Download or read book Essays in Empirical Search Models of the Labor Market written by James Mabli and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Empirical and Theoretical Labor Market Models written by Federico Torracchi and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Macroeconomics of the Labor Market written by Ioannis Kospentaris and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, I build macroeconomic models to answer questions of empirical relevance for the study of labor markets. The dissertation consists of an introductory overview and three research essays. The first essay is devoted to duration dependence in unemployment, namely the fact that recently unemployed workers have a signicantly better chance of finding a job than the long-term unemployed. I build a directed search model to quantify the importance of three common explanations for this fact: (i) unobserved worker differences, (ii) skill loss, and (iii) job-search effort decline. Two novel results emerge: first, the bulk of the effect of unobserved heterogeneity is concentrated in the first six months of the unemployment spell; the drop in job-finding rates observed at longer spells is mostly a result of skill loss and lower search effort. Second, skill loss has a vastly greater impact on job-finding than the decline in search effort. These results have two clear implications for labor market policy: (i) the impact of active labor market programs is expected to be larger for the long-term unemployed; (ii) job-training programs are expected to be more effective than job-search assistance policies at reducing long-term unemployment. In the second essay I study how information obtained by a worker while trying to find a job affects her job-search effort. Specically, I analyze how a worker, who is uncertain about her labor market traits and learns about them while looking for a job, allocates her search effort over the unemployment spell. The main result is that search effort is increasing over time when the worker is optimistic about her traits but decreasing when the worker is pessimistic about her traits. This result can explain discrepant empirical findings from previous literature on search effort. The final essay is devoted to job-search effort as an insurance channel. I build a model in which workers face substantial risk in the labor market but they have two means of self-insurance against this risk: increase their savings and their search effort. The main result is that when labor market risk becomes more severe workers increase both their savings and search effort but the increase in savings is twice as large as the increase in search effort. That is, workers make use of search effort as an insurance channel but much less than the savings channel.

Download or read book Search Models and Applied Labor Economics written by Nicholas M. Kiefer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-02-24 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of papers marks the development of empirical application of the search approach to labor economics--an approach which arose as a theoretical development of the 1960s and led to numerous insights in the 1970s. The search approach naturally incorporates uncertainty in the economic model, making up some of the early work in what is now called "the economics of information." Included are econometric issues such as estimation and specification of search models for wages and unemployment duration, continuous time models of turnover, and identification of structural parameters. Applications to policy questions including Unemployment Insurance and wage subsidy programs are given, and data collection issues are discussed within the search framework.

Download or read book Essays in Search and Selection Models of the Labor Market written by Benjamín Villena Roldán and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Empirical Essays in Labor Markets written by In-Gang Na and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Equilibrium Labor Market Sorting written by Tzuo Hann Law and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The importance of time invariant, but unobserved characteristics of workers and their employers in the determination of wages is well known. This suggests that models of (un)employment featuring permanent worker and firm types are crucial for our understanding of labor markets. While such models are numerous, it was thought that even very simple ones were fundamentally not identifiable with wage data alone. Hence, the empirical content of these models were largely a mystery. With that, our understanding of permanent unobserved heterogeneity has been restricted to statistical models with limited economic interpretation. In the first chapter of my dissertation (joint with Marcus Hagedorn and Iourii Manovskii), I overcome this fundamental problem. I assess the empirical content of equilibrium models of labor market sorting based on unobserved (to economists) characteristics. Specifically, I develop quantitative tools to identify and estimate a wide class of models of labor market sorting. I not only find that many models are likely completely identifiable but that reliable estimates of key model primitives can be obtained using routinely available matched employer-employee datasets. In the second chapter of my dissertation (with Kory Kantenga), I apply the framework developed in the first chapter to study the role of worker and employer heterogeneity in driving German wage inequality between 1993 and 2007. The model I earlier developed fits overall wage variance, the wage function, search frictions, unemployment levels and the degree of sorting between workers and firms. The fit of the model is comparable to non-structural approaches which utilize many more degrees of freedom. In decomposing the rise in German wage inequality, I find that changes in the non-parametrically estimated production function and the sorting between worker and firm types that it induces accounts for most of the increase in German wage inequality. Finally, by testing whether log wage differences between employees who are coworkers at two distinct firms are constant, I show that the commonly assumed log additive separability approximation of log wages is rejected. Finally, the estimated model is capable of reproducing the degree of non additive separability in the data.

