Author: David Wonyoung Jang
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Languages : en
Pages : 0
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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
Author: Felicien Jesugo Goudou
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Languages : en
Pages : 0
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This thesis contributes to understanding labor market frictions and how these frictions impact macroeconomic aggregates such as unemployment and productivity. It also critically examines environmental policies such as carbon taxes and green financing. The first chapter examines how non-compete contracts signed between employers and employees affect unemployment, productivity, and welfare in the economy. These contracts stipulate that the employee, while under contract, cannot work for a competing employer for a specified period, typically ranging from one to two years after separation from their initial employer. This type of contract is widespread in the United States and affects at least one in five employees in the country. Results show that a high enforceable incidence of these contracts can compress wages and generate unemployment. This is primarily due to the fact that some individuals who have signed such contracts face difficulties in finding new employment after separating from their initial job. The article proposes reducing the duration of the post-employment restrictions of these contracts to mitigate their effects on workers. However, it is worth noting that these contracts partially benefit employers by incentivizing them to invest in employee training, thereby increasing overall productivity. Speaking of employment contracts, the second chapter evaluates the implications of the coexistence of temporary contracts (fixed-term contracts) and permanent contracts (indefinite-term contracts) on worker flows between unemployment, employment, and labor force non-participation over the life-cycle. This analysis is particularly important due to the effects of these flows on aggregate employment and wages over the life-cycle. It is found that transitions of individuals from permanent employment to unemployment are the most significant factor explaining aggregate employment over the life-cycle. Any policy aimed at increasing employment should target this flow of workers. Moreover, the transition of individuals from temporary employment to unemployment is significant in explaining the low employment of young individuals in European countries like France, especially for those with higher levels of education. The article goes further by constructing a model that explains the observed transition profiles during agents' life-cycle and analyzes how the effects linked to employment protection reforms in European countries are distributed among workers based on their level of education and age. Finally, the third chapter provides a critical assessment of environmental policies such as emissions taxes on production units and green financing. The article shows that despite their effectiveness in reducing emissions, these policies can negatively impact resource allocation, such as capital, among firms, thus reducing aggregate productivity. This is because some highly productive but seriously financially constrained firms may struggle to invest in emission reduction technology, while less productive but wealthy entrepreneurs invest more easily. The burden of emissions-related fiscal measures forces the former to exit the market, thereby reducing productivity. This suggests that other policies, such as green subsidies, are important to mitigate these potential distortions.
Author: Melissa Christine LoPalo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 412
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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
Author: Guanyi Yang
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Category : Labor market
Languages : en
Pages : 108
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Chapter 2 studies frictions in firm's hiring and firing decisions in an environment with dual labor markets. More firms execute employment decisions in two labor markets: a permanent (regular) market with firing costs and a frictionless temporary labor market. This paper studies the employment response of firms to heightened idiosyncratic risk and firing rigidity. Rising firing rigidity in the regular market and heightened risks reduce employment and output, which creates large welfare loss. By introducing a temporary labor market, firms switch from regular employment to temporary employment and reduce total employment loss. Thus, temporary employment creates a buffer for firms' employment decisions and for the economy's welfare. However, it cannot fully compensate the efficiency cost from rising firing cost and risk.
Author: Richard Barry Freeman
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ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Author: Juuso Vanhala
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ISBN: 9789521027727
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: Lawrence F. Warren
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Category : Employment (Economic theory)
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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This dissertation contributes to the current understanding of labor markets, focusing on the use of micro level data and computational modeling to study the interaction of unemployment with various aspects of the macroeconomy. I address the fact that frictions in the labor market carry over into other dimensions of firms' and workers' decisions, such as a firm's incentive to utilize its current labor force, workers' participation in the labor market, and the decision to acquire or discharge debt. In Chapter 1, I study involuntary part-time employment over the business cycle. I document that the population at work part-time for economic reasons ($PTE$) is countercyclical, volatile, and transitory. Workers in $PTE$ are nearly three times more likely than the unemployed to return to full-time work in a given month, and seven times more likely than full-time workers to become unemployed. Using household survey data, I demonstrate that cyclical fluctuations in $PTE$ come from changes in the transition rates between full-time and part-time employment rather than between part-time and unemployment. Moreover, these movements are primarily due to within-job changes in hours. Accordingly, I model part-time work focusing on a firm's decision to hire, fire, or partially utilize its labor force. Firms in the model are heterogeneous in size and productivity, and are subject to search frictions. The model produces firm-level utilization of part-time employment which is consistent with observed worker flows, and varies across the size and age distributions of firms. Over the business cycle, the model matches the observed relative volatility of unemployment and $PTE$. Part-time labor utilization by firms increases the volatility of vacancies and unemployment in the model relative to the case with only an extensive margin. Chapter 2 studies the interaction of a participation margin in a labor market search model.
Author: Jin Yan (Ph. D. in economics)
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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This dissertation focuses on studying the effect of certain life events including accumulating student debt and incidences of unemployment on workers' labor market outcomes. The chapters use economic models to guide empirical analysis and find that both student debt and unemployment experience can negatively impact workers' future earnings. The models in Chapter 2 and 3 both feature imperfect information about workers' underlying ability and learning through noisy productivity signals over time. Both chapters suggest that information frictions in the labor market can be costly. Chapter 2 develops and estimates a model of career choices and experimentation featuring imperfect information, risk aversion, and incomplete markets. The model emphasizes the importance of career experimentation in driving earnings growth and shows that information frictions cause risk-averse graduates with student debt to choose a safe career path with a flatter experience-earnings profile which is consistent with the empirical results. Chapter 3 finds that the longer a worker is unemployed, the less he earns initially coming out of an unemployment spell, but the wage penalty of unemployment duration decreases over time. The findings are consistent with the prediction of the employer learning with statistical discrimination model developed in Altonji and Pierret (2001) which suggests that information frictions can motivate profit-maximizing employers to use unemployment duration as a negative signal to predict workers' productivity at the time of hire, put extra negative weight on unemployment duration when making initial wage offers, and alleviate it only after learning about workers’ underlying ability. Chapter 4 presents a flow-based methodology for real-time unemployment rate projections to characterize the evolution of the unemployment rate during the recession triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the chapter analyzes fluctuations in the unemployment rate through the lens of labor market flows and this approach performed considerably better at the onset of the COVID-19 recession in spring 2020 in predicting the peak unemployment rate as well as its rapid decline in the following months. The predictive power of the methodology comes from its combined use of real-time data with the flow approach
Author: Kun Li
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Languages : en
Pages : 0
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My dissertation uses theoretical tools and empirical methods to address substantive questions in the intersection of Macroeconomics and Industrial Organization. In particular, my research focuses on understanding the underlying forces that determine efficiency and distortions. In the first chapter, Privatization, Distortions, and Productivity, I ask that to what extent and through what channels privatization has contributed to the rapid growth of GDP and TFP in China's manufacturing sector. Privatization, like many other industrial policies, affects firms' output and productivity through a direct effect on productivity and an indirect effect on resource allocation. Understanding the consequences of privatization on both productivity and allocative efficiency is crucial for policy evaluation and subsequent reforms. To do so, I first develop a method to separately identify productivity and factor misallocations. This links to two distinct literatures. One is the macro literature on misallocation that use wedges or distortions to measure the deviation from firm's optimal scale. The other is the empirical IO literature to estimate production function using input and output, together with firm's optimal choices. I augment the empirical production function estimation framework by introducing wedges between marginal revenues and marginal costs as an additional unobserved variable that distorts the firms output away from their optimal input choices. And I show that how to identify and estimate productivity, distortions and parameters in production function. I then estimate the productivity and distortion effects of privatization. Finally I propose a decomposition method for aggregate productivity growth to explicitly account for the direct effect of privatization. Second, I discussed market frictions, specifically search and informational frictions that prevents efficient allocations in the labor markets. In Understanding Transitions using Directed Search with Mike Peters (UBC) and Steven Xu (HKU), we develop a directed search model to study worker transitions between jobs in the French labor market. In particular, the model we consider allows workers to have incomplete information about each other's' marketable characteristics (types) at the point where they make their search decisions. The theory provides a series of testable predictions about the relationship between the wage a worker receives at the job that he or she leaves, and the wage they get at their next job. The paper then uses data from the French DADS data set to study transitions in a variety of different labor markets in France in 2007, and compares these transitions to what is predicted by the theory. We find that the labor markets for skilled workers and industrial type of workers support more of our model. Third, I explore the return of productivity and distortions in scientific world. In Is Citation Behavior Biased? The Influence of Journal Editors with Bruno Biais (TSE) and Augustin Landier (TSE), we test the null hypothesis that the number of citations provides an unbiased measure of an article's scientific value. To do so, we exploit a shock that is exogenous to the scientific value of a paper, namely the ending time of editorial appointments of colleagues of a paper's author(s). We show that during the course of an editor's appointment, the citation rates of her papers in the journal she edits go up by 23 percentage points. During the same period, these articles don't have any significant citation premium at other journals. The citation premium fades away when the editor steps down. The same phenomenon applies to colleagues of the editor. This provides a counterexample to the null hypothesis that is both large in size and in the population of papers that is affected.
Author: Eunbi Ko
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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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.
