Download or read book Essays on Labor Markets and Income Inequality in Less Developed Countries written by Ariel Fiszbein and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Inequality in Labor Markets and Wealth written by David Nathaniel Wasser 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 three essays that address important questions within the fields of labor economics and public economics. I use advanced empirical methods and a combination of restricted access and public-use data to study the role of inequality in labor markets and wealth.In Chapter 1, I study whether the effects of unemployment insurance (UI) extensions are different for workers exposed to higher levels of local labor market concentration, a potential source of employer market power. UI extensions can improve the bargaining power of job seekers relative to employers by improving workers' outside options. I exploit measurement error in state unemployment rates that led to quasi-random assignment of UI durations in the U.S. during the Great Recession. Using matched employer-employee data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program, I find that UI extensions lengthen nonemployment durations by one week and cause economically meaningful but not statistically significant increases in earnings. The UI-earnings effect is significantly lower at higher levels of concentration, while there is no difference in the UI-duration effect. The lower UI-earnings effect is driven by differences at the extremes of the distribution of concentration. Workers exposed to higher concentration also are slightly more likely to change workplaces, local labor markets, and industries following an extension, but they are not induced to match into less-concentrated markets. My results imply that the benefits of more generous UI, in terms of match quality, are attenuated at higher levels of concentration, and so UI policy that accounts for local concentration is potentially warranted.In Chapter 2, joint with Anne M. Burton, we revisit how Ban the Box (BTB) policies affect the employment of minority men. BTB policies are intended to help ex-offenders find employment by delaying when employers can ask about criminal records. Existing evidence finds BTB causes discrimination against young, non-college-educated minority men. We show that effects for this group are not robust to a simple change in specification and the coding of BTB laws. Using a distinct treatment definition, we find no evidence of statistical discrimination: employment effects are near zero, precisely estimated, and not statistically significant.In Chapter 3, joint with N. Meltem Daysal and Michael F. Lovenheim, we study the effect of changes in parental wealth in childhood on the intergenerational transmission of wealth. Rising wealth inequality has spurred an increased interest in understanding how and why wealth is correlated across generations. Prior research has found an intergenerational correlation between 0.2 and 0.4 and has emphasized the role of family characteristics in driving this correlation. We contribute to this literature by examining the intergenerational transmission of wealth changes, which allows us to isolate the causal effect of wealth shocks from pre-determined parental preferences and household characteristics. Using Danish Register Data, we examine the effect of home price changes that occur between ages 0-5, 6-11, and 12-17 on overall wealth, housing wealth, and nonhousing wealth of adult children at ages 29-33. For the youngest age group, we find that 16.5% and 22.2% of each Krone of home price change is transmitted to overall wealth and housing wealth in adulthood, respectively. The corresponding transmission rates for the 6-11 age group are 30.8% and 18.5%, with a transmission to non-housing wealth of 12.3%. There is no transmission of home price changes that occur during the teenage years for any wealth outcome. Examining mechanisms, we find that home price increases in the first two age groups lead to modest increases in home ownership, educational attainment, and income. There also is an increase in partner wealth for the younger two groups. Income and education can explain less than a third of the intergenerational transmission we document. We argue that our results largely reflect changes to parental/household behaviors and preferences that are passed down to children and cause them to accumulate more housing wealth in young adulthood.

Download or read book Labour Markets Institutions and Inequality written by Janine Berg and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Labour market institutions, including collective bargaining, the regulation of employment contracts and social protection policies, are instrumental for improving the well-being of workers, their families and society. In many countries, these instituti

Download or read book Essays in Labor Market Inequality written by Ariella Kahn-Lang and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Labor Markets and Inequality written by Emilien Gouin-Bonenfant and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first chapter, I propose a tractable model of the labor share that emphasizes the interaction between labor market imperfections and productivity dispersion. I bring the model to the data using an administrative dataset covering the universe of firms in Canada. As in the data, most firms have a high labor share, yet the aggregate labor share is low due to the disproportionate effect of a small fraction of large, extremely productive “superstar firms”. I find that a rise in the dispersion of productivity across firms leads to a decline of the aggregate labor share in favor of firm profit. The mechanism is that productivity dispersion effectively shields high-productivity firms from wage competition. Reduced-form evidence from cross-country and cross-industry data supports both the prediction and the mechanism. Through the lens of the model, rising productivity dispersion has caused the U.S. labor share to decline starting around 1990. In the second chapter, we propose a new, systematic approach for analyzing and solving heterogeneous-agent models with fat-tailed wealth distributions. Our approach exploits the asymptotic linearity of policy functions and the analytical characterization of the Pareto exponent to make the solution algorithm more transparent, efficient, and accurate with zero additional computational cost. As an application, we solve a heterogeneous-agent model that features persistent earnings and investment risk, borrowing constraint, portfolio decision, and endogenous Pareto-tailed wealth distribution. We find that a wealth tax is a “lose-lose” policy: the introduction of a 1% wealth tax (with extra tax revenue used as consumption rebate) decreases wage by 6.5%, welfare (in consumption equivalent) by 7.7%, and total tax revenue by 0.72%. In the third chapter, I propose a model of earnings dynamics and inequality within the firm. The model combines a production hierarchy with a “rank order tournament” promotion scheme. I motivate the theory by documenting three sets of facts using proprietary personnel data. First, most of inequality within the firm is between hierarchy levels rather than within. Second, there is on average very little upward mobility within the firm. Third, there is important heterogeneity in earnings trajectories. The model provides a positive theory of these facts and sheds light on the determinants of inequality within the firm.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Market Analysis written by Orley Ashenfelter and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1977 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monographic compilation of essays in labour economics - covers labour demand and labour supply in the USA civil service, economic models of collective bargaining during labour disputes, economic analysis of job satisfaction, costs of job searching, etc. Diagrams, graphs, references, statistical tables. Festschrift comay yp 1939-1973.

Download or read book Labor Markets in Action written by Richard Barry Freeman and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Labor Markets in Developing Countries written by Binh T. Nguyen and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Labor Market Inequality written by Conrad Miller (Ph. D.) and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three chapters on aspects of labor market inequality. In chapter 1, I estimate the dynamic effects of federal affirmative action regulation, exploiting variation in the timing of regulation and deregulation across work establishments. I find that affirmative action sharply increases the black share of employees, with the share continuing to increase over time: five years after an establishment is first regulated, its black share of employees increased by an average of 0.8 percentage points. Strikingly, the black share continues to grow even after an establishment is deregulated. Building on the canonical Phelps (1972) model of statistical discrimination, I argue that this persistence is in part driven by affirmative action inducing employers to increase the precision with which they screen potential employees. I then provide supporting evidence. In chapter 2, I study the spatial mismatch hypothesis, which proposes that job suburbanization isolates blacks from work opportunities and depresses black employment. Using synthetic panel methods and variation across metropolitan areas from 1970 to 2000, I find that for every 10% decline in the fraction of metropolitan area jobs located in the central city, black employment (earnings) declined by 1.4-2.1% (1.1-2.3%) relative to white employment (earnings). This relationship is driven primarily by job suburbanization that occurred during the 1970's. To address the potential endogeneity of suburbanization, I exploit exogenous variation in highway construction and find that highways cause job suburbanization and declines in black relative employment in a manner consistent with spatial mismatch. In chapter 3, joint work with Isaiah Andrews, we analyze the effect of heterogeneity on the widely used analyses of Baily (1978) and Chetty (2006) for optimal social insurance. The basic Baily-Chetty formula is robust to heterogeneity along many dimensions but requires that risk aversion be homogeneous. We extend the Baily-Chetty framework to allow for arbitrary heterogeneity across agents, particularly in risk preferences. We find that heterogeneity in risk aversion affects welfare analysis through the covariance of risk aversion and consumption drops, which measures the extent to which larger risks are borne by more risk tolerant workers. Calibrations suggest that this covariance effect may be large.

Download or read book Inequality in Housing and Labor Markets written by Caitlin Knowles Myers and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Labor Markets written by Andreas Gulyas and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation contributes towards our understanding of the determinants of wage inequality and to the causes of the emergence of jobless recoveries. It consists of two chapters. The first, "Identifying Labor Market Sorting with Firm Dynamics" studies the determinants of wage inequality, which requires understanding how workers and firms match. I propose a novel strategy to identify the complementarities in production between unobserved worker and firm attributes, based on the idea that positive (negative) sorting implies that firms upgrade (downgrade) their workforce quality when they grow in size. I use German matched employer-employee data to estimate a search and matching model with worker-firm complementarities, job-to-job transitions, and firm dynamics. The relationship between changes in workforce quality and firm growth rates in the data informs the strength of complementarities in the model. Thus, this strategy bypasses the lack of identification inherent to environments with constant firm types. I find evidence of negative sorting and a significant dampening effect of worker-firm complementarities on wage inequality. Worker and firm heterogeneity, differential bargaining positions, and sorting contribute 71\%, 20\%, 32\% and -23\% to wage dispersion, respectively. Reallocating workers across firms to the first-best allocation without mismatch yields an output gain of less than one percent.\\ My second chapter, "Does the Cyclicality of Employment Depend on Trends in the Participation Rate?" studies the fact that the past three recessions were characterized by sluggish recovery of the employment to population ratio. The reasons behind these "jobless recoveries" are not well understood. Contrary to other post-WWII recessions, these "jobless recoveries" occurred during times with downward trending labor force participation rate(LFPR). I extend the directed search setup of Menzio et al. (2012) with a labor force participation decision to study whether trends in LFPR cause jobless recessions. I then show that that recoveries during times of declining LFPR look very different to recoveries during positive LFPR trend. The basic intuition is as follows: During downward trending LFPR, many low productivity workers cling on to their jobs, but once separated, it does not pay off for them to pay the search cost to re-enter the market. If the recession happens during increasing trend LFPR, then the employment recovery is helped by persons entering the labor market. Thus, I highlight that contrary to the usual approach in the literature, it is important to explicitly account for the trend of the LFPR.

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 In International Trade and Labor Markets written by Rodrigo Rodrigues Adão and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis develops empirical methodologies to investigate the effect of globalization on welfare and inequality both between- and within-countries. The first essay proposes a Roy-like model where workers are heterogeneous ill terms of their comparative and absolute advantage. We show that the schedules of comparative and absolute advantage (i) determine changes in the average and the variance of the log-wage distribution, and (ii) are nonparamnetrically identified from the cross-regional variation in the sectoral responses of employment and wages to observable sector-level demand shifters. Applying these results, we find that the rise in world commodity prices accounts for 5-10% of the fall in Brazilian wage inequality between 1991 and 2010. The second essay develops a methodology to construct nonparametric counterfactual predictions, free of functional-form restrictions on preferences and technology, in neoclassical models of international trade. First, we establish the equivalence between such models and reduced exchange models in which countries directly exchange factor services. This equivalence implies that, for an arbitrary change in trade costs, counterfactual changes in factor prices, and welfare only depend on the shape of a reduced factor demand system. Second, we provide sufficient conditions for the nionparainetric identification of this system. Together, these results offer a strict generalization of the parametric approach used in so-called gravity models. Finally, we use China's recent integration into the world economy to illustrate tile feasibility of our approach. The third essay investigates the connection between the recent rise in services trade and changes in labor market outcomes in different countries. We develop a theoretical framework where trade in services arises from the spatial unbundling of workers' task output. Transmission costs endogenously determine the magnitude of between-sector task trade both within a country ("outsourcing") and between countries ("offshoring"). We show that, while differentials in sectoral task prices decrease in response to outsourcing, they increase in response to offshoring. The heterogeneity in the composition of workers' task endowments controls responses in between- and within-sector wage inequality across countries.

Download or read book Labor Markets and Wage Determination written by Clark Kerr and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Skill specific Labor Markets Inequality and Consumption Over the Business Cycle written by Runli Xie and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Wage Determination and Labor Market Inequality written by Zoe B. Cullen and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores questions in labor economics with a particular focus on economic inequality. As one might expect, race, gender, and location are recurring themes. The dissertation makes headway on long-standing questions in economics, in large part, through the collection of administrative datasets, and complementary field experiments. In the first chapter, I present evidence that employers pay a premium to equalize pay between workers if those workers can share information about their compensation. To establish a causal relationship between pay transparency and wage compression, I work with the operator of an online labor market who granted me access to detailed records of the tasks that employers advertise and the prices at which workers are willing to do them. These data capture the entire wage determination process, making it possible to observe the drivers of wage compression and the gender wage gap. Three facts emerge. First, for a particular multi-worker setting, pay between any two workers differs on average by over fifty percent when workers propose a price for their services. Second, when workers are in the same location, employers deliberately raise the pay of lower bidders, reducing dispersion, irrespective of differences in assessed productivity or reservation values. Finally, employers who compress pay when workers work in the same place will allow disparities when workers are physically separated. Overall, we find that even in this short-term spot market for labor, consideration of relative pay are quantitatively important for both wages and labor supply. We combine these online platform data with a field experiment to show that, with few institutional constraints, paying a premium to compress pay may be efficient when workers can communicate pay. Our field experiment shows that when pay is unequal, workers strategically use information about co-worker pay to negotiate higher wages that can double the time it takes to complete a job. Worker morale response to lower relative pay can lead quality of output to fall by a full standard deviation. An employer can make trade-offs between these costs by adjusting the terms of negotiation or compressing pay. A profit maximizing employer may optimally equalize wages ex-ante in equilibrium. An important extension to this empirical result is the effect of gender on the ramifications of pay transparency. While a male worker who communicates with co-workers is, on average, able to close the wage gap between the highest paid work and himself by 85 percent, a female worker in the same position closes the gap by 12 percent. This result may give pause to advocates of pay transparency policies if their goal is more equal pay for men and women. The second and third chapter examine the relationship between place and productivity. In the second chapter, I study the impact on aggregate productivity of policies that affect a firm's choice of where to locate. In particular, I study the relationship between state corporate taxes and the investment of firms in R & D, as captured by new patents. While tax advantaged-areas make investment cheaper for firms, they often require firms to locate where their productivity will be lower. In this chapter, I create a unique patent-establishment panel dataset by linking the residence of scientists on each patent application granted, over a thirty-year window, with the address of U.S. establishments. With this dataset, I show that innovation productivity is lower in low tax places, suggesting that place-based productivity is a more important determinant of innovative activity than traditional explanations which focus on the cost of investment. Our analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we analyze establishment mobility and show that lower taxes attract establishments. In particular, a one percent lower corporate tax rate increases the share of establishments in a local area by roughly 3.4%. Second, we exploit establishment migration to separate variation in innovation productivity due to establishment-specific and place-specific characteristics. We show that moving to a place that is 5% more productive increases a given firm's patent activity by 1\%. We follow this literature in evaluating the validity of this variation using pre-move behavior and control functions in the spirit of Dahl (2002). We then relate these place effects to corporate taxes and document that low tax places tend to have lower innovation productivity. The third chapter provides evidence that the voluntary choice of African-Americans to move from Northern regions in the U.S. to Southern regions is responsible in part for lower occupational standing and real income. I find that these migration patterns are also part of a trend that accelerated during the early 21st century among Northern born African-Americans. We combine evidence from four nationally-representative surveys, the U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, and the Survey of Income Program and Participation, to statistically assess the forces behind a reverse migration from North to South and associated economic trade-offs. Using variation in the precise timing of individual moves and a model of the wage process, I provide evidence that, on average, African-American are moving to places where their earnings are lower after adjusting for regional price differences, and much lower relative to non-Hispanic white migrants. As suggestive evidence about the reason for these moves, we find that the magnitude of the economic trade-off between origin and destination is proportional to the severity and duration of riots which occurred in Northern cities at the time of the earlier Great Migration. We conclude from this that attractive amenities of the South may play a minor role in driving a reverse migration relative to the failure of some Northern cities to integrate during the 20th century. In chapters 1 and 2, I work closely with co-authors Bobak Pakzad Hurson, currently a classmate of mine, and Juan Carlos Suarez Serrato, who was a post-doc at Stanford at the inception of our collaboration, and who has since take a faculty position at Duke University.

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: