Download or read book Essays on Technology and the Labor Market with Search Models written by Soonhong Min and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 116 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 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 Digitized Labor written by Lorenzo Pupillo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As with previous technological revolutions, innovations in the online world have triggered transformations in the labor market and the economy. While the Internet is trumpeted as a great job creator, there are also downsides that need to be identified and dealt with. The book discusses the following topics: Is the Internet a net creator of jobs? How are job profiles changed by the digital economy? What are the impacts on income distribution? Is it a winner-takes-all tournament? What models can facilitate adjustment without slowing innovation? This book features essays from major experts in the field coming from academia, international organizations, the private sector, and civil society. It blends theoretical and applied research presenting results from many countries, with particular emphasis on Europe, the USA, Canada and Asia.

Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics written by Joanne Tan and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis examines the themes of sorting, inequality and the impact of technological change on the labor market. In particular, it addresses the questions of how workers sort within and between firms and how this influences labor market inequality, both in the workforce as a while, as well as between demographic and skill groups. It also considers how changes in technology affects the labor market conditions faced by workers and firms. These questions are tackled over three chapters. The first chapter, entitled `Multidimensional heterogeneity and matching in a frictional labor market - an application to polarization' deals with the sorting of workers to firms along multidimensional characteristics and quantifies the impact of technological change on the evolution of sorting patterns, wages and employment outcomes of different skill and demographic groups. I construct a model of directed search with two-sided multidimensional heterogeneity and estimate the model on US data. I find that production complementarities between cognitive and interpersonal skills and tasks have increased, relative to hat between manual skills and manual tasks. This change in production technology accounts for a large part of wage and job polarization in the US. Also, despite being gender-blind, the model can explain a substantial fraction of the narrowing of gender wage and job rank gaps from the 1980s to the present day. The second chapter, entitled `Intra-firm hierarchies and gender gaps' and coauthored with Nicolo Dalvit and Aseem Patel, studies the sorting of women into layers of hierarchy within firms, using administrative French data, and examines the incidence of gender wage and employment gaps across hierarchies over time. Further, by exploiting a policy on corporate board quotas in France, it assesses the impact of an increase in female leadership on gender wage and employment outcomes within firms. We find that hierarchies matter in gender wage and employment gaps. Gender wage and employment gaps increase with each layer of firm hierarchy, even if these gaps narrow more over time in the upper layers. In addition, improvements in top female leadership has differing impacts across hierarchies. While a greater share of female corporate board members narrows the gender wage gap in top layers of hierarchy, it has no such impact on lower layers. Instead, it increases the share of women in lower layers working part-time, at the expense of full-time employment. The opposite is true for women in upper layers. The third chapter, `Occupational Shortage and Labor Market Adjustments: a Theory of Islands', coauthored with Riccardo Zago, addresses the incidence of occupational shortage, and assesses whether it leads to wage and employment adjustments. Using a unique dataset on reported vacancies that firms find difficult to fill, we document the incidence of shortage across regions, industries and occupation groups. We find that shortage only leads to wage and employment adjustments in non-routine occupations, but not in routine occupations. We show how the secular decline of the routine occupations, caused by technological change, can account for the persistence in shortage in the routine sector and its inability to adjust.