Download or read book Essays on Labour Economics written by Yongjian Hu and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Estimated Labor Search Models written by Mauricio Manuel Tejada and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Search theory has proven to be a very useful tool to analyze and understand the impact of labor market policies and institutional arrangements on labor market outcomes. Structural econometrics, on the other hand, seeks to recover the primitives of economic theory and to estimate decision rules. These essays use the conjunction of both to analyze various labor market issues. The first chapter estimates a search and matching model to analyze the relationship between duality in the labor market and labor market protection in Chile. Results indicate that both types of contracts, permanent and temporary, survive in equilibrium and that there is a strong substitution effect between contracts. Also, stringent labor protection generates important trade offs between flexibility and productivity. The second chapter provides lifetime measures of inequality for Chile and analyzes its main sources. Results indicate that inequality is not only high in a cross-section perspective, but also in a lifetime perspective and that low mobility is the main source of lifetime inequality. Finally, the third chapter uses a descriptive approach and a structural estimation of a search model to identify the sources of gender differentials in the United States. Results show that prejudice may still have a role in explaining the evidence on gender differentials and it is responsible for the reversal of the returns to schooling ranking in recent years.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Bryce Scott VanderBerg and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of two empirical studies and one applied theoretical study in labor economics. In the first chapter, I study the extend to which an observed layoff is used by employers to infer a worker's unobserved ability early in their labor market career. In the second chapter, I develop a theoretical model of wage dynamics that extends the employer learning and statistical discrimination model of Altonji and Pierret (2001) to allow for discrete changes in observable characteristics. In the third chapter, which is joint work with Gabrielle Pepin at the W.E. Upjohn Institute, we study the contribution of occupational sorting and mismatch to child penalties in the United States.I: The Signaling Role of Early Career Job LossI examine the extent to which ability signaling explains long-term wage losses suffered by young workers who experience layoffs. Young workers are of particular interest because employers have limited information about their ability, so signaling theoretically plays a larger role in determining wages. In addition, young workers are unlikely to experience wage losses due to loss of industry-specific human capital or separation from high-quality job matches, which may explain long-term wage decreases among older workers. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, I show that young workers of all ability levels initially experience similar wage losses following layoffs, but high-relative ability workers fully recover within five years while low-relative ability workers experience persistent wage losses. Consistent with traditional learning models, relative, not actual, ability affects wage trajectories. I illustrate a conceptual model of layoff signaling that varies by pre-layoff experience and can explain divergent wage trajectories across high- and low-relative ability workers. I test the model empirically and find that low-relative ability workers' inability to overcome negative layoff signals explains a substantial proportion of long-term wage losses among young workers. Employer learning effects vary by race and gender.II: Employer Learning and Statistical Discrimination with Unexpected InformationThe Employer Learning and Statistical Discrimination (EL-SD) model of Altonji and Pierret (2001) assumes that employers learn about a worker's unobserved ability in a smooth, continuous manner, holding observable characteristics constant. In practice, observable characteristics, such as years of education, often change discretely over time for many workers. I extend the EL-SD model to allow for changes in observable characteristics to influence an employer's belief about a worker's ability. I show that changes in observable characteristics that are correlated with ability lead to discrete changes in employers' beliefs about the worker's ability, interrupting the smooth, continuous employer learning processes described in the EL-SD model. I further show that this discrete change in employer learning is larger for workers early in their labor market career, with the effect diminishing as labor market experience increases. I then use data from the NLSY97 to empirically test these predictions in the context of the signaling role of returning to school. I find suggestive evidence that returning to school to receive a GED or graduate degree sends a positive ability signal to the labor market, while returning to school to receive an associate or bachelor's degree does not.III: Occupational Sorting, Multidimensional Skill Mismatch, and the Child Penalty among Working MothersWe study the extent to which occupational sorting explains child penalties---gender gaps in labor market outcomes due to children---among working parents. Using an event-study approach and data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY) 1979 and 1997, we estimate that children generate long-run earnings gaps of over \\$200 per week among working parents. In the NLSY79, we find that children lead mothers to sort into lower-paying occupations in which employees tend to work fewer hours. We estimate that children increase multidimensional occupation-skill mismatch among working mothers by 0.3 standard deviations, relative both to their own levels of mismatch from before birth and to those of fathers. In the NLSY97, results suggest that improvements in labor market outcomes among fathers in response to children, rather than a worsening of labor market outcomes among mothers, seem to drive child penalties.

