Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Labor economics'

In this dissertation, I present three essays on matching and assignment in labor economics. The first chapter presents an integrated model of occupation choice, spouse choice, family labor supply, and fertility. Two key features of the model are that occupations differ both in wages and in an amenity termed flexibility, and that children require a nontrivial amount of parental time that has no market substitute. I show that occupations with more costly flexibility, modeled as a nonlinearity in wages, have a lower fraction of women, less positive assortative mating on earnings, and lower fertility among dual-career couples. Costly flexibility may induce high-earning couples to share home production, which rewards husbands who are simultaneously high-earning and productive in child care. Empirical evidence broadly supports the main theoretical predictions with respect to the tradeoffs between marriage market and career outcomes. In the second chapter, I use the University of Michigan Law School Alumni Survey to investigate the interaction between assortative mating and the career and family outcomes of high-ability women. Women with higher earnings potential at the time of law school graduation have higher-earning spouses and more children 15 years after graduation. As the earnings penalty from reduced labor supply decreased over the sample, women with higher-earning spouses and more children reported shorter work weeks and were less likely to be in the labor force. Decreasing the career cost of non-work may have the unintended result of reducing the labor supply of the highest-ability women, as their high-earning spouses give them the option to temporarily exit the labor force. The third chapter addresses specification choice in empirical peer effects models. Predicting the impact of altering composition on student outcomes has proven an unexpected challenge in the experimental literature. I use the experimental data of Duflo et al. (2011) to evaluate the out-of-sample predictive accuracy of popular reduced form peer effects specifications. I find that predictions of the impact of ability tracking on outcomes are highly sensitive to the choice of peer group summary statistics and functional form assumptions. Standard model selection criteria provide some guidance in selecting among peer effect specifications.

Aquesta tesi persegueix els objectius següents. En primer lloc, estudia els factors que impulsen el creixement constant tant en la participació de la mà d'obra com en les hores per treballador de persones majors, persones majors de 62 anys, als Estats Units des de mitjan anys vuitanta. Utilitzem dades del Health and Retirement Study (HRS) per estimar un model de cicle de vida de l'oferta laboral, la jubilació i l'acumulació de riqueses per contrastar el comportament de l'oferta laboral de dues cohorts als EUA: persones nascudes després de la Primera Guerra Mundial ("The Great Depression Kids"), i els nascuts després de la Segona Guerra Mundial ("The Baby Boomers"). Ens centrem en les diferències entre aquestes dues cohorts en l'obtenció i la dinàmica de la salut, així com les polítiques a què s'enfronten, un augment gradual de l'Edat de jubilació normal i l'eliminació de la prova de guanys l'any 2000, com a possibles fonts de canvi. Els resultats demostren que els efectes de les polítiques i els factors no relacionats amb la política tenen una magnitud similar. L'eliminació de la prova de guanys va tenir el major impacte de totes les polítiques. De forma conjunta, l'augment de les despeses mèdiques de butxaca i l'augment de l'esperança de vida són els factors dominants entre els no relacionats amb les polítiques. En segon lloc, utilitzem el Panell Socioeconòmic Alemany (SOEP) per estudiar com la introducció d'un salari mínim federal a Alemanya l'1 de gener de 2015 afecta els salaris de les reserves individuals. Trobem que la reforma estava associada amb un augment dels salaris de reserva d'aproximadament el 4 per cent en el final més baix de la distribució. A més, els canvis en els salaris de reserva i els salaris observats a causa de la reforma salarial mínima són comparables en la seva magnitud. També mostrem que els ciutadans alemanys ajusten els seus salaris de reserva més que els immigrants. En tercer lloc, torneu a utilitzar les dades SOEP per estimar l'efecte de la reforma salarial mínima alemanya sobre la durada de l'atur. Trobem una associació molt forta de la reforma amb un augment de la durada de l'atur entre homes joves. Aquest efecte és especialment fort en les regions amb alt grau de reforma.