Download or read book Essays on the Impact of Technological Progress on the U S Labor Markets written by MUSA ORAK and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies the impact of technological progress on various aspects of the U.S. labor markets such as the recent decline in the labor's share of income, job and wage polarization, rising income and wealth inequalities and skill accumulation. Chapter 1, "Capital-Task Complementarity and the Decline of the U.S. Labor Share of Income," studies how changes in occupational composition of the labor force contributes to the recent decline of the US labor share of income. Following the job polarization literature and classifying labor by tasks performed, I estimate unitary elasticity between equipment capital and labor performing non-routine tasks. This implies that income loss of labor em- ployed in routine task occupations is the main driver of the decline of the aggregate labor share. For a given path of technological change, decline of the labor share is larger when: (i) the substitutability between equipment capital and routine tasks is stronger, and (ii) equip- ment capital has a larger weight in production. Furthermore, a dynamic general equilibrium model shows that the impact of permanent technology shocks on the labor share gets smaller as the fraction of routine task labor declines. Consistent with this, the model predicts that the labor share should stabilize at around 55% in the long-run even if technological progress continues at its current pace. The model also documents that the fall in relative equipment capital prices alone can explain 72% of the decline of the labor share for the 1967-2013 period. Finally, repeating the analysis by disaggregating labor into educational groups reveals that the theory based on capital-task interactions improves on the capital-skill complementarity theory in explaining the decline of the labor share. Chapter 2, "Impact of Information Technology on the Labor Share: Evidence from the U.S. Sectoral Data," contributes to the debate over the relationship between capital deep- ening and the aggregate labor share from a sectoral perspective. The study focuses on a specific group of equipment capital: information and communication technology (ICT) capital and exploits various sectoral heterogeneities to characterize the conditions under which the surge in ICT capital cause the labor share to fall. First, I document significant capital- task complementarity at each sector. Second, decline in ICT capital prices turns out to have a positive impact on the labor share. However, gains of labor devoted to non-routine task occupations are offset by the losses of labor employed in routine task occupations when a sector has: (i) initially high load of employment in routine task occupations, and (ii) weak absolute complementarity between ICT capital and labor working in occupations associated with non-routine tasks. Since sectors satisfying these two conditions have compromised the majority of the economy, the aggregate labor share has exhibited a downward trend so far, leading to the illusion that information technology has been driving the labor share downwards. However, there are two promising facts concerning the future: in one hand, the share of these sectors in value added is persistently falling and on the other hand, the share of routine task employment continues to fall at every sector. Thus, once the structural shifts and within sectoral adjustments are completed, the decline in the labor share should revert back. Chapter 3, "Job Polarization, Skill Accumulation and Wealth Inequality," is one of the first attempts in literature to incorporate the job polarization idea into an otherwise standard incomplete markets model with heterogeneous agents in two dimensions: skills and idiosyn- cratic productivity shocks. This set up allows us to contribute to the existing literature in two ways: (i) linking job polarization with rising wealth concentration, and (ii) modeling the continuous rise in skill supply in response to technological progress and job polarization accompanying it over time. When calibrated and solved for the years 1981 and 2011, the model shows that the decline in relative computer (ICT) capital prices alone accounts for a significant portion of the increases in employment share and relative wages of high skill occupations, as well as the increase in the supply of labor with a college or above-college degree. Consistent with the routinization hypothesis, the model also shows that advances in computer technology can account for most of the decline of the employment share and rela- tive wage of middle class over the three decades between 1981 and 2011. Furthermore, the model successfully captures the erosion of middle-class wealth, whereas wealth concentration rises substantially at the right tail and slightly at the left tail of the wealth distribution.

Download or read book Essays on Tasks Technology and Trends in the Labor Market written by Orhun Sevinc 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 Three Essays on the Labor Market Effects of Technological Change and Unemployment Benefits written by Franziska Brall and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Technology and Work written by Joonas Vilhelm Tuhkuri and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of four papers on technology, work, skills, and personality using novel large-scale data and methods. The first paper (Chapter 1, with Johannes Hirvonen and Aapo Stenhammar) presents novel evidence on the effects of advanced technologies on employment, skill demand, and firm performance. The main finding is that advanced technologies led to increases in employment and no change in skill composition. Our main research design focuses on a technology subsidy program in Finland that induced sharp increases in technology investment in manufacturing firms. Our data directly measure multiple technologies and skills and track firms and workers over time. We demonstrate novel text analysis and machine learning methods to perform matching and to measure specific technological changes. To understand our findings, we outline a theoretical framework that contrasts two types of technological change: process versus product. We document that the firms used new technologies to produce new types of output rather than replace workers with technologies within the same type of production. The results contrast with the ideas that technologies necessarily replace workers or are skill biased.

Download or read book Three Essays on Search and Matching Models with Ex ante Investments written by Hiromi Nosaka and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Innovations Technology and the Labor Market written by Stephan Fahr and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Local Labor Markets written by Matt Notowidigdo and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis studies the economics of local labor markets. There are three chapters in the thesis, and each chapter studies how economic outcomes are affected by local labor market conditions. The first chapter studies the incidence of local labor demand shocks. This chapter starts from the observation that low-skill workers are comparatively immobile. When labor demand slumps in a city, college-educated workers tend to relocate whereas non college workers are disproportionately likely to remain to face declining wages and employment. A standard explanation of these facts is that mobility is more costly for low-skill workers. This chapter proposes and tests an alternative explanation, which is that the incidence of adverse shocks is borne in large part by (falling) real estate rental prices and (rising) social transfers. These factors reduce the real cost of living differentially for low-income workers and thus compensate them, in part or in full, for declining labor demand. I develop a spatial equilibrium model which, appropriately parameterized, identifies both the magnitude of unobserved mobility costs by skill and the shape of the local housing supply curve. Nonlinear reduced form estimates using U.S. Census data document that positive labor demand shocks increase population more than negative shocks reduce population, that this asymmetry is larger for lows kill workers, and that such an asymmetry is absent for wages, housing values, and rental prices. Estimates of the full model using a nonlinear, simultaneous equations GMM estimator suggest that (1) the asymmetric population response is primarily accounted for by an asymmetric housing supply curve, (2) the differential migration response by skill is primarily accounted for by transfer payments, and (3) estimated mobility costs are at most modest and are comparable for high-skill and low-skill workers, suggesting that the primary explanation for the comparative immobility of low-skilled workers is not higher mobility costs per se, but rather a lower incidence of adverse labor demand shocks. The second chapter, written jointly with Daron Acemoglu and Amy Finkelstein, studies how local area health spending responds to permanent changes in local area income. This chapter is motivated by the fact that health expenditures as a share of GDP have more than tripled over the last half century, and a common conjecture is that this is primarily a consequence of rising real per capita income, which more than doubled over the same period. We investigate this hypothesis empirically by instrumenting for local area income with time-series variation in global oil prices between 1970 and 1990 interacted with cross-sectional variation in the oil reserves across different areas of the Southern United States. This strategy enables us to capture both the partial equilibrium and the local general equilibrium effects of an increase in income on health expenditures. Our central estimate is an income elasticity of 0.7, with an elasticity of 1.1 as the upper end of the 95 percent confidence interval. Point estimates from alternative specifications fall on both sides of our central estimate, but are almost always less than 1. We also present evidence suggesting that there are unlikely to be substantial national or global general equilibrium effects of rising income on health spending, for example through induced innovation. Our overall reading of the evidence is that rising income is unlikely to be a major driver of the rising health share of GDP. The third chapter, written jointly with Kory Kroft, studies theoretically and empirically how optimal Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits vary with local labor market conditions. Theoretically, we derive the relationship between the moral hazard cost of UI and the unemployment rate in a standard search model. The model motivates our empirical strategy which tests whether the effect of UI benefits on unemployment durations varies with the local unemployment rate. In our preferred specification, a one standard deviation increase in the local unemployment rate reduces the magnitude of the duration elasticity by 32%. Using this estimate to calibrate the optimal level of UI benefits, we find that a one standard deviation increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 6.4 percentage point increase in the optimal replacement rate. JEL classification: J61, 110, J65.

Download or read book Essays on Technological Change and Labor Markets written by Xueda Song and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Imperfect Competition in the Labor Market written by Sydnee Christian Caldwell and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three chapters on imperfect competition in the labor market. The first chapter (joint with Nikolaj Harmon) explores the relationship between an individual's wages and the quality of her opportunities at other firms (her outside options). To overcome the fact that many factors that shift an individual's outside opportunities also impact her productivity at her current job, we develop a novel identification strategy that generates within-individual (and within-firm-by-occupation) variation in workers' information about their outside options. This strategy, which we implement using linked employer-employee data from Denmark, exploits the fact that individuals often learn about labor market opportunities through their social networks. We find that increases in labor demand at former coworkers' current firms increases an incumbent worker's job-to-job mobility and wage growth. Consistent with theory, larger changes are necessary to induce a job-to-job transition than to induce a wage gain. Tests that exploit within-firm or within-firm-and-occupation variation and tests that exploit different subsets of an individual's former coworkers confirm that the results are not driven by unobserved changes in demand for workers' skills. Finally, we use our reduced form moments to identify a structural search model incorporating both posting and bargaining firms. We find that bargaining is more prevalent among high skilled workers. The second chapter (joint with Oren Danieli) investigates the role that cross-sectional differences in individuals' outside options play in generating between-group wage inequality. We use a two-sided matching model to micro-found a measure of workers' outside options, which we call the "Outside Options Index" (001). The index is similar to those used in the industrial organization literature to measure concentration (e.g. the Herfindal-Hirschman Index, the HHI). We then use German administrative data to estimate this index and use two sources of quasi-random variation: (1) the introduction of high-speed trains and (2) a standard shift-share instrument to identify the elasticity between our index and wages. When we combine these two ingredients, we find that roughly 1/3 of the gender wage gap in Germany can be explained by differences in options, mostly the result of differences in effective labor market size (commuting costs). The third chapter (joint with Emily Oehlsen) asks whether, in the absence of commuting costs, firms with market power have an incentive to pay women less than men. We use data from a series of experiments at Uber where we offered random subsets of male and female drivers higher "wages". Drivers varied both in the size of the wage increase and in whether they could drive for Uber's main competitor, Lyft. These two sources of variation allow us to experimentally identify: (1) Frisch elasticities and (2) firm substitution elasticities. We find that women have Frisch elasticities double those of men on both the intensive and extensive margin. However, unlike the prior literature, we find that women are not less likely to shift between firms in response to changes in relative wages. The results suggest that, at least in the gig economy, firms have little incentive to wage discriminate between men and women based on their labor supply choices. JEL Codes: JOO, J31, J42

Download or read book Technology Growth and the Labor Market written by Donna K. Ginther and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology, Growth, and the Labor Market brings together research by economists from academia and the Federal Reserve System. The first section of the volume includes discussions by monetary policymakers with firsthand experience in determining how technology affects productivity, inequality, and macroeconomic growth. Papers in the second section discuss the sources of the surge in labor productivity growth during the latter half of the 1990s and present forecasts of labor productivity growth rates during the next few years. In the third section, the papers focus on the role of technological advances in changes in earnings inequality in the labor market. The authors examine whether inequality should be viewed as a causal result of skill-biased technological change or whether there is a missing link - or perhaps no link - between changes in technology and changes in wage inequality. The final section explores the relationships between computer investment, worker skills, human resource practices, and productivity at the industry and firm levels.

Download or read book Essays on Finance and Labor Markets written by Alex Xi He and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three chapters in corporate finance and labor economics. The first two chapters study the interaction of the financial sector and labor market, and the last chapter focuses on corporate R&D investment. The first chapter (co-authored with Daniel le Maire) studies how the market for corporate control disciplines managers who pay high wages. We construct a manager-firm-worker matched panel data set covering the population of Denmark from 1995 to 2011 and develop a framework to measure manager styles in wage-setting by tracking workers and managers across different firms over time. We find that individual managers do matter for wages, and variation in manager fixed effects can explain a significant part of wage differences between firms. Using a comprehensive sample of over 3000 M&As, we show that mergers target high-paying managers and reduce wage premiums but not employment at target firms, and that the effect is stronger in less competitive industries. Establishments with high wage premiums due to generous managers are more likely to be acquired, and experience higher manager turnover and larger wage declines after acquisition. Lower wages have little effect on firms? productivity, and therefore represent a transfer from workers to shareholders. We show that increased market power in product markets or labor markets cannot account entirely for these facts. The reduction in wages accounts for about half the shareholder gains in all M&As, suggesting that rent extraction might be a major motive for merger transactions. The second chapter (co-authored with Daniel le Maire) investigates the effects of liquidity constraints on employment and earnings by exploiting a mortgage reform in Denmark in 1992, which for the first time allowed homeowners to borrow against housing equity for non-housing purposes. Liquidity-constrained homeowners extracted housing equity, increased debt levels and experienced higher earnings growth after the reform. In contrast, the reform had little impact on employment and earnings of homeowners with high liquid asset holdings. Consistent with models of job search with risk aversion, the option to borrow against housing equity allows individuals to seek jobs that have higher earnings growth but higher unemployment risks. This effect is larger for low-income and older individuals. The results imply that relaxing liquidity constraints can increase output, and policies restricting mortgage refinancing during economic distress may backfire in recessions. The third chapter studies the spillovers of corporate R&D investment across different technological fields. I build a measure of technological distance between firms using the citation-based innovation network, which incorporates knowledge spillovers from upstream technological fields to downstream technological fields. I then use this measure to estimate the impact of technology spillovers using panel data on U.S. firms. I find that spillovers from firms innovating in upstream fields are quantitatively as important as spillovers from firms innovating in same fields. Consistent with the idea that firms innovate more when there is more past upstream innovation to build on, firms' R&D investments respond positively to R&D investments of firms in upstream fields, but not to R&D investments of firms in downstream fields or in the same fields. Smaller firms on average operate in more upstream technological fields and generate more spillovers and higher social returns, which is contrary to the findings of previous research. JEL Codes: G34, J30, D22