Download or read book Essays on the Macroeconomics of Labor Market Institutions written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis contributes to furthering the understanding of the macroeconomic impact of two types of labor market institutions: temporary help service agencies and temporary contracts. In the first chapter, I depart from the observation that employment in the temporary help service industry in the United States has seen a secular rise in recent decades. The chapter provides a theory of the temporary help service industry within the steady state version of a random search model of the labor market with endogenous job destruction and a second sector in which employment relationships are intermediated. In this framework temporary jobs are endogenously of short duration and recruitment is fast. Conditions are provided under which intermediated employment relationships exist in equilibrium. The implications of the model for two possible explanations of the secular rise of employment in the temporary help service industry, technological progress and a rise in firm-level uncertainty, are such that technological progress as an explanation is favored. In the second chapter, I investigate the impact of uncertainty shocks on a dual labor market using the Spanish economy as a case study. In an empirical analysis, I find that, given my identification strategy, fluctuations in uncertainty cause a significant drop in temporary employment, a non-significant reaction in permanent employment and a significant decline in GDP. Since in the data the responses to a second-moment shock are similar to the responses to a first-moment shock, a quantitative labor demand model of the Spanish labor market is built and calibrated. I use this model to generate simulated response functions to a (pure) second-moment, a (pure) first-moment and a combined first- and second moment shock. I find that the empirical impulse responses can only partially be rationalized by the model when considering a (pure) second-moment shock. A (pure) first moment shock in the model generates impulse response functions similar to the empirical ones. A combined first- and second moment shock cannot improve on the first-moment shock in replicating the data.

Download or read book Three Essays in Empirical Labour Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three empirical essays that examine different aspects of wage determination in local labour markets. The first essay investigates whether or not there are human capital externalities or spill-overs from education. I find that the fraction of college graduates in U.S. cities is associated with higher wages in the 1980s but not in the 1990s. To rationalize this pattern, I empirically investigate a model of structural change by Acemoglu (1999) and find considerable support for it in a number of dimensions. Consistent with the notion that there has been a structural change in the labour market, increases in the supply of skilled labour in the 1990s induce a change in the composition of jobs, increase inequality, unemployment, the return to education, and the wages of high-skill workers and harm low-skill workers. The second essay, which is co-authored with Paul Beaudry and David Green, develops a multi-sector search and matching model of the labour market that illustrates a mechanism through which changes in local industrial composition can cause changes in wages in all sectors of the local economy. We empirically test this model using geographical variation in industrial composition across U.S. metropolitan areas from 1970 to 2000 and find that shifts in industrial composition that favor high-paying industries impact wages in other sectors in a manner that is consistent with the model. The third chapter, co-authored with Christopher Bidner, extends the model developed in chapter two to examine the impact of changes in industrial composition on the relative wages of men and women. We find that men lost representation in high-paying industries relative to women and that these losses can account for a substantial portion of the `unexplained' gender pay gap. All three essays use data from the U.S. decennial Censuses and take U.S. metropolitan areas as local labour markets.

Download or read book Essays on the U S Labor Market written by Matthew D. French and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Job Referrals in the Labor Market written by Ji Woong Moon and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter empirically studies the effects of job referrals in the labor market, and the second chapter provides a theoretical explanation on the empirical findings. The third chapter explores the aggregate implications of job referrals quantitatively. In the U.S labor market, a majority of workers use referrals when searching for a job, but relatively little is known about how the quality of information transmitted through referrals is determined. In the first chapter, using recent survey data, I document that the effects of referrals are different between the currently employed searchers and the unemployed. Job referrals increase wages and job-finding probability for the employed searchers, but have statistically insignificant effects for the unemployed. In the second chapter of my dissertation, I build an equilibrium model of on-the-job search and referrals to capture these patterns and use it to understand how referrals affect the aggregate labor market. A novel feature of the model is that the extent of information transmission through referrals is endogenously determined by a strategic game. In equilibrium, referrals are endogenously more informative when the match surplus for firms is low. Consequently, the employed searchers benefit more from referrals as they search for high wage jobs, and the quality of information transmitted through referrals improves during recessions. In the third chapter, I calibrate the model and quantify the effects of job referrals on the aggregate labor market. The results show that referrals increase steady-state welfare substantially about 3-5% through better match quality. Referrals increase inequality, but mostly by benefiting workers who can use social connections.

