Download or read book Five Essays on Labor and Public Economics written by Wei Huang and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is important to understand the individual behavioral responses to public policies and the corresponding social consequences because they are key parameters to evaluate and design efficient social policies. In this dissertation, I examine the effects of a series of public policies in China by investigating the policy-induced individual behaviors and social consequences in different stages over lifetime. Chapter 1 examines the impact of fertility policies on the education investment in girls; Chapter 2 shows how the ethnic-specific terms in the OCP distorted individual behaviors and equilibrium outcomes in marriage market; Chapter 3 examines an unintended outcome of birth control policies - more reported twins; Chapter 4 uses the compulsory schooling laws (CSL) as exogenous shocks to estimate the causal effects of education on health at prime ages; Chapter 5 examines the effects of new social pension provision on the outcomes of the elderly, including income, expenditure health and mortality. I conclude that the public policies have significant and remarkable effects on the behaviors and welfare outcomes of individuals. In addition, these lessons from China may shed lights on the some important and general interested questions in economics.

Download or read book Essays in Labor and Public Economics written by Jennifer Anne Graves and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Labor and Public Economics written by Susan Yeh and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final chapter, joint with Cecilia E. Rouse, evaluates a learning communities experiment, which had goals of fostering student engagement and collaborative learning among at-risk students at a diverse two-year college. We find that the program improved academic achievement during the semester it was implemented, but most advantages disappeared in the following terms. The last section of the essay considers the role of motivational factors in explaining the program's impacts and, more directly, their effects on academic outcomes. We observe that perceiving a more engaging experience in the first semester of college does not necessarily translate to better performances afterwards.

Download or read book Three essays in labor and public economics written by Joshua M. Congdon-Hohman and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Labor and Public Economics written by Jonah B. Gelbach and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Labor and Public Economics written by Sebastian Camarero Garcia and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Labor and Public Economics written by Claudio Labanca and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores three topics in labor and public economics. Chapter 1 studies how coordination of hours among coworkers affects labor supply decisions and wage rates. Using rich data from Denmark we find that greater coordination of hours within firms is associated with higher wages, attenuated response to tax rate changes and spillover effects on hours worked by workers who are not directly affected by a tax change. Chapter 2 estimates the short-term effects of migration on employment of native workers in Italy using the exogenous, unanticipated and temporary migration resulting from the Arab Spring. I find significant and offsetting short-term effects across industries. The positive employment effects are consistent with a rise in sectoral employment operating through increased demand from immigrants. Both positive and negative effects on employment tend to dissipate over time. Chapter 3 uses rich data from Brazil to show evidence that exporters prepare to export by hiring workers from other exporters. We also show that poaching workers from other exporters is a strong predictor of various aspects of export-market success at the poaching firm.

Download or read book Essays in Labor and Public Economics written by Giulia Giupponi and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Labor and Public Economics written by Simon Jäger and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three independent essays in labor and public economics. Chapter 1 presents evidence on how exogenous worker exits affect a firm's demand for incumbent workers and new hires. Using matched employer-employee data based on the universe of German social security records, I analyze the effects of unexpected worker deaths and show that these worker exits affect the remaining workers' wages and retention probabilities. Chapter 2 (with Peter Ganong) proposes a permutation test for the Regression Kink (RK) design. As a complement to standard RK inference, we propose that researchers construct a distribution of placebo estimates in regions with and without a policy kink and use this distribution to gauge statistical significance of RK estimates. Chapter 3 (with Johannes Abeler) analyzes a laboratory experiment to study how tax complexity affects the reaction to tax changes.

Download or read book Three Essays on Labor Economics and Public Policy written by Paul A. Torelli and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics and Public Finance written by Jacqueline Eve Berger and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Public and Labor Economics written by Frédéric Panier and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is composed of three empirical papers in the field of labor and public economics. The first paper uses historical data from the New-York Stock Exchange to investigate the importance of ethnic discrimination, ethnic networks and ethnic homophily in the field of finance. The second paper studies the role of parental insurance on the job search behavior of new entrants in the labor market. It also uses parental shocks around the time of the child's entry into the labor force as an instrument to test for the existence of persistent effects from a temporary increase in job search effort at the beginning of a worker's career. The third paper takes advantage of an important tax reform that took place in Belgium in 2006 to answer a longstanding question in the field of public economics and corporate finance: what is the role of corporate taxes in determining the observed levels of leverage among incorporated firms.

Download or read book Essays in Labor and Public Economics written by Victor Hernandez Martinez and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This thesis consists of three independent essays in labor and public economics. Chapter 1 argues that credit constraints are an important mechanism to understand the labor supply responses of unemployed workers to increased unemployment insurance generosity. This chapter proposes a novel method to assess the severity of credit constraints for different groups of unemployed workers, via estimation of their internal interest rate. The only inputs of this method are the labor supply responses of unemployed workers to conditional and unconditional income transfers, free of any parameterization of individuals' preferences, beliefs, or market structure. To estimate these inputs, we use administrative data from Spain and provide causal estimates of the labor supply responses to changes in potential duration, benefit level, and severance payment, both in the aggregate and for different subgroups. The results indicate that poorer workers face an internal interest rate 40 percent larger than wealthier workers. Furthermore, for poorer workers, credit constraints represent up to 40 percent of the labor supply responses to increased UI generosity, vs. only 16 percent for richer individuals. Finally, we suggest that redistribution within the unemployment system, from individuals with long to short working experience, can reduce both the inefficiency from credit constraints and the aggregate distortion generated by moral hazard. Chapter 2 provides an alternative approach to define the specificity of human capital, based on how concentrated, or specialized, is the knowledge used in an occupation. I combine this new measure with individual labor histories from the NLSY79-97 to analyze the heterogeneity of earning losses following an exogenous displacement. I provide evidence that, holding any other individual and aggregated characteristics constant, greater levels of knowledge specialization at displacement are associated with significantly larger earning losses, in the range of an additional 5 to 9 pp for an individual in the 75th percentile of knowledge specialization vs the 25th percentile. This larger losses do not seem to be driven by longer periods of unemployment or longer distance (in the task space) occupational moves following displacement. In addition, I show that the loss premia associated with changing industries/ occupations post displacement is almost fully driven by higher specialization levels. For low specialization levels, industry/occupational changes imply relatively small additional losses after the first year. Furthermore, I do not find evidence of negative effect of higher pre displacement specialization on earning losses for those who remain in the same industry or occupation. Finally, Chapter 3 aims to understand whether machines can replace workers in the labor market and, if so, which types of workers are the ones that can be substituted with technology. Using an IV strategy, I take advantage of the shale boom in the US and the relative increase in low skilled labor demand it generated in sectors related to oil & gas production to analyze the changes in the annual capital expenditures, output, labor composition and relative wages of manufacturing firms, located in areas exposed to this shock. My findings suggest a mild substitutability between low skill labor and capital in the manufacturing sector. The structure of my data allows me to assess how is best defined low skill labor in this scenario. I find that the strongest conclusions are reached when the definition of high skill labor includes only those with a college degree or above that level of education"--Pages ix-x.

Download or read book Essays in Labor and Public Economics written by Samuel Nathan Dodini and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays, each of which uses high-quality data and rigorous econometric methods to further our understanding of key questions in applied labor and public economics. Chapter 1 uses novel data from a sales company whose workers sell pest control services door to door to test for what is called in the behavioral economics literature "reference-dependent preferences." I show that sales workers select daily sales targets based on long-run goals to achieve bonuses paid by the firm at the end of the sales season. I then show that, contrary to standard theory of labor supply, workers substantially reduce their likelihood of continuing to work after achieving their daily sales target holding constant other factors of their work day. This behavior is consistent with loss aversion where workers put forth effort specifically to avoid underperforming relative to their expectations. The results support the theory that narrow goal setting and reference dependence together may act as a commitment device rather than representing a cognitive mistake as standard theory would suggest. These results have broad implications for how firms motivate their workers and show how long-run contract incentives can drive short-run labor supply choices. In Chapter 2, I exploit the 2014 rollout of provisions in the Affordable Care Act to identify the effects of direct subsidies for the purchase of private health insurance on adverse financial outcomes, consumer welfare, and outside parties. I use administrative tax data and credit bureau data to compare outcomes in areas that had high per-capita receipt of these premium tax credits to areas that had low per-capita receipt. To control for pre-treatment differences in trends attributable to the Great Recession, I use a propensity score reweighting and stratification procedure. I find that the premium tax credits substantially reduced the rates of severe mortgage delinquency, consumer bankruptcy, and severe auto delinquency as well as the right tail of the distribution of third-party collections and other debts. I also show that the value of the risk protections against medical debt amount to approximately 10-15% of the cash costs of the subsidies, while the subsidies provided substantial indirect benefits to mortgage lenders, creditors, and hospitals that amount to approximately two-thirds of the subsidy costs. Chapter 3, which is joint work with Michael Lovenheim and Alexander Willén, examines the dynamics of the decline in private-sector unionization rates in the United States over the past 40 years. We take a skill-based approach to studying this decline by accounting for changes in the types of skills covered by unions. We document that, from 1973 to 2017, private-sector unionized jobs shifted toward more non-routine, cognitive skills and fewer routine or manual skills and that women experienced a more pronounced change over this time period than men. After decomposing the changes in skills within the unionized sector to their components, we show that most of the change in unionized worker skills has been driven by the composition of occupations that are unionized rather than within-occupation skill changes. We show how these changes are compatible with a model of skill-biased technological change when we specifically account for the institutional framework surrounding collective bargaining and frictions to union certification or decertification. Finally, we show that accounting for different skills in the unionized sector leads to slightly larger estimates of the union wage premium than shown in the prior literature and that the wage premium remains relatively large for men and women at approximately 20% despite having fallen by over ten percentage points since its peak in the 1980s.

Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics and Public Policy written by Michael R. Strain and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main component of this thesis, found in the first chapter, is an investigation of earnings instability, which can be thought of as the fluctuations around permanent earnings over time of a worker's labor market earnings. This chapter reflects my interests in labor economics and in economic analysis using longitudinal, linked worker-firm data. The instability of labor earnings in the United States contributes to earnings inequality and may diminish household welfare. Despite the importance of earnings instability little is known about its correlates or causes. This study seeks to better understand whom earnings instability affects and why it affects them. Using both parametric and semi-parametric techniques, I provide an in-depth investigation into the relationship between earnings instability and worker skill. I find that earnings instability follows a U-shape over skill, with low-skill workers experiencing the least stable earnings, middle-skill workers experiencing the most stable, and high-skill workers falling in between the two. This finding is robust to a number of controls, sample selections, and other statistical concerns, and is not driven by workers entering and leaving employment, changing jobs, or holding multiple jobs. I then investigate whether firm characteristics affect the stability of worker earnings. I am the first to directly test the relationship between earnings instability and firm employment instability using linked employer-employee data. I find a positive and statistically significant relationship between the two that remains when the effect is estimated using only within-firm variation. This suggests that the effect is a feature of the way workers are being paid by their employer. The size of the effect varies by a worker's position in the earnings distribution: low-earning worker are passed a greater share of firm employment instability than higher-earning workers. This finding helps to explain the left tail of the U-shape of earnings instability over skill. I find significant heterogeneity in the magnitude and significance of the effect across industries and explore how the competitiveness of an industry relates to the size of the industryspecific effect. My interest in the economics of education is reflected in the second essay of this thesis, which studies a public policy innovation using administrative records. The effects of single-sex education are hotly contested, both in academic and policy circles. Despite this heated debate, there exists little credible empirical evidence of the effect of a U.S. public school's decision to offer single-sex classrooms on the educational outcomes of students. This study seeks to fill this hole. Using administrative records for third through eighth graders in North Carolina public schools, the chapter finds evidence that the offering of single-sex mathematics courses is associated with lower performance on end-of-grade math exams, and finds no evidence that the offering of single-sex reading scores increases performance on reading exams. Evidence of significant heterogeneity in the effect across schools is also presented. Finally, my interest in public policy is further reflected in the third chapter of this thesis, coauthored with Donald Morgan and Ihab Seblani. Despite a dozen studies, the welfare effects of payday credit are still debatable. We contribute new evidence to the debate by studying how payday credit access affects bank overdrafts (such as returned checks), bankruptcy, and household complaints against lenders and debt collectors. We find some evidence that Chapter 13 bankruptcy rates decrease after payday credit bans, but where we find that, we also find that complaints against lenders and debt collectors increase. The welfare implications of these offsetting movements are unclear. Our most robust finding is that returned check numbers and overdraft fee income at banks increase after payday credit bans. Bouncing a check may cost more than a payday loan, so this finding suggests that payday credit access helps households avoid costlier alternatives. While our findings obviously do not settle the welfare debate over payday lending, we hope they resolve it to some extent by illuminating how households rearrange their financial affairs when payday loan supply changes. In summary, this thesis nicely reflects my interests in labor economics, public policy, economic analysis using linked and administrative data, and education economics, and the econometric and research skills I have acquired during my five years as a graduate student in economics at Cornell.

Download or read book Three Essays on Public Policy and Labor Economics written by Max Matthew Schanzenbach and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics and Public Finance written by Antoine Goujard and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public policies are an important determinant of the welfare of individuals and the society at large. Careful evaluation of the impact of public policies on welfare is therefore imperative for our understanding of the positive and normative implications for these institutions. The three chapters of this thesis examine the welfare consequences of specific economic and political institutions. Chapters 1 and 2 study two distinct channels through which social housing, a common feature of developed countries, may impact the neighborhoods in which they are built and the labor market outcomes of their low income tenants. Chapter 1 is concerned with the effect of the provision of social housing on neighboring private ats. It assesses the spillovers of low-income tenants and the change in the composition of the housing stock that are to be expected from the provision of new social housing units. In particular, it uses the direct conversion of private rental flats into social units without any accompanying rehabilitation to identify the impact of the inflow into the neighborhood of low income tenants, separately from the effects of social housing on the quality of the existing housing stock. Chapter 2 shows that social housing influences the location of low income tenants, and that the neighborhood of social housing units may improve the labor market outcomes of the poorest tenants. I observe the relocation of welfare recipients through the selection process of social housing applicants in the city of Paris from 2001 to 2007. The institutional process acts as a conditional randomization device across residential areas in Paris. The empirical estimates outline that neighborhoods have weak short- and medium-run effects on the economic self-sufficiency of poor households. Chapter 3, by contrast, focuses on how regional migrations of unemployed workers may affect their job search prospect in Europe. Using a longitudinal sample of French unemployment spells, the empirical estimates outline positive migration effects on transitions from unemployment to employment that depends on the previous duration of the unemployment spells.