Download or read book Essays on Worker Productivity and Labor Supply written by Pedro Bessone Tepedino and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is a collection of essays exploring factors that affect developing country workers' productivity, well-being and labor supply. The first essay explores how workers labor supply is affected by transitory income shocks. In neoclassical models, transitory income shocks should not affect labor supply. This prediction has often been rejected empirically in favor of theories featuring reference-dependent preferences. We show that apparent negative daily income effects can be generated in a dynamic neoclassical model of labor supply by dynamic selection, where income early in the day causes differential attrition throughout workers' shifts. Using data from an RCT with rich experimental variation in income and fine measures of labor supply, we show that estimates of negative income effects are an artifact of dynamic selection in this setting, providing a neoclassical explanation to the findings of the income targeting literature.

Download or read book Essays on the Determinants of Worker Productivity and Labor Market Outcomes written by Melissa Christine LoPalo and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines determinants of worker productivity, labor market outcomes, and population health. The first chapter, previously published in the Journal of Public Economics, examines the impacts of cash assistance on refugee labor market outcomes. I exploit variation across states and over time in the generosity of cash assistance available to refugees upon arrival in the U.S. and study the impacts on wages and employment. I argue that cash assistance is randomly assigned to refugees conditional on characteristics such as education and country of origin, as refugee placement is decided by a committee that does not meet with the refugees or learn their preferences. I find that refugees resettled with more generous cash assistance go on to earn higher wages, with no significant change in the probability of employment. The effects are largest for highly-educated refugees. The second chapter examines the impact of temperature on the productivity and job performance of outdoor workers in developing countries. I overcome data challenges with studying individual-level productivity by studying household survey interviewers as workers. Using data from Demographic and Health Survey interviewers in 46 countries, I find that interviewers complete fewer interviews per hour worked on hot and humid days, driven by an increase in working hours. I also find evidence that suggests that workers allocate their effort towards tasks that are more easily observed by supervisors on hot days. The third chapter, previously published in Social Justice Research and co-authored with Diane Coffey and Dean Spears, examines the role of social inequality in population health outcomes in India, focusing on the case of casteism and child height in India. We describe evidence from the India Human Development Survey showing that children in villages with more strongly casteist attitudes are shorter on average, an association that is statistically explained by the association between casteism and the prevalence of open defecation

Download or read book Essays on Labor Supply written by Nail Hassairi and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of essays studying labor supply empirically through the use of an experimental platform set up on Amazon Mechanical Turk online labor market. The essays contribute to measuring labor supply elasticties; response of effort to pay; and the willingness to pay for job attributes. What these topics have in common is that a) it's extremely hard to estimate these parameters using observational data, b) the parameters estimated from these studies serve as input parameters for macroeconomic models of employment, welfare policy, and tax policy. The notion that increased pay raises productivity, either through sorting or incentives, lies at the heart of the efficiency wage theory. The alternative competitive model also implies a correlation between wages and productivity, however, the causal effect implied is from productivity to pay, that is more productive workers receive higher pay. A conclusive test with the ability to nest both of these hypotheses and rule between them then has to provide a credible evidence of the direction of causality in the wage-productivity relationship. This challenge has so far been unmet in the literature. To provide an unequivocal answer, the first essay in this volume presents findings from a large-scale field experiment conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The findings confirm the intuition behind the efficiency wage theory, demonstrating that increase in pay indeed has a causal effect on productivity; through sorting, and, to a lesser extent, incentives. These findings also suggest that this causalrelationship between pay and productivity is dynamic in nature, weakening over the course of the tenure of a worker. The findings also indicate that heterogeneity in tenure length among workers is correlated with their heterogeneity in response to higher pay. As the competitive model continues to be used as a microeconomic foundation of macroeconomic theories of unemployment, these findings give a vote of confidence to its main alternative - the efficiency wage theory. An integral part of Adam Smith's compensating wage differentials theory is that work- ers trade off between job characteristics and wage. Other than risk of death, however, no job characteristics have consistently been found to affect wages, likely because of problems with self-selection and unobservable job characteristics. The second essay in this volume presents results from the experiments on Mechanical Turk, randomizing offered pay and job characteristics, thereby overcoming both problems. The findings indicate, as predicted by the theoretical model, that increasing job disamenities significantly reduces both likelihood of working and amount of work supplied. Correspondingly, the wage increases necessary to compensate workers for worse job disamenities are substantial. The last essay in this volume estimates extensive and intensive margin labor supply elasticity. Contrary to prior analyses using micro data, the findings indicate that the intensive margin elasticities are more than twice the size of extensive margin elasticities and that both are substantial, even if conditioning on working. Furthermore, using data on all workers in the experiments whether they decide to work on the experiments or not, the elasticities range from 1.2 to 2.9, depending on experiment and specification. These results are consistent with the idea that off-line labor markets are characterized by frictions that lower elasticities and may reverse the ordering of extensive margin and intensive margin elasticities.

