Author: Eunbi KoPublisher:
ISBN:
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Languages : en
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Book Description
This dissertation develops two models of frictional labor market which provide tools to understand some important phenomena of the US labor market.The first chapter models labor market choices of workers depending primarily on his/her marital status and the partner's labor market outcome if the worker is married. In the household of a married couple, an increase in the husband's wage leads to a rise in the number of days his wife remains out of the labor force. If only one of the couple is employed, a wage increase for the employed partner lengthens the spouse's unemployment duration. Moreover, if both are employed, their wages move in the same direction. To explain these stylized facts, I construct an equilibrium model of the labor market in which a married couple jointly chooses market participation and search for and separation from a job. Calibration shows that the model can correctly account for the facts. The unified framework with endogenous market participation and frictional search is necessary to correctly predict the correlations in spouses' labor market outcomes. Using the benchmark model, I do the policy experiments of unemployment insurance (UI) and the earned income tax credit (EITC). I show that generous UI can increase the employment-population ratio by mitigating married females' disincentive to participate in the market. I also show that the EITC increases the employment of single parents but it decreases the employment of workers who belong to other types of households. In the sense of welfare, the EITC enhances welfare for all single parents, but it reduces welfare of some married parents by reducing the value of working wives.In the second chapter, I construct a directed search model of the labor market with two types of workers and two types of firms to show that an asymmetric positive productivity shock could cause a recent upward shift of the US Beveridge curve. The model possesses an equilibrium in which unskilled workers apply to both high-tech and low-tech firms and skilled workers apply only to high-tech firms. The productivity difference between sectors affects unskilled workers' application strategy: the larger the productivity gap is, the more unskilled workers apply to high-tech firms. The calibration suggests that the productivity difference between sectors has become greater after the recession than before. This makes unskilled workers apply to a high-tech firm with a greater probability than before, which results in the lower average job-finding rate and an upward shift of the Beveridge curve.
