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 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 in Urban Economics and Local Labor Markets written by Adam W. Perdue and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: This dissertation consists of two essays exploring the often noted dispersion of economic activity within cities. Focusing in particular on the phenomenon of polycentricity, these essays explore the relationship between employment centers and spatial and economic outcomes of cities. The first essay explores the implications of two common proposed criteria for identifying an employment center. Does the area represent a local concentration of employment? Does the area affect the local population density of the city? Using data on both place of employment and place of residence, I propose a new method for testing the relationship between concentrations of employment and population density within a metropolitan area. First a recently developed statistical method is used to identify concentrations of employment using data on place of employment. Second, I propose two methods for estimating the extent of the radius of influence for an employment center, using the relationship between tract of employment and tract of residence. Third, I propose a new specification for the entrance of distance into the polycentric regression. This new specification allows the impacts of the concentrations of employments on density to be positive, following the theoretical hypothesis. I use this new specification to jointly estimate the local gradients of 21 identified concentrations of employment in the Houston metropolitan area on their local population density. I find that not all identified employment concentrations have the expected significant positive gradients, and thus do not qualify as employment centers. I also find that the estimated gradients are sensitive to estimates for the radius of influence for each employment concentration, and that the level of employment in an employment concentration, alone, is not a strong predictor of significant local impact on population density or on the size of the estimated gradient. The second essay tests for the theoretically predicted relationships between the number of employment centers in a city, and the city's transport costs and wages. Urban area vehicle miles travelled rise with an increase in the number of employment centers in an urban area, while commute times are unaffected. These findings contradict the common hypothesis that additional employment centers lower transport costs by allowing workers to live closer to work. Instead, it appears that if transport costs are falling they do so through a fall in per unit distance price. I find that urban area average wages fall with an increase in the number of employment centers. I also find that average wages increase as a larger share of employment locates within employment centers. These two findings support the belief in the presence of agglomeration economies within employment centers that increases in concentration. In a competitive equilibrium the formation of additional employment centers have externalities in both the costs and benefits, thus it is not clear if the efficient number of employment centers will be formed within an urban area. This is explored through an investigation of the determinants of the share of urban area employment that locates in employment centers. I find that the predicted employment share maximizing number of employment centers increases with urban area size.

Download or read book Essays on Local Labor Markets written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Progressive income taxes provide a disincentive for workers to live in high productivity local labor markets, potentially leading to a spatial misallocation of labor. Relative to previous work, Chapter 1 relaxes two key assumptions; 1) that workers are perfectly mobile and 2) that workers are homogeneous. These generalizations allow us to better quantify the impact of federal income taxes, as well as analyze the associated equity-efficiency trade-off, which has not previously been studied in a spatial context. To quantify these effects, we augment an empirical spatial equilibrium model (Diamond, 2015) to incorporate taxes and estimate it using Census data. We find that the optimal federal income tax code is substantially more progressive than the current tax code, i.e. that redistribution concerns outweigh the efficiency costs of income taxes in a spatial equilibrium. High school graduates are substantially less likely to move between states than college graduates. If moving costs increase with distance, then a stronger spatial correlation in the value of nearby locations will decrease migration rates. In Chapter 2, I document that the spatial correlation in average (log) wages, by MSA, is stronger for high school graduates. I estimate a location choice model in the spirit of McFadden(1978) and Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes(2004) to assess the quantitative importance of this empirical relationship. Counterfactual experiments examine migration rates for high school graduates as if they faced the same spatial correlation in wages as college graduates.

Download or read book Essays on the Impact of Economic Shocks in the Local Labor Markets written by Jan Peter aus dem Moore and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 Essays on Local Labor Markets written by Clément Malgouyres and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis studies empirically several issues regarding the functioning of local labor markets. In Chapter 1, I follow the methodology developed by Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013) to estimate the impact of Chinese imports competition onto French local labor markets, with an emphasis on the spill-overs e ects beyond the manufacturing sector on the structure of employment and wages. Local employment and total labor income in both manufacturing and non-manufacturing are negatively a ected by rising exposure to imports. Imports competition from China polarized the local structure of employment in the manufacturing sector. Hourly wages distribution is negatively a ected but overall wage dispersion is not increased. The non-traded sector even experiences a decrease in lower-tail inequality. Exploiting geographical variation in the bite of the minimum wage, I nd evidence suggesting that the minimum wage explains this e ect. In Chapter 2, I use a re nement of empirical strategy in Chapter 1 to look at whether communities suddenly a ected by rising economic integration with low-wage countries tended to vote more for the far-right parties over the last four French presidential elections. I nd evidence of a small but signi cantly positive impact of imports competition exposure on votes for the far-right: a one standard-deviation increase in imports-per-worker causes the change in the far-right share to increase by 7 percent of a standard deviation. Further results suggest that this e ect has been increasing over the time period considered. We conduct a simple sensitivity test supporting the notion that (i) omitting local share of immigrants is likely to bias our estimate downward, and that (ii) this bias is likely to negligible. In Chapter 3, co-authored with Camille H emet, we study the impact of local diversity on labour market outcomes, at two di erent level of aggregation: local labor market and i immediate neighborhood. We nd that employment correlates positively with local labor market diversity, but negatively with neighborhood diversity. Using an instrumental variable approach to deal with local labor market diversity drives the positive correlation to zero, con rming the suspicion of self-selection. Regarding neighborhood diversity, we adopt the strategy of Bayer et al. (2008), taking advantage of the very precise localization of the data: the negative e ect of diversity is reinforced. We also show that nationality-based diversity matters more than parents' origin-based diversity, giving insights on the underlying mechanisms. In Chapter 4, co-authored with Camille H emet, we exploit some speci cities of the French Labor Force Survey, in order to detect the presence of referral networks among neighbors. We show the presence of referral networks, provide extensive robustness checks and investigate two rather understudied issues in the literature: (i) what kind of job transition are local referrals associated with (job-to-job or unemployment-to-job), (ii) how has the strength of local referral e ects evolved overtime?

Download or read book Essays on Local Labor Markets written by Federica Daniele and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is composed of three essays in which I analyze how heterogeneity in productivity, either on the worker or on the firm side, interacts with the size of local labor markets and a set of outcomes of interest. In the first chapter, I analyze how the presence of firm-level uncertainty affects consumers and cities. I provide evidence supporting entrepreneurial risk-seeking in the non-tradable sector and that this has the strongest consequences for competition in large cities. I show how a reduction in uncertainty dampened entry and competition, and reduced the attractiveness of consumer cities. In the second chapter, I analyze the role of large firms for local labor market volatility. I provide empirical and narrative evidence supporting the existence of granularity- driven business cycles. I discuss the im-portance of size-dependent policies with respect to the systemic risk externality imposed by large firms on the economy. In the third chapter, I analyze how indi-vidual specialization shapes the urban wage premium. I investigate to what extent changes in specialization have accounted for the divergence in US workers loca-tion choices. I show that the evolution of specialization can explain the increase in between-cities wage inequality for high-skilled workers, while it counteracted the increase in the average skill premium.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Nicholas Anthony Carollo and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays in labor economics with a focus on economic and institutional differences in regional labor markets. It separately explores the causes and consequences of two major trends in the United States - the declining geographic concentration of immigrant location choices and the increasing prevalence of state-level occupational licensing requirements. Chapter one shows that the geographic concentration of the foreign-born population in the United States fell sharply between 1980 and 2010 as immigrants were increasingly drawn to areas with historically low migrant inflows. This trend was driven primarily by the changing location choices of new immigrant cohorts, though secondary migration has played a minor role as well. An analysis of the determinants of location choice across four decades suggests that immigrants remain highly responsive to local labor market conditions, but the traditionally strong pull of ethnic enclaves has diminished over time. Chapter two describes the construction of a novel dataset that compiles over one hundred years of occupational licensing, certification, and registration requirements in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. The data are assembled through a comprehensive analysis of numerous primary and secondary sources and currently identify major state and federal policy changes for 250 unique occupation categories. It is the first occupational licensing database to link each policy to both current statutes or administrative regulations, as well as to historical legislation covering the entire twentieth century. A comprehensive analysis of state session laws, in particular, allows me to observe the exact text of all legislative acts enacting, amending, or replacing statutes that reference specific occupations. Using the content of these laws, I record the enactment and effective dates of regulatory changes and several variables that characterize the type of regulation that was adopted. Relative to existing sources, my data offer a significantly longer time series, the ability to observe superseded legislation, and a more complete coding of legal prohibitions that differentiates between practice and title restrictions. Chapter three studies the short- and long-run impact of occupational licensing on labor market outcomes in the United States using the data described in chapter two. I implement an event study design that exploits within-occupation variation in the timing of licensing statutes across states to trace out the dynamic response of earnings and employment to policy changes. I find consistent evidence across several independent employer and household surveys that the typical licensing statute adopted during the past half-century increased worker earnings, but had null or weakly positive effects on employment. Twenty-five years after licensing statutes were adopted, cumulative wage growth in treated state-occupation cells exceeded that of untreated controls by 4 to 7%. Over the same time period, my results rule out an average disemployment effect greater than -5%. The data show much larger decreases in employment, however, among occupations that have little potential to cause serious harm. In cases where the consumer protection rationale for licensing is more plausible, I find simultaneous increases in both earnings and employment following the adoption of licensing requirements.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Labor Markets written by Alexander Wickman Bartik and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three chapters on the economics of labor markets. Each chapter explores an aspect of the distributional consequences of labor market shocks due to changes in trade, regulations, or technology. The first chapter investigates the extent to which geographic variation in wage growth reflects workers' incomplete arbitrage of changing job opportunities in different locations, industries, and occupations. Without moving costs, worker adjustment to changes in labor demand would eliminate differential earnings effects between directly exposed workers and others in the same skill group. I find evidence against this full-mobility benchmark, estimating that exposure to trade with China reduces earnings of non-college educated workers in exposed Commuting Zones (CZs) by 4%, and fracking increases earnings of the original residents of exposed CZs by 7%. I estimate a model of location, sector, and occupation choice to quantify the costs that rationalize this incomplete arbitrage. Simulations show that halving these moving costs would have reduced the effect of exposure to trade with China by 35%. In the second chapter, Scott Nelson and I study recent bans on employers' use of credit reports to screen job applicants. Exploiting geographic, temporal, and job-level variation in which workers are covered by these bans, we find that the bans reduced job-finding rates for blacks by 7 to 16 log points, and increased separation rates for black new hires by 3 percentage points. We interpret these findings in a statistical discrimination model in which credit report data provides employers with a higher precision signal of workers' skills, compared to employers' prior beliefs and knowledge about workers' skills; this signal has particularly strong effects on blacks' employment outcomes. In the third chapter, Janet Currie, Christopher Knittel, Michael Greenstone, and I investigate the local welfare consequences of hydraulic fracturing. Exploiting geological and temporal variation, we find that allowing fracking leads to improvements in a wide set of economic indicators. At the same time, estimated willingness-to-pay (WTP) for the decrease in local amenities is equal to $1000 to $1,600 per household annually. Overall, we estimate that the WTP for allowing fracking equals $1,300 to $1,900 per household annually.

Download or read book Essays on Trade Shocks and Local Labor Markets written by Chan Yu and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first two chapters of the dissertation study how local labor market adjusts to trade shocks. The last chapter explores the relationship between economic condition change and health outcomes. In what follows, I describe my three essays. The first chapter proposes a mechanism through which local labor markets adjust to trade shocks: immigrants’ mobility. I find that immigrants are more responsive than natives to trade shocks. A $1000 increase in the import exposure leads to a 2.6 percent decline in the immigrant population but has little change in the native population. Additionally, immigrant mobility reduces the negative effects of trade shocks on native employment and wages. The study ultimately shows that natives in areas with more immigrants experience smaller declines in employment and wages. The second chapter studies the disparate impacts of trade liberalization on U.S. workers according to gender and age. Focusing on US-China trade shocks that occurred between 1990-2007, I show that these trade shocks generated larger declines in manufacturing employment and wages for older women than for older men. In contrast to prior studies, I find that discrimination and gender differences in industrial employment play relatively small roles in explaining this pattern. Instead, I present evidence that women's career interruptions from marriage and motherhood provide a more promising explanation. Within an age cohort, trade shocks depress labor market outcomes more strongly for married women with children than their male counterparts. The last chapter estimates the impact on infant birth outcomes of the farm credit crisis that hit the U.S. Midwest in the 1980s. Exploiting county-level variation in agricultural loans before the crisis, I use a difference-in-differences methodology to show that counties with more pre-existing farmland loans (per acre) experienced relatively worse infant health outcomes as the crisis unfolded. My estimates indicate that a $100 dollar increase in farmland loan (per acre) increased the incidence of low birth weight by around 0.4 percentage points and reduced the birth weight by 19 grams. Other findings show that the credit crisis intensified financial distress and tightened financial constraints for affected households, economic pressures that potentially provide a mechanism for the impact on birth outcomes. Counties that had purchased more farmland prior to the crisis suffered larger declines in their farm earnings, higher delinquency rates, and more bank failures

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Evan Nelson Buntrock and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three essays of this dissertation are studies of individual choice and outcomes in labor-economics related problems. In the first chapter, I use an individual's rank in his coworker-comparison group to predict whether he leaves his job and the amount of earnings growth he will experience over his next few years. Even after controlling for a variety of individual and firm observables and unobservables, I find that an individual's rank is positively correlated with his earnings growth on the current job but negatively correlated with his earnings growth when he changes jobs. The mean reversion of job changers' earnings with respect to rank suggests that rank is a signal of an individual's match productivity with his current firm. In the second chapter, my co-author and I use a flexible decomposition procedure for job-matching to distinguish changes in job-to-job flows due to structural factors of the labor market from changes due to the evolving composition of workers and firms. We find that the likelihood of workers moving to firms 25-100 miles away from their current firm when changing jobs has increased. This increased integration of local labor markets has gone undetected by other studies of mobility, which focus on interstate and even inter-county job and residential migration. In the third chapter, I study whether US citizens have become more or less likely over time to marry someone with whom they share a state of birth. Using a variety of descriptive statistics, I find that the proportion of marriages between citizens with different states of birth has increased. Individuals born in later years and those having higher education are generally more likely to marry someone born in a different state.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Mark Yau Colas and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 1 analyzes the dynamic effects of immigration on worker outcomes by estimating an equilibrium model of local labor markets in the United States. The model includes firms in multiple cities and multiple industries which combine capital, skilled and unskilled labor in production, and forward-looking workers who choose their optimal industry and location each period as a dynamic discrete choice. Immigrant inflows change wages by changing factor ratios, but worker sector and migration choices can mitigate the effect of immigration on wages over time. I estimate the model via simulated method of moments by leveraging differences in wages and labor supply quantities across local labor markets to identify how wages and worker choices respond to immigrant inflows. Counterfactual simulations yield the following main results: (1) a sudden unskilled immigration inflow leads to an initial wage drop for unskilled workers which decreases by over half over 20 years; (2) both workers' sector-switching and migration across local labor markets play important roles in mitigating the effects of immigration on wages; (3) a gradual immigration inflow leads to significantly smaller effects on native wages than a sudden inflow. Chapter 2 is joint work with Kevin Hutchinson. Progressive income taxes provide a disincentive for workers to live in high productivity local labor markets, potentially leading to a spatial misallocation of labor. We study the extent to which large reductions in the progressivity of the federal tax code caused the reallocation of workers across cities, thus altering aggregate output, deadweight loss, and the spatial distribution of populations, wages and rents. Further, we also evaluate the extent to which these changes affected the relative welfare of high and low-skill workers. To quantify these effects, we augment an empirical spatial equilibrium model (Diamond, 2016) to incorporate federal income taxes and estimate it using Census data. In chapter 3, I use a dynamic model to analyze how changes in major-specific tuition levels would affect college and major choice. In my model, students face borrowing constraints; therefore, relatively small changes in tuition can potentially affect college and major choice despite large differences in lifetime earnings across majors.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics and Public Policy written by Gabriela Liliana Galassi and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis contains three chapters around two related questions: (1) what are the determinants of the decision to work?, and (2) what are the (unintended) effects of policies stimulating labor market participation? The first two chapters tackle the second question in the empirical setting of the Mini-Job reform in Germany, which expanded substantially the in-work benefits, or tax advantages for low-earning workers. The third chapter, dealing with the first question, focuses on the transmission of employment behavior and preferences for work across generations. The first chapter analyzes how firms respond to changes in tax benefits for low-earning workers and how, through equilibrium effects, such policies also affect non-targeted, highearning workers. Combining theoretical and empirical analysis, I document the presence of both job creation and substitution underlying firm responses induced by the Mini-Job Reform. In particular, I nd that firms with a high pre-reform use of low-earning workers increase the demand for workers with better earnings, an important result. The second essay provides an empirical analysis of the effects of the same reform on earnings and employment prospects of targeted workers. The findings question the role of in-work benefits as an antipoverty policy since they do not improve earnings of targeted workers. However, they also show that these benefits provide opportunities for jobless individuals to smoothly transit to better paid employment. Finally, in the third chapter, joint with Lukas Mayr and David Koll, we analyze how employment status and attitudes towards work are related across generations. Using data for the US, we find a significant positive correlation between the employment status of mothers and children, after controlling for productivity and other observable factors. We interpret this finding as evidence of transmission of preferences for work. We show that the correlation is unlikely to be driven by networks, transmission of specific human capital or local labor markets' conditions, and we provide suggestive evidence for a role model channel.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics and International Trade written by Moises Yi and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation employs tools from Labor Economics and International Trade to study how workers and labor markets adjust to economic shocks arising from trade liberalization and technological change. It contributes to the existing literature by studying several economic mechanisms that determine the magnitudes of these adjustments. The first chapter of this dissertation analyzes the roles that skill transferability and the local industry mix have on the adjustment costs of workers affected by negative trade shocks. Using rich administrative data from Germany, we construct novel measures of economic distance between sectors based on the notion of skill transferability. We combine these distance measures with sectoral employment shares in German regions to construct an index of labor market flexibility. This index captures the degree to which workers from a particular industry will be able to reallocate into other jobs. We then study the role of labor market flexibility on the effect of import shocks on the earnings and the employment outcomes of German manufacturing workers. Among workers living in inflexible labor markets, the difference between a worker at the 75th percentile of industry import exposure and one at the 25th percentile of exposure amounts to an earnings loss of roughly 11% of initial annual income (over a 10 year period). The earning losses of workers living in flexible regions are negligible. These findings are robust to controlling for a wide array of region level characteristics, including region size and overall employment growth. Our findings indicate that the industry composition of local labor markets plays an important role on the adjustment processes of workers. In the second chapter, we develop and apply a framework to quantify the effect of trade on aggregate welfare as well as the distribution of this aggregate effect across different groups of workers. The framework combines a multi-sector gravity model of trade with a Roy-type model of the allocation of workers across sectors. By opening to trade, a country gains in the aggregate by specializing according to its comparative advantage, but the distribution of these gains is unequal as labor demand increases (decreases) for groups of workers specialized in export-oriented (import-oriented) sectors. The model generalizes the specific-factors intuition to a setting with labor reallocation, while maintaining analytical tractability for any number of groups and countries. Our new notion of "inequality-adjusted" welfare effect of trade captures the full cross-group distribution of welfare changes in one measure, as the counterfactual scenario is evaluated by a risk-averse agent behind the veil of ignorance regarding the group to which she belongs. The quantitative application uses trade and labor allocation data across regions in Germany to compute the aggregate and distributional effects of a shock to trade costs or foreign technology levels. For the extreme case in which the country moves back to autarky we find that inequality-adjusted gains from trade are larger than the aggregate gains for both countries, as between-group inequality falls with trade relative to autarky, but the opposite happens for the shock in which China expands in the world economy. In the third chapter, we use detailed production data from a large Latin American garment manufacturer to study the process of technology adoption and resulting productivity changes within a firm. We find that the adoption of modern manufacturing techniques increases productivity through two channels, a direct effect and a spillover effect across adjacent production units. By exploiting the gradual introduction of new manufacturing techniques across independent production units, we estimate a direct effect on productivity of roughly 30%. We also estimate large spillovers to neighboring untreated units which amount to a 25% increase in productivity. Both of these effects accumulate slowly over time. The timing and the magnitudes of the estimated spillover effects corroborate qualitative evidence consistent with knowledge diffusion, learning and imitation.

Download or read book Essays on the Responses to Local Labor Market Shocks written by Yiming Li and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies the impacts of local labor market changes on the US family structures and disability benefit take-up. The dissertation uses unexpected time series changes in energy prices, together with the pre-existing county exposure to the unexpected time series changes, to identify causal links between the changes in county's economic conditions and changes in marriage outcomes, fertility outcomes, and disability benefit payments.

Download or read book Essays on Job Displacement and the Economics of Local Labour Markets written by Ines Helm and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: