Essays on Labor Markets and Income Inequality in Less Developed Countries

Essays on Labor Markets and Income Inequality in Less Developed Countries PDF Author: Ariel Fiszbein
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Essays on Labor Markets and Income Inequality in Less Developed Countries

Essays on Labor Markets and Income Inequality in Less Developed Countries PDF Author: Ariel Fiszbein
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Essays on Inequality in Labor Markets and Wealth

Essays on Inequality in Labor Markets and Wealth PDF Author: David Nathaniel Wasser
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation consists of three essays that address important questions within the fields of labor economics and public economics. I use advanced empirical methods and a combination of restricted access and public-use data to study the role of inequality in labor markets and wealth.In Chapter 1, I study whether the effects of unemployment insurance (UI) extensions are different for workers exposed to higher levels of local labor market concentration, a potential source of employer market power. UI extensions can improve the bargaining power of job seekers relative to employers by improving workers' outside options. I exploit measurement error in state unemployment rates that led to quasi-random assignment of UI durations in the U.S. during the Great Recession. Using matched employer-employee data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program, I find that UI extensions lengthen nonemployment durations by one week and cause economically meaningful but not statistically significant increases in earnings. The UI-earnings effect is significantly lower at higher levels of concentration, while there is no difference in the UI-duration effect. The lower UI-earnings effect is driven by differences at the extremes of the distribution of concentration. Workers exposed to higher concentration also are slightly more likely to change workplaces, local labor markets, and industries following an extension, but they are not induced to match into less-concentrated markets. My results imply that the benefits of more generous UI, in terms of match quality, are attenuated at higher levels of concentration, and so UI policy that accounts for local concentration is potentially warranted.In Chapter 2, joint with Anne M. Burton, we revisit how Ban the Box (BTB) policies affect the employment of minority men. BTB policies are intended to help ex-offenders find employment by delaying when employers can ask about criminal records. Existing evidence finds BTB causes discrimination against young, non-college-educated minority men. We show that effects for this group are not robust to a simple change in specification and the coding of BTB laws. Using a distinct treatment definition, we find no evidence of statistical discrimination: employment effects are near zero, precisely estimated, and not statistically significant.In Chapter 3, joint with N. Meltem Daysal and Michael F. Lovenheim, we study the effect of changes in parental wealth in childhood on the intergenerational transmission of wealth. Rising wealth inequality has spurred an increased interest in understanding how and why wealth is correlated across generations. Prior research has found an intergenerational correlation between 0.2 and 0.4 and has emphasized the role of family characteristics in driving this correlation. We contribute to this literature by examining the intergenerational transmission of wealth changes, which allows us to isolate the causal effect of wealth shocks from pre-determined parental preferences and household characteristics. Using Danish Register Data, we examine the effect of home price changes that occur between ages 0-5, 6-11, and 12-17 on overall wealth, housing wealth, and nonhousing wealth of adult children at ages 29-33. For the youngest age group, we find that 16.5% and 22.2% of each Krone of home price change is transmitted to overall wealth and housing wealth in adulthood, respectively. The corresponding transmission rates for the 6-11 age group are 30.8% and 18.5%, with a transmission to non-housing wealth of 12.3%. There is no transmission of home price changes that occur during the teenage years for any wealth outcome. Examining mechanisms, we find that home price increases in the first two age groups lead to modest increases in home ownership, educational attainment, and income. There also is an increase in partner wealth for the younger two groups. Income and education can explain less than a third of the intergenerational transmission we document. We argue that our results largely reflect changes to parental/household behaviors and preferences that are passed down to children and cause them to accumulate more housing wealth in young adulthood.

Labour Markets, Institutions and Inequality

Labour Markets, Institutions and Inequality PDF Author: Janine Berg
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1784712108
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Labour market institutions, including collective bargaining, the regulation of employment contracts and social protection policies, are instrumental for improving the well-being of workers, their families and society. In many countries, these instituti

Essays in Labor Market Inequality

Essays in Labor Market Inequality PDF Author: Ariella Kahn-Lang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Essays on Labor Markets and Inequality

Essays on Labor Markets and Inequality PDF Author: Emilien Gouin-Bonenfant
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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In the first chapter, I propose a tractable model of the labor share that emphasizes the interaction between labor market imperfections and productivity dispersion. I bring the model to the data using an administrative dataset covering the universe of firms in Canada. As in the data, most firms have a high labor share, yet the aggregate labor share is low due to the disproportionate effect of a small fraction of large, extremely productive “superstar firms”. I find that a rise in the dispersion of productivity across firms leads to a decline of the aggregate labor share in favor of firm profit. The mechanism is that productivity dispersion effectively shields high-productivity firms from wage competition. Reduced-form evidence from cross-country and cross-industry data supports both the prediction and the mechanism. Through the lens of the model, rising productivity dispersion has caused the U.S. labor share to decline starting around 1990. In the second chapter, we propose a new, systematic approach for analyzing and solving heterogeneous-agent models with fat-tailed wealth distributions. Our approach exploits the asymptotic linearity of policy functions and the analytical characterization of the Pareto exponent to make the solution algorithm more transparent, efficient, and accurate with zero additional computational cost. As an application, we solve a heterogeneous-agent model that features persistent earnings and investment risk, borrowing constraint, portfolio decision, and endogenous Pareto-tailed wealth distribution. We find that a wealth tax is a “lose-lose” policy: the introduction of a 1% wealth tax (with extra tax revenue used as consumption rebate) decreases wage by 6.5%, welfare (in consumption equivalent) by 7.7%, and total tax revenue by 0.72%. In the third chapter, I propose a model of earnings dynamics and inequality within the firm. The model combines a production hierarchy with a “rank order tournament” promotion scheme. I motivate the theory by documenting three sets of facts using proprietary personnel data. First, most of inequality within the firm is between hierarchy levels rather than within. Second, there is on average very little upward mobility within the firm. Third, there is important heterogeneity in earnings trajectories. The model provides a positive theory of these facts and sheds light on the determinants of inequality within the firm.

Essays in Labor Market Analysis

Essays in Labor Market Analysis PDF Author: Orley Ashenfelter
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Monographic compilation of essays in labour economics - covers labour demand and labour supply in the USA civil service, economic models of collective bargaining during labour disputes, economic analysis of job satisfaction, costs of job searching, etc. Diagrams, graphs, references, statistical tables. Festschrift comay yp 1939-1973.

Labor Markets in Action

Labor Markets in Action PDF Author: Richard Barry Freeman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Essays on Labor Markets in Developing Countries

Essays on Labor Markets in Developing Countries PDF Author: Binh T. Nguyen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cost and standard of living
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Essays on Labor Market Inequality

Essays on Labor Market Inequality PDF Author: Conrad Miller (Ph. D.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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This thesis consists of three chapters on aspects of labor market inequality. In chapter 1, I estimate the dynamic effects of federal affirmative action regulation, exploiting variation in the timing of regulation and deregulation across work establishments. I find that affirmative action sharply increases the black share of employees, with the share continuing to increase over time: five years after an establishment is first regulated, its black share of employees increased by an average of 0.8 percentage points. Strikingly, the black share continues to grow even after an establishment is deregulated. Building on the canonical Phelps (1972) model of statistical discrimination, I argue that this persistence is in part driven by affirmative action inducing employers to increase the precision with which they screen potential employees. I then provide supporting evidence. In chapter 2, I study the spatial mismatch hypothesis, which proposes that job suburbanization isolates blacks from work opportunities and depresses black employment. Using synthetic panel methods and variation across metropolitan areas from 1970 to 2000, I find that for every 10% decline in the fraction of metropolitan area jobs located in the central city, black employment (earnings) declined by 1.4-2.1% (1.1-2.3%) relative to white employment (earnings). This relationship is driven primarily by job suburbanization that occurred during the 1970's. To address the potential endogeneity of suburbanization, I exploit exogenous variation in highway construction and find that highways cause job suburbanization and declines in black relative employment in a manner consistent with spatial mismatch. In chapter 3, joint work with Isaiah Andrews, we analyze the effect of heterogeneity on the widely used analyses of Baily (1978) and Chetty (2006) for optimal social insurance. The basic Baily-Chetty formula is robust to heterogeneity along many dimensions but requires that risk aversion be homogeneous. We extend the Baily-Chetty framework to allow for arbitrary heterogeneity across agents, particularly in risk preferences. We find that heterogeneity in risk aversion affects welfare analysis through the covariance of risk aversion and consumption drops, which measures the extent to which larger risks are borne by more risk tolerant workers. Calibrations suggest that this covariance effect may be large.

Inequality in Housing and Labor Markets

Inequality in Housing and Labor Markets PDF Author: Caitlin Knowles Myers
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 109

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