can affect the dynamics of household income growth and risk, shedding light on the relationship between worker mobility and monopsony power in the labor market. There has been a large empirical literature documenting rent sharing between workers and firms: firms pass through performance shocks to the earnings of their employees, a fact inconsistent with perfectly competitive labor markets. This fact can be rationalized by monopsonistic models of labor markets where firm market power arises from imperfect worker mobility. An untested implication of these models is that firms should use the information available to them to infer differences in mobility for their workers and engage in price discrimination, resulting in differences in rent sharing. In this paper I provide novel evidence for this prediction by studying coworking couples: married couples who share an employer. Using Norwegian administrative data, I quantify differences in the pass-through of idiosyncratic firm shocks to coworking couples, and find that women in coworking couples experience less generous rent sharing: at any given level of firm performance, they have lower income growth than their non-coworking counterparts. These differences result in large differences in household income dynamics: coworking couples face lower average income growth and higher income risk, with substantial consequences for welfare. Firms exploit the fact that coworking couples are less mobile in order to engage in less generous rent sharing agreements, which explain a substantial fraction of the observed difference in income growth and risk. In the second chapter, I study the importance of liquid savings for smoothing consumption in the face of income shocks. I take advantage of a unique institutional feature of certain US retirement accounts, including Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs): prior to the age of 59.5, withdrawals from these accounts are subject to an additional 10\% tax penalty to discourage early withdrawal. Thus, IRAs undergo a sharp and predictable change in liquidity at age 59.5. Using survey data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), I document 3 facts. First, annual withdrawals from IRAs increase sharply by \$1,500 on average after age 59.5. Second, households with low liquid wealth in the form of checking and savings deposits have the largest proportional increases in withdrawals. Finally, IRA withdrawals increase in response to falls in income, but only for those with low liquid wealth. Using consumption data from the CAMS supplement to the HRS, I quantify how the increased liquidity of IRAs after age 59.5 helps households insure consumption against income shocks. In the third chapter, I study how workers of different skill levels are differentially affected by sudden job displacement events. Through a framework of general and occupation-specific human capital, I study the potential labor market consequences of a technology shock such as AI which displaces workers in high-skill occupations. Workers with high general human capital can partially insure themselves against job loss by switching occupations, but they also tend to be employed in occupations with high returns to specific human capital, meaning that their potential losses are much larger. To evaluate the relative size of these two forces, I specify and estimate a dynamic model of occupational choice, and use it to analyze the impact of a hypothetical job-destroying technology shock to high-skill occupations. Despite finding substantial ability of high skill workers to cushion the shock by switching occupations, the model predicts that a 40\% increase in the job destruction rate in high skill occupations results in average earnings losses of 2.4 to 5.4\% for workers in these occupations. These losses are substantially larger than the losses from an analogous shock in low skill occupations. In the fourth chapter, I document and seek to explain a novel fact about gender differences in the cyclicality of unemployment. Using historical Current Population Survey data, I show that after 1979, male unemployment became significantly more cyclical than female. I hypothesize that the reason for this increase is the drastic decline in male unionization rates from the 1980s to the present. I leverage the passage of right-to-work laws in 7 states that weakened the power of unions to test this hypothesis, and find mixed results. However, I also take advantage of the limited panel dimension of the CPS to directly compare the unemployment cyclicality of unionized and non-unionized workers. I show that due to the drastic decrease in male unionization relative to female, even a small difference in union cyclicality can explain a great deal of the gender unemployment cyclicality gap.