This dissertation pursues the following objectives. First, it studies the factors driving the steady growth in both labor force participation and hours per worker of seniors, individuals above age 62, in the US since the mid 1980s. We use data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to estimate a life-cycle model of labor supply, retirement, and wealth accumulation in order to contrast the labor supply behavior of two cohorts in the US: individuals born after World War I ("The Great Depression Kids"), and those born after the World War II ("The Baby Boomers"). We focus on the differences between these two cohorts in earning and health dynamics as well as policies that they face, a gradual increase in Normal Retirement Age and the elimination of the earnings test in 2000, as potential sources of change. The results demonstrate that the effects of policies and policy-unrelated factors are of similar magnitude. The elimination of the Earnings Test had the biggest impact of all policies. Jointly, the rise in out-of-pocket medical expenditures and the increase in life expectancy are the dominant factors among non policy-related ones. Second, we use the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to study the how the introduction of a federal minimum wage in Germany on January 1, 2015, affected individual reservations wages. We find that the reform was associated with an increase in reservation wages of approximately 4 percent at the low end of the distribution. Furthermore, the shifts in reservation wages and observed wages due to the minimum wage reform are comparable in their magnitude. We also show that German citizens adjust their reservation wages more than immigrants do. Third, use again the SOEP data to estimate the effect of the German minimum wage reform on unemployment duration. We find a very strong association of the reform with an increase in unemployment durations across young men. This effect is especially strong in the regions with high reform bite.

This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter studies the effects of an integration of local labor markets between France and Switzerland. It shows that removing barriers to worker mobility can improve the labor market outcomes of workers, even of those that do not move. The reason is that the option to work at a larger number of employers decreases a single firm’s wagesetting power. The second chapter estimates the elasticity of labor supply to individual firms in Switzerland with a discrete choice model where workers have correlated preferences across firms. The results show that allowing for correlated worker preferences across firms in the model increases the estimated degree of competition in the labor market. The last chapter studies the role of childbearing for gender differences in the careers of PhD scientists in the United States. It finds that one third of the gender gap in earnings after twenty years cannot be explained by the presence of children.
Esta tesis consta de tres capítulos. El primer capítulo estudia los efectos de una integración de los mercados laborales locales entre Francia y Suiza. El análisis demuestra que eliminar barreras a la movilidad de los trabajadores puede aumentar el empleo y los salarios, incluso de la gente que no se desplaza. Esto se debe a que la opción de trabajar para un mayor número de empleadores disminuye el poder de fijación de salarios de una sola empresa. El segundo capítulo estima la elasticidad de la oferta de mano de obra a las empresas en Suiza. Se aplica un modelo de elección discreta en el que los trabajadores tienen preferencias correlacionadas entre las empresas. Los resultados muestran que tener en cuenta las preferencias correlacionadas de los trabajadores aumenta el grado estimado de competencia en el mercado laboral. El último capítulo estudia cómo la presencia de niños impacta las diferencias entre los géneros en las carreras de los científicos de doctorado e nEstados Unidos. El análisis en cuentra que un tercio de la diferencia en los ingresos entre los géneros después de veinte años no puede explicarse por la presencia de niños.

