Essays in Labor and Transition Economics

Essays in Labor and Transition Economics PDF Author: Minsong Liang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Essays in Labor and Transition Economics

Essays in Labor and Transition Economics PDF Author: Minsong Liang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Labor Markets, Migration, and Mobility

Labor Markets, Migration, and Mobility PDF Author: William Cochrane
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811592756
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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This volume is devoted to three key themes central to studies in regional science: the sub-national labor market, migration, and mobility, and their analysis. The book brings together essays that cover a wide range of topics including the development of uncertainty in national and subnational population projections; the impacts of widening and deepening human capital; the relationship between migration, neighborhood change, and area-based urban policy; the facilitating role played by outmigration and remittances in economic transition; and the contrasting importance of quality of life and quality of business for domestic and international migrants. All of the contributions here are by leading figures in their fields and employ state-of-the art methodologies. Given the variety of topics and themes covered this book, it will appeal to a broad range of readers interested in both regional science and related disciplines such as demography, population economics, and public policy.

Essays in Labor Economics

Essays in Labor Economics PDF Author: MinSub Kim
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Industrial management
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation studies the importance of networks and other institutional factors on workers' labor market outcomes. I particularly focus on manager-employee networks formed within the workplace, for two main reasons: these networks play a critical role in determining the productivity of individual employees, and also affect the equitability of a given working environment, which in turn influences workers' outcomes. Because social networks are more likely to form among those who share similar backgrounds (such as gender or ethnicity), vertical co-worker connections may worsen existing intra-institutional gaps between majority and minority groups, as there is a higher chance of such bonds emerging among the majority. Hence understanding the characteristics and mechanisms of manager-employee connections may yield significant implications for policymakers in empowering a diverse workforce and redressing disparities. Despite having consequential ramifications for an employee's career outcomes, little attention has been paid to manager-employee networks in the workplace, mainly due to the limited data at hand. This, in turn, limits causal evidence in the existing literature. In the first two chapters below, using web scraping techniques, I construct unique datasets that allow me to identify co-worker connections in specific professions to provide causal evidence of the effects of manager-employee connections. In Chapter 1, I inquire whether the gender of academic leaders, i.e., college deans and department chairs, affects outcomes of faculty members in terms of (i) wages and (ii) share of female faculty in an academic unit. Exploiting data allowing for a year-by-year identification of any changes in individual departments/colleges such as chair/dean transitions, I adopt an event study design which compares female and male faculty who are exposed to a gender-constant head transition (e.g., male-to-male department chair transition) and those who are exposed to a transition that also involves a change in the leader's gender (e.g., male-to-female department chair transition). I find that managers can improve or worsen female outcomes relative to male outcomes, but the effect of managers does not depend on their gender. This finding is contrary to the common expectation that promoting female managers will have positive spillover effects on other female workers: my findings suggest that merely appointing female managers is not sufficient to reduce gender disparities and improve women's representation in universities. In Chapter 2, I investigate whether and to what extent connections with "successful" senior colleagues (i.e., senior colleagues who rise to high-ranking positions during the course of their career paths) affect a junior prosecutor's chances of promotion. This study focuses on a professional organization that is marked by its bureaucratic hierarchy where managers train, supervise, and assess juniors as well as hold the influence to recommend them for promotion. To identify a causal network effect of successful seniors, I exploit exogenous variation in networks arising from personnel transfer assignments, an organization-specific attribute unique to the Korean prosecution service. I find that connections to successful seniors have a positive spillover effect on junior prosecutors: a one standard deviation increase in the number of connections with successful seniors increases the probability of being promoted for a junior by 10 percentage points. I further provide empirical evidence that there are at least three potential mechanisms behind the network effect: (i) skill spillovers from a senior to a junior, (ii) transmission of information on a junior's performance between seniors, and (iii) nepotism based on alma-mater connections. I also find that social networks arising within workplaces can reinforce the disparity between the minority and majority groups: the alumni of a major university. My findings thus propose that matching a successful senior with a junior within the same minority group of a given institution is an effective way of supporting the minority group within the workplace. In Chapter 3, we study the gender gap for academic economists across a wide range of departments and institutions. Extending the faculty salary data used in Chapter 1, we quantify how much of the gender pay gap arises within versus between departments (and institutions), and explore potential explanations for the variations in the magnitude of gender disparity across different departments and universities, focusing on institutional factors such as gender composition and the overall level of dispersion in salaries at an institution and in a department.

Radical Economics and Labour

Radical Economics and Labour PDF Author: Frederic Lee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135969930
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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To celebrate the centenary of the most radical union in North America - The Industrial Workers of the World - this collection examines radical economics and the labor movement in the 20th Century. The union advocates direct action to raise wages and increase job control, and it envisions the eventual abolition of capitalism and the wage system through the general strike. The contributors to this volume speak both to economists and to those in the labor movement, and point to fruitful ways in which these radical heterodox traditions have engaged and continue to engage each other and with the labor movement. In view of the current crisis of organized labor and the beleaguered state of the working class—phenomena which are global in scope—the book is both timely and important. Representing a significant contribution to the non-mainstream literature on labor economics, the book reactivates a marginalized analytical tradition which can shed a great deal of light on the origins and evolution of the difficulties confronting workers throughout the world. This volume will be of most interest to students and scholars of heterodox economics, those involved with or researching The Industrial Workers of the World, as well as anyone interested in the more radical side of unions, anarchism and labor organizations in an economic context.

Three Essays on Labor Market Transitions

Three Essays on Labor Market Transitions PDF Author: Huanan Xu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Essays in Empirical Labor Economics

Essays in Empirical Labor Economics PDF Author: Shahriar Sadighi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor economics
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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My dissertation consists of three essays in empirical labor economics which are self-contained and can be read independently of the others. The first essay, coauthored with Professor Modestino, measures mismatch unemployment in US economy in the post-recession era and explores the heterogeneity among educational groupings. The second essay estimates the changing effects of cognitive ability on wage determination of college bound and non-college bound young adults between 1980s and 2000s. The third essay, coauthored with Professor Dickens, examines the impact of measurement error in survey data on identifying the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in US economy. Essay I: No Longer Qualified? Changes in the Supply and Demand for Skills within Occupations-- In this study, we extend the framework developed by Sahin et al. (2014) to measure mismatch unemployment since the end of the Great Recession and explore the heterogeneity among educational groupings. Our findings indicate that mismatch across two-digit industries and two- digit occupations explain around 17- 20 percent of the recent recovery in the US unemployment rate since 2010. We also capture movements in employer education requirements over time using a novel database of 87 million online job posting aggregated by Burning Glass Technologies and further show that mismatch is not only greater in magnitude for high-skill occupations but also is more persistent over the course of the recent labor market recovery, possible accounting for the shift rightward that has been observed in the aggregate Beveridge Curve by other researchers. Furthermore, we shed light on at least one of the potential causes of mismatch on the demand side, providing evidence that labor demand shifts among high-skilled occupation groups exhibit a permanent increase in the share of employers requiring a Bachelor's degree as well as other baseline, specialized, and software skills listed on job postings, suggesting a role for structural shifts associated with changes in technology or capital investment. Our results demonstrate that equilibrium models where unemployed workers accumulate specific human capital and, in equilibrium, make explicit mobility decisions across distinct labor markets, can mean that workers are chasing a moving target-at least among high-skilled occupations. Furthermore, our findings inform debates focused on workforce development strategies and related educational policies where decision making could benefit from the use of real-time labor market information on employer demands to provide guidance for both job placement as well as program development. Essay II: The Changing Impacts of Cognitive Ability on Determining Earnings of College Bound and Non-College Bound Young Adults-- Using data on young adults from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I investigate the changing impact of cognitive ability, as captured by performance on AFQT tests, on wage determination of college bound and non-college bound young adults. My findings indicate that cognitive ability plays a substantially diminished role for the most recent cohort and its impact on wage determination has undergone a drastic change between 1980s and 2000s. My results tend to corroborate the findings of previous studies which emphasize the lifecycle path of technological development from adoption to maturation and trace back the labor market outcomes observed over these periods to pre- and post-2000 patterns in technology investment and its consequent boom-and-bust cycles in the demand for cognitive skills. Essay III: Measurement Error in Survey Data and its Impact on Identifying the Extent of Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity-- In this study, we employ data drawn from the 1996, 2001, 2004 and 2008 panels of the SIPP, which cover the years 1996-2013, to assess the effectiveness of dependent interviewing at reducing bias in the estimates of the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in the US economy. In the 2004 and 2008 panels of the SIPP, dependent interviewing was used much more extensively than in the past. This questioning method by focusing on changes rather than levels of wages and using responses from prior interviews to query apparent inconsistencies over time reduces the incidence of reporting and measurement errors. Our change-in-wage distributions derived from SIPP 2004 and 2008 panels exhibit remarkably larger zero-spikes and asymmetries vis-℗♭℗ -vis those derived from 1996 and 2001 panels before dependent interviewing was used. These results are consistent with the findings of previous studies that used payroll data or statistical techniques to correct for reporting error. We apply one such technique to the SIPP panels before and after the introduction of dependent interviewing. In the pre-2004 panels the correction is large and results in a distribution that closely resembles the uncorrected distributions of the 2004 panel. When the correction is applied to the 2004 panel no evidence of errors is found.

Essays in Labor Economics

Essays in Labor Economics PDF Author: Amanda Dawn Pallais
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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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.

Three Essays in Labor Economics

Three Essays in Labor Economics PDF Author: Yuseob Lee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Chapter 1 Firm's outsourcing decision changes the match surplus to be split as well as the rule for splitting the surplus with employees. This study proposes and estimates a simple wage bargaining model that tracks down the time variation of revenue, cost, and input variables while taking the outsourcing patterns as given. The model is examined using a firm-level panel data containing administrative information on income statement and balance sheet provided by the National Tax Service of South Korea. Evidence suggests that outsourcing firms tend to have i) higher bargaining power against employees, ii) a larger fixed cost of bargaining failure, and iii) match surplus more responsive to the cost of purchases. Chapter 2 This study proposes and estimates a labor supply model to understand the transition between school and workplace, dispersion in time to degree, and labor supply decision while enrolled in college. Without assuming incomplete financial market or heterogeneous parental transfers, our model succeeds in generating the observed patterns. The model is estimated using simulated method of moments with NLSY97 data set. Counterfactual experiments suggest that decreasing the direct schooling cost would facilitate more full-time enrollment and less part-time enrollment in the earlier period and that more work-friendly postsecondary education environment would hardly affect enrollment pattern in earlier periods but would propel part-time enrollment after the usual time to Bachelor's degree. Chapter 3 This study estimates the impact of single-sex schooling on the gender gap in College major choice. Potential endogeneity concerns are alleviated owing to two features of the South Korean educational setting: homogenous application behavior under Boston mechanism-type assignment in equalized educational districts and college-major-specific admissions policies. Single-sex schooling is found to widen the gender gap in the choice of predominantly male majors by attracting female students to gender-balanced majors and male students to predominantly male majors. As possible channels through which single-sex schooling affects, overall and subject-wise gender composition of teachers have been studied. Increasing the overall proportion of female teachers or increasing the proportion of male science and math teachers turn out to encourage the pursuit of predominantly male majors by female students in all-girls high school. These findings provide policy implications on preferential hiring criteria, with respect to the gender composition of teachers by subject.

Three Essays in Labor Economics

Three Essays in Labor Economics PDF Author: Gábor Kézdi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Essays in Labor Economics

Essays in Labor Economics PDF Author: Andrea Mattia
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This thesis consists of two papers in the field of labor economics.The first paper is titled ”The Distribution of Value of Time: An Analysis from Traffic Congestion and Express Lanes”. The value of time (VOT) determines the allocation of non-labor time to tasks and is crucial in travel demand and infrastructure, where congestion is a major source of loss. A large literature has estimated the mean VOT over a variety of subpopulations, but commuting choices and welfare effects of congestion policies depend on the individual VOT of the policy-relevant population. In this paper, I estimate the full VOT distribution for a population of drivers, using a rich new dataset in the unique context of highway Express Lanes (ELs), which offer time savings in exchange for a toll. A continuous function of traffic density sets the toll and rounds it to the nearest USD0.25, creating 32 separate discontinuities which provide identifying variation. The analysis is divided into three parts. First, using an RDD, I show that EL drivers have a mean VOT of USD66.56 per hour saved, substantially exceeding estimates from the literature. Second, the full VOT distribution for all drivers, which rationalizes EL aggregate traffic shares and RD results, shows wide heterogeneity: the median is USD17.42 per hour and the 95th percentile is USD166.05. Third, I build a structural model that endogenizes departure time (a key form of adjustment) to assess the welfare consequences of a range of counterfactual policies. I find that the EL is welfare-reducing because the value of the increase in travel times for non-users outweighs the benefits for users by USD25.68 per year, more than what half of drivers spend on the EL in a year.The second paper is titled ”The dynamics of the earnings gap between spouses in the United States and Europe”. When husbands in heterosexual couples prefer to be the primary earners, women's outcomes both during and before marriage can be negatively affected. Some papers claimed that the distribution of the wife's share of household earnings has missing mass to the right of 0.5 and attributed this regularity to a “male breadwinner” norm. If this norm exists, economic theory predicts that spouses would respond to violations of the norm ex-post, or prevent ex-ante violations. These responses do not emerge from the static distribution of the earnings gap between spouses, but from its dynamics. To test the theory, I provide the first dynamic analysis of the earnings gap, characterize its Markov transition matrix and the persistence of its shocks. The methodology is easily replicable, because it only requires a two-year panel of both spouses' earnings. The gap converges to a stationary distribution that reproduces extremely well the static distribution of the wife's share of earnings. Shocks to the earnings gap are more persistent when they are close to the quantile of the initial gap. Finally, the local transition of the earnings gap around 0 is driven by couples bunched exactly at 0 earnings gap. The behavior of spouses with similar earnings is not consistent with them holding a male breadwinner norm. When the wife earns slightly more than the husband, in the following period it is more likely that the husband earns more without any spouses' response. All the results hold true across the US and 20 European countries.