Download or read book Essays on Labour Markets written by Sebastian Buhai and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2008 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 Market Frictions and Worker Productivity written by David Wonyoung Jang and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation examines how labor market adjustment happens in times of economic downturns or policy changes. Chapter 1 analyzes how the contribution of intensive margin adjustments to the cyclical fluctuations in total hours worked has increased in the US since the 1980s. I document that the job tenure length has increased during this period and labor hours adjustments in recessions are more prominent in economies with higher job tenure lengths. I build a search-and-matching model with part-time workers and job-specific human capital accumulation. With the model, I claim that the improvement in initial match quality can account for the increased use of intensive margin adjustments along the business cycle. A policy simulation shows that subsidizing intensive margin adjustments via Short-time compensation (STC) policy is more effective in reducing unemployment volatility when the initial match productivities are higher and job separations are lower. Chapter 1 explored the impact of job-specific human capital on intensive margin adjustments, while Chapter 2 examines the role of ex-ante worker heterogeneity. Chapter 2 finds that the pool of IPT workers increasingly consists of high-wage workers who are more attached to the labor market during recessions. According to the microdata from the Current Population Survey, this cyclical change is driven by the inflows into the IPT pool, especially the full-time to IPT flow. The demographic compositional changes of the IPT pool in recessions suggest a new channel through which the intensive margin adjustments can affect aggregate unemployment fluctuations by driving up firms' hiring standards during economic downturns. Chapter 3 focuses on a natural experiment in Oregon and Florida that changed the enforceability of non-compete agreements (NCA) between firms and workers. Using the experiment, I find that banning NCA can have a negative consequence on low-wage workers and an unintentional distributional impact. The unemployment duration increases after the ban which exacerbates the loss of general human capital of unemployed workers. I propose the crowding out effect of unemployed workers due to the ban can cause what I observe in the data and the potential cost of banning NCA for workers. Together, these chapters provide insights into different aspects of labor market dynamics, highlighting the importance of initial match quality, worker heterogeneity, and policy implications for labor market institutions

Download or read book Growth Productivity Unemployment written by Robert M. Solow and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this book extend and elaborate on many of the important ideas Solow has either originated or developed in the past three decades.

Download or read book The Labor managed Economy written by Jaroslav Vanek and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monograph comprising an evaluation of workers self management experiences in Peru and Yugoslavia - discusses the solutions to macroeconomics problems such as unequal income distribution, decision making on capital investment, and labour productivity within self-managed firms, etc., and considers micro and macro economic theory relating to efficiency and competition. Graphs and references.