En aquesta tesi, analitzo les causes i conseqüències del desajust entre les habilitats de treballadors i les habilitats requerides per la seva ocupació. També investigo els factors que determinen l’èxit de fertilització in vitro, els quals posseeixen importants implicacions sobre l’elecció professional i la fertilitat de les dones. En el primer capítol, calculo noves mesures de desajust d’habilitats per habilitats alfabetitzadores i numèriques. Les mesures existents de desajust d’habilitats basades en les dades de l’Avaluació Internacional de Competències d’Adults (PIAAC) només utilitzen informació de la part del treballador i ignoren el tipus de treball que aquests realitzen. Per a 13 dels països de l’OCDE, mesuro les habilitats dels treballadors utilitzant la puntuació en exàmens individuals i les habilitats requerides per les seves professions amb dades de requisits ocupacionals de la Xarxa d’Informació Ocupacional. Mesuro 1) la correlació entre les habilitats i els requisits ocupacionals a cada país i 2) el percentatge de treballadors el desajust dels quals és superior a 50. Mostro que les mesures de desajust que proposo tenen una correlació negativa amb la productivitat laboral agregada superior a les mesures existents. En el segon capítol, col·laborant amb en Andrii Parkhomenko, estudiem la relació entre les prestacions d’atur i el canvi d’ocupació. Pot afectar el nivell de les prestacions d’atur al tipus de treball posterior a l’atur? Utilitzant dues bases de dades d’Estats Units, el SIPP i el NLSY79, documentem nous resultats envers la relació entre les prestacions d’atur i el canvi d’ocupació. Primerament, els aturats que tenen dret a prestacions més altes canvien d’ocupació en menor freqüència. En segon lloc, entre els que si canvien d’ocupació, les prestacions més altes tenen una correlació positiva amb el requisit d’habilitats en la nova ocupació. Finalment, el primer resultat és més pronunciat per a treballadors que tenen una permanència més llarga a la seva antiga ocupació i, en canvi, en el segon resultat, es més pronunciat entre els que tenen una permanència més curta. Proposem un model d’agents i llocs de treball heterogenis per estudiar l’efecte de les prestacions d’atur en els sous i el tipus d’ocupacions de treballadors que han estat a l’atur. El model estimat ens permet mostrar que, proporcionant prestacions més altes a treballadors amb menys experiència, el resultat és de sous mitjans més alts. En el tercer capítol, col·laborant amb la Fane Groes, la Daniela Iorio, la Mallory Leung i el Raul Santaeulalia-Llopis, estudiem els factors que determinen l’èxit de la fertilització in vitro (FIV), utilitzant dades administratives de Dinamarca (1995-2009). Trobem que l’educació materna afecta de manera significativa a l’èxit de FIV (nascut viu). Comparant les fertilitzades que no van acabar l’educació secundària envers les que tenen un diploma universitari o de secundària, tenen un 21% i un 13% més de probabilitat d’aconseguir un nascut viu a través de FIV, respectivament. Argumentem que el gradient d’educació reflexa diferències en productivitat en FIV (com de bé les dones segueixen les instruccions del tractament de FIV) i en factors psicològics (com les afecta assumir el tractament). Desenvolupem un model dinàmic de dones utilitzant la tecnologia de FIV, on les dones tenen productivitats diferents en FIV i nivells diferents d’estrès psicològic associat al tractament. En el model, les dones equilibren la probabilitat positiva d’obtenir un fill i el cost psicològic del tractament. El model estimat demostra que el 95% del gradient es pot explicar amb les diferencies en la productivitat en FIV.
En esta tesis analizo las causas y consecuencias del desajuste entre las habilidades de trabajadores y las habilidades requeridas por su ocupación. Estudio cómo medir este desajuste y cómo se ve afectado por el nivel de prestaciones de desempleo mediante su efecto en el cambio de ocupación. También investigo los factores que determinan el éxito de la fertilización in vitro, los cuales tienen implicaciones importantes sobre la elección profesional y de fertilidad de las mujeres. En el primer capítulo, calculo nuevas medidas de desajuste de habilidades para habilidades alfabetizadoras y numéricas. Las medidas existentes de desajuste de habilidades basadas en los datos de la Evaluación Internacional de Competencias de Adultos (PIAAC) usan información solo de la parte del trabajador e ignoran el tipo de trabajos que estos realizan. Para 13 de los países de la OCDE, mido las habilidades de los trabajadores usando la puntuación obtenida en exámenes individuales y las habilidades requeridas por sus profesiones con datos de requisitos ocupacionales de la Red de Información Ocupacional. Mido 1) la correlación entre las habilidades y los requisitos ocupacionales en cada país y 2) el porcentaje de trabajadores para los que el desajuste es mayor de 50. Muestro que las medidas de desajuste que propongo tienen una correlación negativa con la productividad laboral agregada más alta que las medidas existentes. En el segundo capítulo, en colaboración con Andrii Parkhomenko, estudio la relación entre las prestaciones de desempleo y el cambio de ocupación. ¿Puede afectar el nivel de las prestaciones de desempleo al tipo de trabajos posteriores al desempleo? Usando dos bases de datos de Estados Unidos, el SIPP y el NLSY79, documentamos nuevos resultados sobre la relación entre las prestaciones de desempleo y el cambio de ocupación. Primero, los desempleados que tienen derecho a prestaciones más altas cambian de ocupación menos frecuentemente. Segundo, entre los que sí cambian de ocupación, las prestaciones más altas tienen una correlación positiva con el requisito de habilidades en la nueva