Download or read book Essays in Empirical Labor Economics written by Jessica Yunfen Pan and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third and final essay, co-authored with Patricia Cortes, explores how the widespread availability of foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in Hong Kong affected native women's labor supply decisions and welfare. Our empirical strategy is based on two complementary approaches. First, exploiting differences in the expansion of the FDW program between Hong Kong and Taiwan from 1978 to 2006, we find that the program is associated with a 9 to 13 percentage point increase in employment of mothers with a young child, compared to mothers with older children. Second, using cross-sectional variation in the cost of hiring a FDW, we estimate a structural model of labor force participation and the decision to hire a FDW. We find evidence of strong complementarities between the two choices, particularly for mothers with very young children, suggesting that FDWs are a good substitute for mother's time in household production. From simulation exercises, we estimate that the availability of FDWs at current prices generates a monthly average consumer surplus for mothers of young children aged 0 to 5 of between US$130 to $200, and has increased their labor force participation rate by 12 to 13 percentage points relative to mothers of older children. In spite of the use of different sources of variation, we find that the simulated program estimates from the structural model and the difference-in-difference estimates are remarkably similar.

Download or read book Essays on Labor Market Dynamics written by Christina Hyde Patterson and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three chapters on labor market dynamics. In the first chapter, I show empirically that the unequal incidence of recessions is a core channel through which aggregate shocks are amplified. I show that the aggregate marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is larger when income shocks disproportionately hit high-MPC individuals, and I define the Matching Multiplier as the increase in the output multiplier originating from the matching of workers to jobs with different income elasticities - a greater matching multiplier translates into more powerful amplification in a range of business cycle models. Using administrative data from the United States, I document that the earnings of individuals with a higher marginal propensity to consume are more exposed to recessions. I show that this covariance between worker MPCs and the elasticity of their earnings to GDP is large enough to increase shock amplification by 40 percent over a benchmark in which all workers are equally exposed. Using local labor market variation, I validate this amplification mechanism by showing that areas with higher matching multipliers experience larger employment fluctuations over the business cycle. Lastly, I derive a generalization of the matching multiplier in an incomplete markets model and show numerically that this mechanism is quantitatively similar within this structural framework. In the second chapter, joint with David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence Katz, and John Van Reenen, we explore the well-documented fall of labor's share of GDP in the United States and many other countries. Existing empirical assessments typically rely on industry or macro data, obscuring heterogeneity among firms. In this paper, we analyze micro panel data from the U.S. Economic Census since 1982 and document empirical patterns to assess a new interpretation of the fall in the labor share based on the rise of "superstar firms." If globalization or technological changes advantage the most productive firms in each industry, product market concentration will rise as industries become increasingly dominated by superstar firms. Since these firms have high markups and a low labor share of firm value-added and sales, this depresses the aggregate labor share. We empirically assess seven predictions of this hypothesis: (i) industry sales will increasingly concentrate in a small number of firms; (ii) industries where concentration rises most will have the largest declines in the labor share; (iii) the fall in the labor share will be driven largely by reallocation rather than a fall in the unweighted mean labor share across all firms; (iv) the between-firm reallocation component of the fall in the labor share will be greatest in the sectors with the largest increases in market concentration; (v) the industries that are becoming more concentrated will exhibit faster growth of productivity and innovation; (vi) the aggregate markup will rise more than the unweighted firm markup; and (vii) these patterns should be observed not only in U.S. firms, but also internationally. We find support for all of these predictions. In the third chapter, I explore how the distribution of tasks across industries affects labor market responses to shocks. I present a model in which task-level wages connect industries employing the same tasks, meaning that the distribution of tasks across industries insures some workers against shocks and alters their labor market experiences. Workers trained in more dispersed tasks (e.g. accountants) face less unemployment risk from industry-specific shocks than workers who do tasks that are concentrated in few industries (e.g. petroleum engineers). Using industry and regional data, I show empirical evidence that supports the model's predictions - industries that employ more specialized labor contract less in response to demand shocks than industries with less specialized labor. JEL Classifications: E21, J23, D33

Download or read book Three Empirical Essays on Constraints in the Labor Market written by John C. Ham and published by Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms International. This book was released on 1980 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: