Download or read book Essays on Labor Supply and Uncertainty written by Vincent Leah-Martin and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The content of this dissertation focuses on the link between earnings risk and the preferences of workers in the labor market. The research papers which comprise the chapters of the dissertation all examine worker responses to short-run earnings variation. Chapter 1 addresses the question of whether or not behavior consistent with having risk preferences around a daily income target can explain observed behavior in taxi drivers. Chapter 2 examines hows the outcomes of a wage distribution can influence job satisfaction. Lastly, chapter 3 utilizes an experiment to establish a link between estimated risk attitudes and labor supply outcomes.
Download or read book Essays on Labor Markets Monetary Policy and Uncertainty written by Neil Ware White (IV) and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the impacts on the labor market of monetary policy and macroeconomic uncertainty. The first chapter examines how monetary policy shocks in the U.S. affect the flows of workers among three labor market categories--employment, unemployment, and non-participation--and assesses each flow's relative importance to changes in labor market "stock'' variables like the unemployment rate. I find that job loss accounts for the largest portion of monetary policy's effect on labor markets. I develop a New Keynesian model that incorporates these channels and show how a central bank can achieve welfare gains from targeting job loss, rather than output, in an otherwise standard Taylor rule. The second chapter examines the role of monetary policy in "job polarization.'' I argue that contractionary monetary policy has accelerated the decline of employment in routine occupations, which largely affected workers with a high-school degree but no college. In part by disproportionately affecting industries with high shares of routine occupations, contractionary monetary policy shocks lead to large and persistent shifts away from routine employment. Expansionary shocks, on the other hand, have little effect on these industries. Indeed, monetary policy's effect on overall employment is concentrated in routine jobs. These results highlight monetary policy's role in generating fluctuations not only in the level of employment, but also the composition of employment across occupations and industries. The third chapter introduces new direct measures of uncertainty derived from the Michigan Survey of Consumers. The series underlying these new measures are more strongly correlated with economic activity than many other series that are the basis for uncertainty proxies. The survey also facilitates comparison with response dispersion or disagreement, a commonly used proxy for uncertainty in the literature. Dispersion measures have low or negative correlation with direct measures of uncertainty and often have causal effects of opposite sign, suggesting that they are poor proxies for uncertainty. For the measures based on series most closely correlated with economic activity, positive uncertainty shocks are mildly expansionary. This result is robust across identification and estimation strategies and is consistent with "growth options'' theories of the effects of uncertainty.
Download or read book Essays on Firms Aggregate Uncertainty and the Labor Market written by Nicolò Dalvit and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is comprised of three chapters that revolve around two main themes:the micro economic incidence of macro shocks and the role of firms in determining labor market outcomes. In the first chapter I provide new evidence on the cyclical dynamics of firms. I show that firms expecting to lose market share in the futureare hit the hardest during economic downturns. This heterogeneous sensitivity provides a new rationale for the observed counter-cyclical dispersion in firms'growth rates and has implications for the dynamics of aggregate employment. The second chapter studies the role of income tax progressivity in reallocating income risk across heterogeneous workers and stabilizing the economy. We show that eliminating income tax progressivity in Italy would come at the expense of the majority of the work force. The current system of marginal tax rates is effective atreallocating cyclical income risk from low to high wage workers and reducesaggregate employment volatility compared to a counter-factual flat rate system.The third chapter considers the internal hierarchical structure of a firm and its rolein determining wages and internal promotions. We focus in particular on the rolethat internal hierarchies play in propagating gender differences in representation and pay. We study the effect of a change in the gender composition at the top afirm's internal hierarchy on workers further down the organizational ladder and findsome evidence of an effect only on layers close to the top.
Download or read book Essays on Labor Market Rigidities Inflation Persistence and Monetary Policy Uncertainty written by Pau Rabanal and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays in Labor and Information Economics written by Sun Hyung Kim and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contributes to theoretical and empirical studies in microeconomics, with a focus on evaluating policy relevant problems to provide new insights into questions. Within labor economics, I strive to understand the labor market returns to skills, taking into consideration the business cycle. In the first chapter, I investigate how the labor market returns to cognitive skills and social skills vary during recessions. In the second chapter, I examine the short-, medium and long-term career outcomes of college graduates as a function of economic conditions at graduation and both cognitive and social skills. In the third chapter, within information economics, I study how asymmetric information and demand uncertainty influence pricing strategies through learning. In Chapter 1, I examine how labor market returns to cognitive skills and social skills vary with the business cycle over the past 20 years, using data from the NLSY79 and the NLSY97. Exploiting a comparable set of cognitive and social skill measures across survey waves, I show that an increase in the unemployment rate led to higher demand for cognitive skills in the 2000s. High unemployment also sorted more workers into information use intensive occupations that require computer skills in the 2000s, but it sorted more workers into routine occupations in the 1980s and 1990s. This evidence suggests that recessions accelerate the restructuring of production toward routine-biased technologies. I also find that the returns to social skills increase during periods of high unemployment, though only in terms of the likelihood of full-time employment for experienced workers. Furthermore, an increase in unemployment increases the social skill task intensity of a worker's occupation in the 2000s, while it shows the contrary in the 1980s and 1990s.
Download or read book Three Essays in Life cycle Labor Supply and Human Capital Formation written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three independent essays on earnings dynamics, educational production function, and retirement. Each chapter explains labor supply and human capital formation from a life-cycle perspective. In the first chapter, I investigate how two different kinds of uncertainty jointly affect young workers' decisions. This paper introduces the possibility of multidimensional learning about worker ability and job match quality into a model of work decisions. This mechanism has a unique prediction, negative sorting into job mobility that fades away over time, which is verified in the NLSY79 data if the AFQT score carries over some information unused by workers and employers. I estimate the structural model, which also has flexible skill accumulation, by indirect inference. From simulation results on earnings dynamics, I find that the contribution of job shopping to average earnings growth is higher than previous estimates; also, individual heterogeneity in earnings growth is mostly explained by the process of resolving uncertainties. In the second chapter, which is joint work with Keunkwan Ryu, we estimate the effects of high school class size on college entrance exam scores, using Korean administrative data. For the identification, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in class size arising from distinct institutional settings in Korea: especially, students are separately educated by major from grade 11 with different class sizes between majors. By using multi-level differencing and instrumental variable techniques, we find the effects of high school class size reduction on the test scores are positive but small. In the third chapter, I examine the effects of life expectancy on retirement and related decisions. I construct a structural model which has a realistic description of complicated dynamic incentives facing the elderly, including Social Security. Furthermore, individual heterogeneity in survival beliefs are flexibly modeled, directly using subjective survival probabilities in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data. The estimated model suggests that many people in the data believed their wealth was over-annuitized; they would have chosen to work and save less if their average life expectancy had increased. This result partially explains the early retirement puzzle in the last century.
Download or read book Labor Markets Migration and Mobility written by William Cochrane and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is devoted to three key themes central to studies in regional science: the sub-national labor market, migration, and mobility, and their analysis. The book brings together essays that cover a wide range of topics including the development of uncertainty in national and subnational population projections; the impacts of widening and deepening human capital; the relationship between migration, neighborhood change, and area-based urban policy; the facilitating role played by outmigration and remittances in economic transition; and the contrasting importance of quality of life and quality of business for domestic and international migrants. All of the contributions here are by leading figures in their fields and employ state-of-the art methodologies. Given the variety of topics and themes covered this book, it will appeal to a broad range of readers interested in both regional science and related disciplines such as demography, population economics, and public policy.
Download or read book Essays on Non Farm Labor Supply Effects of Farm Mechanization Commodity Market Linkages and Trade Effects of Exchange Rate Uncertainty written by Md. Mansur Ahmed and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays in Economic Theory Growth and Labour Markets written by George Bitros and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The distinguished contributors in this volume provide a variety of essays, which are written in honor of Emmanuel Drandakis. These essays fall into four uniform areas of economics: economic growth, general equilibrium, labor economics and game theory and applications. The editors focus on a select set of issues that stand high on the agenda of academic research. They provide fresh insights and approaches to the analysis of these issues, and thus open up wider avenues for our understanding of the dilemmas posed for theory and policy. Readers are offered new empirical evidence on such thorny social problems as, for example, unemployment, the intergenerational transmission of human capital and the response of wages to price and endowment changes.
Download or read book Essays in Value added Trade and U S Labor Market Outcomes written by Han Wang and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays on how value-added trade affect the U.S. labor market outcomes. In the most recent presidential competition, we observed how voter angst against economic globalization had a considerable impact on the election results. This dissertation seeks to shed light on how the changes in exposure to value-added trade affect individual wages, the probability of being unemployed as well as the likelihood of being married with consideration of each worker's occupation, the level of skill, and gender. In the first essay, we link U.S. industry-level value-added trade data with U.S. worker-level data from the Current Population Surveys from 1995 to 2009. We find that U.S. occupational exposure to value-added imports has a negative effect on the wages earned by intermediate-routine workers, which leads to wage polarization among American workers. In particular, the polarization of wages is driven by occupational exposure to value-added imports of final goods from middle-income countries, while exposure to final goods imported from high-income countries has a negative, albeit more fairly distributed, effect across U.S. workers' wages. On the other hand, occupational exposure to value-added imports of intermediate goods from middle-income countries is associated with a positive wage effect for least-routine workers, signaling to the presence of strong complementarities between the group of least-routine workers and imports of intermediate goods from this group of countries. In the second essay, we investigate the contribution of the degree of occupation routineness and the level of a worker's skill in determining the effects of U.S. exposure to value-added trade on U.S. labor market outcomes. We apply three main approaches to examine how the interplay between routineness and skills is essential in explaining the effects of U.S. exposure to value-added trade flows. First, we find that the increase in occupational exposure to value-added imports of final goods from middle-income countries is the primary driver of polarization of wages in the U.S. labor market within each skill group, where the effect on workers in the occupations with moderate levels of routineness is most adversely affected. Comparing the wage effects for workers within each routineness group, we find that skilled workers tend to face smaller pressure on their wages from import competition than the unskilled. Second, we examine the impact of exposure to value-added trade on the probability of being unemployed at the worker level. We show that an increase in exposure to value-added imports will raise the employment-related uncertainty for unskilled workers relative to skilled workers. Third, we estimate the transition costs across workers who have trade-induced occupation switches between two consecutive periods. Results suggest that occupation switch is very costly for all unskilled workers as well as for the skilled workers who are involved with the least-routine occupations. Notice that the effect of trade might not be gender-neutral. In the third paper, we complement the existing literature by providing evidence that increasing import exposure has differential effects on individual outcomes depending on the workers' gender and on the degree of routineness of their occupations. We explore the effects of gender-specific exposure to value-added trade on individual outcomes such as wages, the probability of being unemployed, and the likelihood of being married. Despite that the male-specific exposures to value-added trade are highly comparable to those female-specific measures, we find it is powerful enough to distinguish their differential effects across gender. We find that the effect of trade is symmetric across genders when it comes to wage effects but asymmetric in terms of the probability of being unemployed and in the likelihood of being married. Our findings on wages suggest that an increase in exposure to value-added imports has the most negative effect on intermediate-routine workers for both gender groups, which results in wage polarization for both groups. As for the probability of being unemployed, we find that the greater the male-specific exposure to value-added imports, the greater the chances of being unemployed for male workers in the intermediate-routine occupations, while the effects for other men are insignificant. In the case of female workers, rising import exposure is associated with an increase in the uncertainty related to unemployment for those in least-routine occupations. Finally, for the likelihood of getting married, the effect for female workers is insignificant regardless of the degree of routineness. In the case of men, the likelihood of getting married decreases for males in intermediate-routine occupations when exposure to imported final goods increases, while, on the other hand, males in least-routine occupations are more likely to get married with an increase in exposure to intermediate inputs.
Download or read book Essays on Labor Supply and Discrimination written by Myeong-Su Yun and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Three Essays in Labor Economics written by Megan de Linde Leonard and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women, on average, are found in systematically different careers than men. The reason for this phenomenon is not fully understood, in part because expectations play a vital role in the process of career choice. Different religious groups have different beliefs on the importance of child bearing, so fertility expectations should differ by religious group. I include a woman's religious denomination in regressions on mea- sures of occupational flexibility. Jehovah's Witnesses choose the most flexible careers followed by Pentecostal, Catholic, Baptist, and Mainline Protestant women. Jewish women generally choose the least flexible careers. This is consistent with the human capital notion that women are choosing different careers than men rather than being forced into different job paths. If women are choosing jobs that allow them to take responsibility for home pro- duction, how does this affect their husbands? Male wage regressions that include marital status dummy variables find a marriage wage premium of 10 to 40%. This premium may occur because wives are taking responsibility for home production and husbands are free to focus their attention on productivity at work. It may also be that factors unobserved to the researcher may make a man more productive and more likely to marry. I use religious denomination as a proxy for specialization within the home. Men in more traditional religious denominations enjoy a higher marriage wage premium, which is evidence that household specialization of labor is an important cause of the wage premium. The choice of a career, whether to marry, and most other important life decisions are dependent on one's risk tolerance. The role of risk preferences in such choices is not fully understood, largely because relative risk aversion (y) is hard to empirically quantify. Chetty (2006) derives a formula for ° based on the link between utility and labor supply decisions. I estimate y at the micro level using the 1996 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. I compare y to an estimate based on hypothetical gambles and find the measures substantially different. This supports Chetty's claim that ex- pected utility theory cannot suffciently explain choices under uncertainty in different domains.
Download or read book Labour Markets and Uncertainty written by and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays on Economic Decisions Under Uncertainty written by Jacques Drèze and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1990-05-25 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Dreze is a highly respected mathematical economist and econometrician. This book brings together some of his major contributions to the economic theory of decision making under uncertainty, and also several essays. These include an important essay on 'Decision theory under moral hazard and state dependent preferences' that significantly extends modern theory, and which provides rigorous foundations for subsequent chapters. Topics covered within the theory include decision theory, market allocation and prices, consumer decisions, theory of the firm, labour contracts, and public decisions.
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 Essays on Labor Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