ocupación. Por último, el primer resultado es más pronunciado para trabajadores que tienen una permanencia más larga en su antigua ocupación, mientras que el segundo resultado es más pronunciado entre quienes tienen una permanencia más corta. Proponemos un modelo de agentes y trabajos heterogéneos para estudiar el efecto de las prestaciones de desempleo en los salarios y el tipo de ocupaciones de trabajadores que pasan por el desempleo. El modelo estimado nos permite mostrar que proporcionando prestaciones más altas a trabajadores con menos experiencia, los salarios medios son más altos. En el tercer capítulo, en colaboración con Fane Groes, Daniela Iorio, Mallory Leung and Raul Santaeulalia-Llopis, estudio los factores que determinan el éxito de la fertilización in vitro (FIV), usando datos administrativos de Dinamarca (1995-2009). Determinamos que la educación materna afecta de manera significativa al éxito de FIV (nacido vivo). Comparado con las fertilizadas que no acabaron la secundaria, quienes tienen diploma universitario o de secundaria tienen un 21% o un 13%, respectivamente, más probabilidades de lograr un nacido vivo mediante FIV. Argumentamos que el gradiente de educación refleja diferencias en productividad en FIV (cómo de bien las mujeres siguen las instrucciones del tratamiento de FIV) y en factores psicológicos (cómo les afecta asumir el tratamiento). Desarrollamos un modelo dinámico de mujeres usando la tecnología de FIV, donde las mujeres tienen distintas productividades en FIV y distintos niveles de estrés psicológico asociado con el tratamiento. En el modelo, las mujeres equilibran la probabilidad positiva de obtener un hijo y el coste psicológico del tratamiento. El modelo estimado demuestra que el 95% del gradiente se puede explicar con las diferencias en la productividad en FIV.
In this dissertation, I analyze the determinants and consequences of a mismatch between the skills of workers and the skills required by the occupation they work in. I study how skills mismatch can be measured and how it is affected by unemployment insurance policy through occupational switching. I also investigate the determinants of in vitro fertilization success, which has important implications for women's career and fertility choices. In Chapter 1, I compute new measures of skills mismatch for literacy and numeracy based on how well workers sort to jobs. Existing measures of skills mismatch based on the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) use information only on the worker's side and ignore jobs that workers perform or the sorting between workers and jobs. For 13 OECD countries from the PIAAC, I measure workers' skills by their individual test scores and the skill requirements of their jobs by the occupational requirements from the Occupational Information Network. I then look at 1) the correlation between the skills and skill requirements in each country and 2) the percentage of workers for whom the absolute difference between the percentile rank of their skills and the skill requirements of their jobs is larger than 50. I show that across countries the new measures of mismatch correlate negatively with measures of aggregate labor productivity, and the correlation is stronger than the existing measures. In Chapter 2, joint with Andrii Parkhomenko, we study the relationship between unemployment benefits and occupational switching. Do unemployment benefits only provide income support for workers during their unemployment spells, or do they also affect post-unemployment outcomes? Using two US data sets, the SIPP and the NLSY79, we document three new facts on the relationship between unemployment benefits and occupational switching. First, unemployed individuals who are eligible for higher unemployment benefits are less likely to switch occupations. Second, conditional on switching, having higher unemployment benefits correlates positively with the cognitive skills requirements of the new occupation. Finally, while the first fact is stronger for workers with longer occupational tenure, the second fact is stronger for workers with shorter occupational tenure. We then build a search model with heterogeneous individuals and jobs to study how unemployment benefits affect skill requirements and wages for workers who experience employment-unemployment-employment transitions. Using the estimated model we find that providing larger benefits to workers with shorter labor market experience results in higher average wages. In Chapter 3, joint with Fane Groes, Daniela Iorio, Mallory Leung and Raul Santaeulalia-Llopis, we study the determinants of in vitro fertilization (IVF) success using administrative data from Denmark (1995-2009). We find that maternal education significantly determines IVF success (live birth). Compared with high school dropouts, patients with a college (high school) degree have a 21% (13%) higher chance of attaining a live birth through IVF. We argue that the education gradient in IVF reflects educational disparities in IVF productivity (how well women follow the IVF procedure) and the psychological factors (how they are affected by undertaking the treatments). We develop a dynamic model of women using IVF technology in which women differ in IVF productivity and the psychological stress associated with undergoing the treatment. In the model, women face a trade-off between a positive probability of succeeding in getting a child through IVF and the psychological cost associated to undergoing the treatment. The estimated model sheds light on the importance of each of the factors in explaining the IVF educational gradient. In particular, we find that differences in average IVF productivity across education groups account for more than 95% of the observed gradient.