Download or read book Essays on the Cyclical Behavior of Employment and Productivity written by Jahangir Aziz and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Organizations Productivity and Labor written by Bradford Lee Cowgill and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is about how firms use incentives and information in internal personnel and management practices, in particular relating to hiring and innovation. In the first chapter, I study competition between workers inside of firms. Why do firms use incentives that encourage anti-social behavior among employees? Rank-based promotion schemes are among the most widespread forms competition and incentives, despite encouraging influence-peddling, sabotage and anti-social behavior. I study a natural experiment using rich administrative data from a large, white collar firm. At the firm, competitors for promotions depend partly on dates-of-hire. I utilize the date-of-hire assignment as a source of exogenous variation in the intensity of intra-worker competition. I use the firm's multidimensional timestamped productivity logs as ``time diaries'' to study the amount, character and allocation of output across tasks. I find that competition has significant incentives for effort and efficiency -- as well as lobbying- and sabotage- like behaviors -- without affecting the quality and innovativeness of output. I also find that employees facing high competition are more likely to quit and join other companies, particularly higher-performing employees. Lastly, I show that competition induces workers to differentiate and specialize by concentrating effort into a smaller set of tasks. These results show that while workers respond to incentives from competition, they also seek to avoid it through sorting and differentiation strategies. The productivity gains from differentiation and specialization may partly explain the common use of these incentives by firms. In the second chapter, I study how firms use social networks in hiring. Using personnel data from nine large firms in three industries (call-centers, trucking, and high-tech), we empirically assess the benefit to firms of hiring through employee referrals. Compared to non-referred applicants, referred applicants are more likely to be hired and more likely to accept offers, even though referrals and non-referrals have similar skill characteristics. Referred workers tend to have similar productivity compared to non-referred workers on most measures, but referred workers have lower accident rates in trucking and produce more patents in high-tech. Referred workers are substantially less likely to quit and earn slightly higher wages than non-referred workers. In call-centers and trucking, the two industries for which we can calculate worker-level profits, referred workers yield substantially higher profits per worker than non-referred workers. These profit differences are driven by lower turnover and lower recruiting costs for referrals. In the third and final chapter, I study the use of betting markets inside of firms. Despite the popularity of prediction markets among economists, businesses and policymakers have been slow to adopt them in decision making. Most studies of prediction markets outside the lab are from public markets with large trading populations. Corporate prediction markets face additional issues, such as thinness, weak incentives, limited entry and the potential for traders with biases or ulterior motives - raising questions about how well these markets will perform. We examine data from prediction markets run by Google, Ford Motor Company and an anonymous basic materials conglomerate (Firm X). Despite theoretically adverse conditions, we find these markets are relatively efficient, and improve upon the forecasts of experts at all three firms by as much as a 25\% reduction in mean squared error. The most notable inefficiency is an optimism bias in the markets at Google. The inefficiencies that do exist generally become smaller over time. More experienced traders and those with higher past performance trade against the identified inefficiencies, suggesting that the markets' efficiency improves because traders gain experience and less skilled traders exit the market.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Amanda Dawn Pallais and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters on topics in labor economics. In the first chapter, I present a model in which firms under-invest in hiring novice workers because they don't receive the full benefit of discovering novice talent. A firm must pay a cost to hire a novice worker. When it does, it obtains both labor services and information about the worker's productivity. This information has option value as a productive novice can be rehired. However, if competing firms also observe the novice's productivity, the option value of hiring accrues to the worker, not the employer. Firms will accordingly under-invest in discovering novice talent unless they can claim the benefit from doing so. I test this model's relevance in an online labor market by hiring 952 workers at random from an applicant pool of 3,767 for a 10-hour data entry job. In this market, worker performance is publicly observable. Consistent with the model's prediction, novice workers hired at random obtained significantly more employment and had higher earnings than the control group, following the initial hiring spell. A second treatment confirms that this causal effect is likely explained by information revelation rather than skills acquisition. Providing the market with more detailed information about the performance of a subset of the randomly-hired workers raised earnings of high-productivity workers and decreased earnings of low-productivity workers. Due to its scale, the experiment significantly increased the supply of workers recognized as high-ability in the market. This outward supply shift raised subsequent total employment and decreased average wages in occupations affected by the experiment (relative to non-treated occupations), implying that it also increased the sum of worker and employer surplus. Under plausible assumptions, this additional total surplus exceeds the social cost of the experiment. In the second chapter, I estimate the sensitivity of students' college application decisions to a small change in the cost of sending standardized test scores to colleges. In 1997, the ACT increased the number of free score reports it provided to students from three to four, maintaining a $6 marginal cost for each additional report. In response to this $6 cost change, ACT-takers sent more score reports and applications, while SAT-takers did not. ACT-takers also widened the range of colleges to which they sent scores. I show that students' response to the cost change is inconsistent with optimal decision-making but instead suggests that students use rules of thumb to make college application decisions. Sending additional score reports could, based on my estimates, substantially increase low-income students' future earnings. In the third chapter, I analyze the effects of the Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarships, a broad-based merit scholarship program that rewards students for their high school achievement with college financial aid. Since 1991, over a dozen states, comprising approximately a quarter of the nation's high school seniors, have implemented similar merit scholarship programs. Using individual-level data from the ACT exams, I find that the program did not achieve one of its stated goals, inducing more students to prefer to stay in Tennessee for college, but it did induce large increases in performance on the ACT. This suggests that policies that reward students for performance affect behavior and may be an effective way to improve high school achievement.

Download or read book Essays on Aggregate Labor Supply written by Choonsung Park and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The theme of this thesis is to measure the aggregate labor supply elasticity both at the intensive and extensive margins. The first two chapters concern measuring the labor supply elasticity at the extensive margin in a manner robust to model specifications. The third chapter obtains an intensive margin elasticity of labor supply in an environment in which workers' hours are complements in production. The first chapter exploits micro data on the joint distribution of consumption and wages to measure the Frisch labor supply elasticity at the extensive margin. I derive the following reservation property of the working decision: in a class of models in which the wage process is exogenous (EWP models), given consumption, there exists a unique wage level above which individuals work and below which they do not. In particular, this property is robust to arbitrary heterogeneity in borrowing constraints, discount factors, and wage processes--intuitively, consumption summarizes these factors that affect individual labor supply. Those workers with low wages relative to consumption are inferred to be more marginally attached to the labor market. The number of such workers is key to the magnitude of the Frisch elasticity at the extensive margin. Using the joint distribution of consumption and wages observed from the PSID waves 1999-2011, I find that (i) the aggregate Frisch elasticity of labor supply at the extensive margin is 0.4, and that (ii) across various demographic groups, the elasticity ranges from 0.2 to 0.6. These estimates are similar to those of quasi-experimental studies, suggesting that the number of marginal workers implied by the data is relatively small. In the second chapter, I allow the wage process to be endogenous by writing a class of models in which individuals accumulate human capital through learning-by-doing (LBD). I again measure the labor supply elasticity at the extensive margin, but consider how the human capital accumulation affects the measured elasticity compared to the simpler environment in Chapter 1. I show that in this environment the reservation wage can be defined conditional on consumption and assets choices. Intuitively, if a worker with the same wage and assets with another individual consumes more, then this suggests that the worker has a higher shadow value of LBD. Thus, consumption and assets choices jointly reveal the willingness to work, or the reservation wage. Using the data of consumption, wages, and assets from the PSID waves 1999-2011, I find that the aggregate labor supply elasticity at the extensive margin under the human capital models is 0.36, while that under the EWP models is 0.4. The small elasticity gap is because individuals with low consumption are likely to have low assets as well, implying that understanding the relationship between consumption and wages remains key to predicting the employment responses to wage shocks. Second, for narrowly defined demographic groups, the measured elasticities range from 0.2 to 1. As with the EWP models, relatively elastic groups are those who are younger, single, nonwhite, female, or without college degree. Considering the human capital accumulation does not particularly change the demographic characteristics of more marginal workers. The third chapter is based on a paper coauthored with Michele Battisti of Ifo Institute, and Ryan Michaels of the Department of Economics at the University of Rochester. We study the labor supply elasticity at the intensive margin in an environment in which workers are complements in production. The complementarity of workers implies an incentive to coordinate labor supply within the firm, which compresses working-time adjustments across workers in response to purely idiosyncratic variation in their return from working. This places no restrictions, however, on the response of firm-wide working time to firm-wide shocks. We estimate a model in which heterogeneous firms and workers bargain on working time and earnings using the method of simulated moments. The target moments are from matched firm-worker data from North-East Italy. We revisit earlier findings of a small intertemporal elasticity of labor supply exploiting the model's prediction that this elasticity will be larger for firm-wide fluctuations than evaluated at the individual level. First, the model uncovers the Frisch labor supply elasticity at the intensive margin 0.53. This value is near the top end of the range of estimates found in earlier studies. Second, to study how ignoring the coordination of labor supply affects the implied elasticity, we simulate the model such that only 1/9 of a firm's workforce receives a lump-sum transfer, but the remainder of the firm's workers do not (The fraction of the workforce corresponds to one cohort of workers that shares the same productivity and preference in the model). If we use the treatment effect in this case to infer the Frisch elasticity, the implied elasticity is less than half the estimate 0.53 we uncover."--Pages v-vii.

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 in Labor Economics written by Mark Yau Colas and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 177 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 on how Health and Education Affect the Labor Market Outcomes of Workers written by Sheryll Namingit and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays on how health and education affect the labor market outcomes of workers. Health and education issues have been key determinants of labor demand and supply. In light of increasing incidence of health problems and the rapid growth of post-baccalaureate certificates in the US, this dissertation seeks to answer questions about labor market outcomes of workers with poor health history and with post-baccalaureate certificates. The first essay which I co-authored with Dr. William Blankenau and Dr. Benjamin Schwab uses a résumé-based correspondence test to compare the employment consequences of an illness-related employment gap to those of an unexplained employment gap. The results of the experiment show that while the callback rate of applicants with an illness-related employment gap is lower than that of the newly unemployed, applicants with illness-related employment gaps are 2.3 percentage points more likely to receive a callback than identical applicants who provide no explanation for the gap. Our research provides evidence that employers use information on employment gaps as additional signals about workers' unobserved productivity. Co-authored with Dr. Amanda Gaulke and Dr. Hugh Cassidy, the second essay tests how employers perceive the value of post-baccalaureate certificates using the same methodology in the first essay. We randomly assign a post-baccalaureate certificate credential to fictitious résumés and apply to real vacancy postings for managerial, administrative and accounting assistant positions on a large online job board. We find that post-baccalaureate certificates are 2.4 percentage points less likely to receive a callback than those without this credential. However, this result is driven by San Francisco, and there is no effect in Los Angeles or New York. By occupation, we also find that there is only significant negative effect in administrative assistant jobs, and there is none in managerial or accounting assistant jobs. A typographical error made in the résumés of certificate holders regarding the expected year of completion of the certificate may also contribute to negative effects of a certificate. Using NLSY79 data, the third essay tests whether the source of health insurance creates incentives for newly-diagnosed workers to remain sufficiently employed to maintain access to health insurance coverage. I compare labor supply responses to new diagnoses of workers dependent on their own employment for health insurance with the responses of workers who are dependent on their spouse's employer for health insurance coverage. I find that workers who depend on their own job for health insurance are 1.5-5.5 percentage points more likely to remain employed and for those employed, are 1.3-5.4 percentage points less likely to reduce their labor hours and are 2.1-6.1 percentage points more likely to remain full-time workers.

Download or read book Productivity Growth Inflation and Unemployment written by Robert James Gordon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description

Download or read book Essays in Labor and Financial Economics written by Bhargav Gopal and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under the model's assumptions, non-compete agreements mitigate the market failure of underprovided firm-sponsored general training, thus increasing the worker's productivity. The extent to which the worker is compensated for this increase in productivity depends on labor market competition at the time of contracting. The fact that increased enforcement raises the wages of job leavers more than job stayers is consistent with the model's predictions.