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 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 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 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 The Estimation of Semi structural Dynamic Models of the Labor Market written by François Poinas and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis contains three essays in microeconometrics and applied labor economics. In the first two essays, we estimate dynamic models of schooling choices and employment contract outcomes of the French population. The first essay focuses on the comparison between second-generation immigrants from Africa and their French-natives counterparts. We show that the gap in higher education attainments between those two sub-populations is mainly explained by parents' background and that schooling investment is the main determinant of the gap in permanent employment. The second essay investigates the role played by educational attainments on the employment contract transitions in the early career. We find that a first fixed term contract has a positive impact on the probability of employment in a permanent contract, except for a limited set of the population endowed with particular schooling attainments and unobserved characteristics. Globally, schooling attainments account for around one third of the variance in the probability of permanent employment. The third essay is devoted to the analysis of intra-firm promotions of American executives. We estimate a dynamic model of promotions, in which we disentangle the spurious and the causal impacts of the speed of past advancement. We find that the principal determinant of promotions is unobserved heterogeneity and that the speed of past advancement in the firm's hierarchy (fast tracks) does not have a causal impact on promotions. Functional area has a high explanatory power in promotion outcomes.

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 308 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 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 Essays on simultaneous search equilibrium written by Ronald Paul Wolthoff and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2008 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Job Search and Hiring in the Labor Market written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays on job search and hiring in the labor market. My first essay studies intra-household risk-sharing and job search behaviors over the business cycle. In the Great Recession, the U.S. national unemployment rate rose above 10%. The Unemployment Insurance benefits were extended to as many as 99 weeks in some states. Such measures may be excessive for married people that can share risks with a spouse. I estimate a dynamic model of unitary households in which spouses make joint job search and savings decision. I find that intra-household risk sharing exacerbates the counter-cyclicality of the unemployment rate, but mitigates the welfare costs of aggregate fluctuations. The results suggest the unemployment rate overstates the severity of a labor market recession for married workers. Given that spouses can share risks with one another, little is know about the efficiency of Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs in the household context. In my second essay, I compare the cost-effectiveness of various UI programs. The UI program is more cost-effective if the receipt of benefits is conditional on spousal non-employment or unemployment. In addition, the spousal unemployment requirement rewards intra-household risk sharing. As a result, the UI disproportionally benefit low-wealth households. Finally, I find little evidence that the UI program weakens intra-household coordination of search participation decisions. On the contrary, the spousal unemployment requirement strengthens the coordination between spouses. My third essay explores the mechanisms behind the phenomenon that both wage and the unemployment hazard rate decline with unemployment duration. I focus on two potential causes: skill depreciation and the stigma effects of unemployment duration. The identification of the two mechanisms can be achieved because the duration dependences of wage and hazard rate are affected by the mechanisms differently. I estimate a general equilibrium model with skill depreciation, unobserved worker heterogeneity, and an imperfect screening technology. Results show that less than 15% of the negative duration dependence of hazard rate is due to skill depreciation. In addition, I find that expansions that raise the meeting rate for workers substantially worsen negative duration dependence of unemployment hazard rate.

Download or read book Three Essays on Labor Market Inequality and Policy Implications in Search Models written by Jun Lu and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics written by Chenyan Lu and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation has two self-contained chapters in labor economics. In the first chapter, I exploit variation in job arrival rates due to the recession in the early 1980s to understand the relative importance of three main channels — skill accumulation, search, and learning — to an individual's lifetime wage growth, and analyze how these channels interact. Specifically, I construct and estimate a model of on-the-job search, dynamic wage growth, and occupational choice using data from the NLSY79 and O*NET. In my model, workers are heterogeneous in initial cognitive and manual skills, while jobs differ by how intensively these skills are used. Over time, workers sort into occupations for which they are well suited by searching either on the job or off the job as they learn about their comparative advantages and accumulate skills. The estimated model shows that, first, all three channels are important in explaining life-cycle wage growth. Second, the interactions of the three components also play a significant role in life-cycle wage growth. Finally, I use my estimated model to understand the persistent wage losses of individuals who graduate during a recession. I find that skill accumulation, both alone and interacted with the other two channels, is the primary contributor to the long-term effect. Richer parents tend to have richer children, and richer individuals tend to be healthier, especially later in life. In the second chapter, we quantify how much of health and wealth outcomes can be explained by parental inputs made in childhood. To this end, we present a model in which parents invest in the health and human capital of their children, while also allowing for adults to invest in their own health and human capital once they are adult. We calibrate the model to available data on intergenerational health and earnings persistence as well as the cross-sectional distribution of health, wealth and earnings. The model allows us to quantify the intergenerational effect of parental investments on the child's human capital, health and wealth outcomes separately from the effects of the child's own investments as an adult. As a result, the calibrated model sheds light on how income redistribution policies may affect health outcomes, and conversely how health policies can affect income distribution, and importantly how the impact of both types of policies may spill over to subsequent generations.