This thesis examines two topics in labor economics and policy evaluation. Chapter 1 provides an introduction. Chapter 2 addresses the estimation of the effects of the minimum wage on labor market outcomes in developing countries. The main finding is that, even in the absence of policy variation, that is, when the same level of the minimum wage holds for all the workers in the data, it is still possible to recover the effects of this policy under particular assumptions of a dual economy model. Using this result, the effects of the minimum wage in Brazil from 2001 to 2009 are estimated. It is shown that the minimum wage has considerably increased average wages and reduced wage inequality. However, these effects are accompanied by higher unemployment and an increase in the size of the informal sector. Overall, the loss of tax revenues from the outflow of workers to the informal sector and unemployment more than offsets the increase in wages. Thus, this minimum wage policy contributes to a decrease in the labor tax revenues collected by the government. Chapter 3 also considers estimation of the effects of the minimum wage on labor market outcomes in developing countries. However, this chapter explores the use of less restrictive assumptions regarding the joint distribution of sectors and wages. To ease the estimation of the model parameters, a parametric approach (maximum likelihood) is used. The results validate the conclusions obtained in the previous chapter. Chapter 4 investigates the estimation of policy effects in partially randomized designs. It is shown that when randomization is implemented in a stratified way, the usual tests of balance of characteristics between treatment and control groups can suffer from size distortions, lack of power, or both. A solution to this problem is proposed, and its performance is compared with the baseline estimators in a simulation. It is shown that the proposed test possesses the desirable characteristics of correct nominal size and consistency. Finally, to illustrate the use of these techniques, a stratified, randomized job training program is analyzed.
Arts, Faculty of
Vancouver School of Economics
Graduate

I model a hiring process in which a candidate is evaluated sequentially by two agents of a firm. Each agent observes an independent signal of the candidate's productivity. I show that if the second agent values a non-productive attribute of a given candidate, that candidate may be less likely to be hired than a candidate lacking the preferred non-productive attribute due to the first agent adjusting their own quality threshold to compensate. I go on to empirically explore the behavior of prisoners in Oregon based on exogenous shocks to the status quo. These shocks include changes in the generosity of sentence reductions available to certain prisoners and the implementation of a variety of policies that have made it less costly for prisoners to communicate with the outside world. I find that prisoners respond to behavioral reviews with improved behavior on the days immediately before and after a review, but increasing available sentence reductions awarded for good behavior does not reduce misconduct rates among inmates. Furthermore, I find that increasing the ability of prisoners to communicate with friends and family using technology has not led to the decrease in in-person visitation that many have predicted. Instead, total communication seems to have increased in Oregon prisons. Given the extensive literature that suggests increased communication with the outside world reduces a prisoner's likelihood of recidivating, this result may indicate that introducing communication technology and making it more affordable may be a cost effective policy to prevent future crimes. This dissertation includes unpublished co-authored material.

In Chapter 1, we estimate the causal effect of homeownership on employment using a regression discontinuity design that exploits an arbitrary threshold arising from a homeownership program that assigns a house to low-income families in Chile. We establish that homeownership decreases employment by between 3.95 and 5.60 percentage points. These results contrast with previous non-experimental literature, which has often found positive effects. Our findings seem to be driven by children of the heads of households not entering the labor market, rather than workers being motivated to leave their job. We also find that residential stability and neighbourhood quality are unlikely to drive the effects, contrary to what has been proposed by previous theoretical papers. Chapter 2 studies the effect of homeownership on the academic achievements of children in the household, using a regression discontinuity design that exploits an arbitrary threshold arising from a voucher-based homeownership assistance program in Chile. Despite the fact that the homeownership program substantially increases the quality of the homes in which students live, I do not find that it affects their test scores. In a subgroup analysis, I find that homeownership decreases the test scores of elementary school students by 0.16 to 0.18 standard deviations. These effects may be due to the fact that, when receiving a voucher, many families cease to live with a hosting family, who are often close relatives (e.g. grandparents), and begin living in their own house. This seems to suggest that students experience a decrease in learning support that was previously provided to them by those close relatives. My results contrast with previous studies, which have often found positive effects of homeownership on students' academic achievements. In Chapter 3, I exploit a plausibly exogenous variation in the characteristics of principals to explore their effectiveness in improving school outcomes. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I find that principals appointed under the reform tend to be younger, less experienced, and more highly educated. Drawing from a panel dataset of teacher responses, I observe that the new principals improve the general climate in their schools by decreasing violence and expanding community engagement. On the other hand, they do not improve teacher-monitoring practices, teachers' pedagogical methods, or students' test results. A plausible explanation for these results is the lack of positive or negative incentives given to principals based on the performance of employees in their schools. Evidence in this paper suggests that, in certain institutional settings, school principals do not seem to be as relevant as is often assumed.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2011.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references.
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.
by Amanda Dawn Pallais.
Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2006.
Includes bibliographical references.
My dissertation is a collection of three essays that consider various aspects of income inequality and the demand for skill. The first chapter uses the advent of the US Interstate Highway System to examine the effect of reducing trade barriers on the relative demand for skilled labor. The Interstate Highway System was designed to connect major cities, to serve national defense, and to connect the US to Canada and Mexico. As an unintended consequence, many rural counties were connected to the highway system. I find that these counties experienced an increase in trade-related activities, such as trucking and retail sales. By increasing trade, the highways raised the relative demand for skilled manufacturing workers in skill-abundant counties and reduced it elsewhere, consistent with the predictions of the Heckscher-Ohlin model. The second chapter examines the effect of the division of labor on the demand for information processing. I find that manufacturing industries with a more complex division of labor employ relatively more clerks, who process information that is used to coordinate production. An early information technology (IT) revolution that took place around 1900 raised the relative demand for clerks in manufacturing, and significantly more so in industries with a complex division of labor.
(cont.) The increased demand for clerks likely contributed to the subsequent onset of the High School Movement. Interestingly, recent changes in IT have enabled firms to substitute computers for clerks, and I find evidence that this substitution occurred at a faster rate in more complex industries. The third chapter, coauthored with Liz Ananat, examines the effect of marital breakup on the economic outcomes of women with children. We find that having a female firstborn child increases the probability that a woman's first marriage ends in divorce. Using this exogenous variation we find that divorce has little effect on a woman's average household income, but it does increase the probability that her household ends up in the lowest income quartile. While women partially offset the loss of spousal earnings by receiving more child support and welfare, combining households, and increasing their labor supply, divorce still increases the odds of household poverty.
by Guy Michaels.
Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2013.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references.