Book Synopsis Essays in Labor Economics by : Weilong Zhang
Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Weilong Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three chapters. They explore develop and estimate economic models to analyze questions of interests to public policies.Chapter 1 develops and estimates a spatial general equilibrium job search model to study the effects of local and universal (federal) minimum wage policies. In the model, firms post vacancies in multiple locations. Workers, who are heterogeneous in terms of location and education types, engage in random search and can migrate or commute in response to job offers. The model is estimated by combining multiple databases including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI). The estimated model is used to analyze how minimum wage policies affect employment, wages, job postings, vacancies, migration/commuting, and welfare. Empirical results show that minimum wage increases in local county lead to an exit of low type (education 12 years) workers and an influx of high type workers (education 12 years), which generates negative externalities for workers in neighboring areas. The model is used to simulate the effects of a range of minimum wages. Minimum wage increases up to $14/hour increase the welfare of high type workers but lower the welfare of low type workers, expanding inequality. Increases in excess of $14/hour decrease welfare for all workers. Two counterfactual policies are further evaluated under this framework: restricting labor mobility and preempting local minimum wage laws. For a certain range of minimum wages, both policies have negative impacts on the welfare of high type workers, but benecial effects for low type workers. Chapter 2 poses a dynamic discrete choice model of schooling and occupational choices that incorporates time-varying personality traits, as measured by the so-called "Big Five" traits. The model is estimated using the Household Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) longitudinal dataset from Australia. Personality traits are found to play a critical role in explaining education and occupational choices over the lifecycle. The traits evolve during young adult years but stabilize in the mid-30s. Results show that individuals with a comparative advantage in schooling and white-collar work have, on average, higher cognitive skills and higher personality traits, in all ve dimensions. The estimated model is used to evaluate two education policies: compulsory senior secondary school and a 50% college subsidy. Both policies are found to be effective in increasing educational attainment, but the compulsory schooling policy provides greater benets to lower socioeconomic groups. Allowing personality traits to evolve with age and with years of schooling proves to be important in capturing policy response heterogeneity. Chapter 3 develops and estimates a model of how personality traits affect household time and resource allocation decisions and wages. In the model, households choose between two behavioral modes: cooperative or noncooperative. Spouses receive wage offers and allocate time to supply labor market hours and to produce a public good. Personality traits, measured by the so-called "Big Five" traits, can affect household bargaining weights and wage offers. Model parameters are estimated by Simulated Method of Moments using the Household Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) data. Personality traits are found to be important determinants of household bargaining weights and of wage offers and to have substantial implications for understanding the sources of gender wage disparities.
Book Synopsis Essays in Labor Economics by : Lingwen Zheng
Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Lingwen Zheng and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chapter of this dissertation examines the phenomenon of labor market segregation. Using a regression discontinuity (RD) design, I exploit the variation in baseyear minority shares across single-establishment firms to document the dynamics of establishment-level segregation in two five-year intervals: 1995-2000 and 2000-2005. Using the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) infrastructure files, I first show that systematic establishment-level segregation still exists in all industries. Then, I show that the dynamics of segregation among these single-establishment firms are nonlinear and exhibit "tipping" patterns in both five-year intervals, although the magnitude is much larger in the earlier time period. The observed tipping pattern is primarily driven by non-Hispanic whites leaving. The effect due to minorities entering is much smaller. Alternative explanations such as non-linear changes in establishment characteristics or omitted variables do not explain the observed changes in minority shares. Finally, I find that, unlike the 1995-2000 period, during which tipping behavior seems to have been driven equally by blacks and Hispanics, Hispanics are the sole driving force in the 20002005 period. Overall, this chapter provides the first suggestive evidence that the dynamics of establishment-level segregation are highly nonlinear and exhibit a tipping pattern. The second chapter of the dissertation describes the technical linking process and examines the properties and the qualities of the crosswalk files. The crosswalk between the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) infrastructure file system and the Census Business Register (BR) is authorized as part of the LEHD Infrastructure Project. This document describes the LEHD - BR crosswalk and its component inputs: the Business Register, Longitudinal Business Database (LBD), and the LEHD Infrastructure File system. The output files include the LEHD - BR crosswalk at both the establishment and employer levels. These output files can facilitate linking a wide range of contextual variables relating to characteristics of the current and prior employers and co-workers of current employees. Match and non-match rates for various populations are defined and estimated in order to examine the properties and quality of the LEHD - BR crosswalk output files. The third chapter of this dissertation exploits plausibly exogenous changes in family size caused by the initial implementation and subsequent relaxations in China's One Child Policy to estimate the causal effect of family size on educational attainment. I find that the average family size has decreased substantially since the One Child Policy implementation. By employing an Instrumental Variable estimation strategy, I find clear evidence indicating that there is indeed a negative trade-off between child's quantity and quality in urban China. An additional child can lead to a decrease of 1.2 years of schooling. A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that the implementation of the One Child Policy has significantly increased the average completed years of schooling by approximately 0.68 years in urban China. This effect is in fact larger for women than for men. No negative trade-off effect is found for the rural households in the sample.
Book Synopsis Essays on Labor Supply by : Martino Tasso
Download or read book Essays on Labor Supply written by Martino Tasso and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: My dissertation consists of three applied studies in the area of public finance and labor economics. In the first chapter, "The effect of financial aid and tax policies on educational choices", I build and estimate a structural dynamic life-cycle model of education choices, labor force participation, and saving decisions by young men in the United States. The model is estimated with the method of simulated moments using a longitudinal sample of white, black, and Hispanic young men from the 1997 panel of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The model incorporates unobservable abilities, tuition costs, and the main features of the U.S. federal income tax. In particular, it takes into account the structure of the Lifetime Learning Tax Credit. I use the estimated model to simulate the impact of a number of education policy changes. I find a sizeable effect on college enrollment from a general tuition reduction as well as a large increase in graduate school attendance from making the Lifetime Learning Tax Credit refundable. In the second chapter, "Aggregate wage dynamics and labor supply: an application to the U.S.", I estimate labor supply elasticities using the change in the return to skills over time as a source of exogenous variation in gross wages. The last few decades have seen a tremendous amount of change in the U.S. labor market: female labor force participation rates have risen, while the wage premium for college education and wage inequality have increased because of an higher demand for skilled labor. The number of hours worked is found to react weakly to changes in the offered wage. In the third chapter, "Labor supply effects of tax-based income-support mechanisms", I build and estimate a static discrete choice model of labor supply for single women in the United States. It incorporates the main features of the federal income tax. I estimate the model using cross-sectional data, and I use it to simulate hypothetical reforms to the tax and benefit system, which is found to have a large effect on the labor force participation decision of single individuals.
Book Synopsis Essays in Labor Economics by : Tiffany Chou
Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Tiffany Chou and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three unrelated papers in labor economics. The first chapter documents the role of norms, both cultural and religious, in the fertility decisions of second-generation women in the US. Using two cohorts of immigrants (1970 and 2000s), I find that fertility declines among second-generation immigrants in the US are highly correlated with contemporaneous falls in total fertility rates (TFR) in Europe, implying that changes in the origin countries after parental emigration are still mirrored among current immigrants. This cross-country correlation is stronger for women from predominantly Catholic countries, which is consistent with immigrants from Catholic Europe sharing the Church's pro-natalist theology. The second chapter estimates the extent to which factor bias within manufacturing affects productivity growth across countries in the last two decades of the 20th Century. Skill-biased technological change (SBTC) implies that countries with more skilled labor and capital experience higher growth in total factor productivity (TFP), which is the case in both developed and developing countries in the 1980s. Labor-biased technological change is especially strong among the "newly industrializing countries" in the 1990s. These results are consistent with the empirical literature on skill-biased technological change, and may explain why "conditional convergence" of per capita income across countries is so slow. The final chapter examines the violence-reducing effect of development spending in Afghanistan. Using data from three distinct reconstruction programs and military records of insurgent-initiated events, the analysis finds that overall spending has no clear effects on the frequency of rebel attacks. Moreover, the types of development program most effective at reducing violence in Iraq -small CERP projects--does not appear to do so in Afghanistan.
Book Synopsis Essays on Labor Supply and Poverty by : Md. Nizamul Islam
Download or read book Essays on Labor Supply and Poverty written by Md. Nizamul Islam and published by Goteborg University. This book was released on 2006 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