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.

Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics written by Suphanit Piyapromdee and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chapter studies the impact of immigration on wages, internal migration and welfare. I estimate an equilibrium model where labor differs by skill level, gender, experience and nativity. Workers are also heterogeneous in city preferences. Cities vary in productivity levels, housing prices and local amenities. The results indicate that an increase in the stock of immigrants has a small impact on the welfare of natives. If workers are constrained to remain in their original locations, the initial wage impacts on previous immigrants are negative and much more severe in the popular destinations for new immigrants. When workers migrate, the negative wage and welfare impacts in most locations are diffused. The model is also used to assess changes in the skill mix of immigrants and a location-specific immigration policy. The second chapter extends a classic on-the-job search model of homogeneous workers and firms by introducing a shirking problem. Workers choose their effort levels and search on the job. Firms elicit effort through wages and monitoring; an inverse relationship between wages and monitoring rates is derived. This gives rise to an equilibrium wage distribution that contrasts with existing literature in several aspects. In particular I show that a unique hump-shaped and positively skewed wage distribution, as observed empirically, can be derived even when firms and workers are respectively identical. The last chapter examines the relationship between separation rates and the speed of firm learning. In the model, there is uncertainty about match productivity; the firm gathers information about the match by monitoring the worker. The speed of the firm's learning process depends on how frequently the firm monitors the worker. The model predicts that separation rates increase with monitoring intensity. The effect is stronger early in the match and attenuates over time as unpromising matches are identified and terminated. Using the NLSY79, I estimate a probit model for worker separations in the first and second years of tenure. The empirical results are consistent with the model's implications that separation rates increase with monitoring intensity and the effect is stronger early in the relationship.

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.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Jan Tilly and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of two papers. In the first paper, I study the employment and welfare effects of short-time work in Germany during the recession between 2008 and 2010. Short-time work is a government program that subsidizes part-time work during economic downturns. Using administrative data, I document that (i) take-up of short-time work is increasing in experience and tenure, (ii) almost all short-time workers return to full-time work, and (iii) short-time work is not associated with a long-term loss in earnings. I develop a model that is consistent with these facts. The model features search frictions, aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks, human capital, and an intensive margin. Productivity shocks differ in duration and magnitude, and when hit by an adverse temporary productivity shock, firms can curtail their losses by reducing working hours. Using the estimated model, I find that short-time work was important in reducing job loss during the recession. However, the welfare gains are modest, because workers who would have been laid off without short-time work are workers for whom the earnings loss associated with unemployment is low.In the second paper, I investigate how policy expectations interact with the employment effects associated with minimum wage increases. I provide evidence from federal and state minimum wage increases in the U.S. that minimum wage increases result in substantial negative employment effects when the increases are unanticipated and no employment effects when they are anticipated. The effects of unanticipated increases are further exacerbated when the increases are indexed to inflation. I then develop an equilibrium search model in which workers and firms have rational expectations of the future evolution of the minimum wage. Using the estimated model, I show that policy expectations are quantitatively important to understand the impact of minimum wage increases on employment.

Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation has two self-contained chapters in labor economics. In the first chapter, I exploit variation in job arrival rates due to the recession in the early 1980s to understand the relative importance of three main channels — skill accumulation, search, and learning — to an individual's lifetime wage growth, and analyze how these channels interact. Specifically, I construct and estimate a model of on-the-job search, dynamic wage growth, and occupational choice using data from the NLSY79 and O*NET. In my model, workers are heterogeneous in initial cognitive and manual skills, while jobs differ by how intensively these skills are used. Over time, workers sort into occupations for which they are well suited by searching either on the job or off the job as they learn about their comparative advantages and accumulate skills. The estimated model shows that, first, all three channels are important in explaining life-cycle wage growth. Second, the interactions of the three components also play a significant role in life-cycle wage growth. Finally, I use my estimated model to understand the persistent wage losses of individuals who graduate during a recession. I find that skill accumulation, both alone and interacted with the other two channels, is the primary contributor to the long-term effect. Richer parents tend to have richer children, and richer individuals tend to be healthier, especially later in life. In the second chapter, we quantify how much of health and wealth outcomes can be explained by parental inputs made in childhood. To this end, we present a model in which parents invest in the health and human capital of their children, while also allowing for adults to invest in their own health and human capital once they are adult. We calibrate the model to available data on intergenerational health and earnings persistence as well as the cross-sectional distribution of health, wealth and earnings. The model allows us to quantify the intergenerational effect of parental investments on the child's human capital, health and wealth outcomes separately from the effects of the child's own investments as an adult. As a result, the calibrated model sheds light on how income redistribution policies may affect health outcomes, and conversely how health policies can affect income distribution, and importantly how the impact of both types of policies may spill over to subsequent generations.

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.