I addressed three questions in Labor Economics, using experimental and quasi-experimental variation to determine causality. In the first chapter, I ask whether playing longer in the NFL increases mortality in retirement. I compared players with very short careers with those with long careers. I also examined mortality for replacement players used briefly during the 1987 players' strike. I find that mortality is 15 percent higher for players with longer careers. This difference is even larger for positions with a high risk of injury. In the second chapter, we use a randomized experiment to evaluate the effects of academic achievement awards for first- and second-year college students studying at a Canadian commuter college. The award scheme offered linear cash incentives for course grades above 70. Awards were paid every term. Program participants also had access to peer advising by upperclassmen. Program engagement appears to have been high but overall treatment effects were small. The intervention increased the number of courses graded above 70 and points earned above 70 for second-year students, but generated no significant effect on overall GPA. Results are somewhat stronger for a subsample that correctly reproduced the program rules. In the third chapter, we examine two questions: (1) What is the value of receiving the first draft pick in the National Basketball Association?, and (2) Do teams lose intentionally to secure higher draft positions? We answer the first question by adjusting for the probability of winning the lottery using a propensity score methodology. The estimates indicate that winning the draft lottery increases attendance by 6 percentage points during the five-year period following the draft. Receiving the first pick is also associated with a small increase in win percentage. To answer the second question, we use a fixed-effects methodology that compares games in which a team can potentially change its lottery odds to games at the end of the season in which these odds are fixed. Since 1968, playoff-eliminated teams have seen around a 5 percentage point increase in win percentage once their lottery odds are fixed. This difference has ballooned above 10 percentage points in more recent years.
by Tyler Williams.
Ph.D.

Thesis advisor: Shannon Seitz
Issues pertaining to low income workers are of the upmost interest to policy makers. In the mid 1990s, the issue of welfare recipients and work was at the forefront of public policy, as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was passed. One of the many goals of the policy was to "end the dependence of needy families on government benefits" by encouraging work and ultimately higher wages. The first paper of my dissertation explores the processes by which work leads to wage growth for welfare recipients. I find that welfare recipients have similar returns to tenure and experience as non-recipients and that tenure has higher returns than experience for these women. Because of this, policies that discourage leaving work, like a work requirement, are more effective encouraging wage growth than policies discouraging welfare use, like a time-limit. A decade later, the low savings rates of low income workers has led policy makers within the Obama administration to consider making Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) available to all workers. The second paper of this dissertation examines how likely low individual workers are to participate in these plans. We find that low-income workers not currently offered voluntary retirement savings plans are less likely to participate than those currently offered those plans. The paper indicates policy makers should be wary of basing estimates of participation in the offered IRAs on current participation, as this may overestimate the participation rate by up to 25 percent
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

The importance of risk-sharing in agricultural economies has been extensively analyzed through the principal-agent framework, which predicts that sharecropping should be observed more frequently than fixed rent contracts when output uncertainty is higher. Empirical studies, however, provide mixed support for this prediction, since often fixed rent contracts are found to be prevalent in more risky environments. The first chapter provides a model where the relative incidence of share tenancy over fixed rent contracts may be negative depending, among other things, on the relative average degree of risk aversion of tenants and landlords. The second chapter explores the empirical validity of the theoretical framework using Indian data. After paying special attention to the measure of uncertainty used to identify farming risk, a parameterized version of the theoretical model is structurally estimated. The econometric results support the proposed model. The third chapter studies the offset effect of pension wealth on private wealth when individuals are misinformed about their future retirement benefits. We show that if individuals have expectational errors correlated with their actual pension wealth, and update over time their expectations, then the canonical econometric specification used so far to estimate the offset effect gives biased estimates. An alternative econometric specification is proposed and used to estimate the offset effect on Italian data. The estimates obtained are higher than the ones previously found in the literature
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2003
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

Thesis advisor: Andrew Beauchamp
Thesis advisor: Arthur Lewbel
This thesis sheds light on two cutting-edge topics in Labor Economics, peer effects in the workplace and non-cognitive skills, and makes a methodological contribution to the related literature. The literature on peer effects in the workplace seeks to better understand co-workers' effect on an individual's productivity through the interactions among workers beyond the production technology. In the first essay, titled Learning When It Counts: Evidence from Professional Bowling Tournaments, I test the hypothesis that a worker can improve productivity by learning from peer co-workers in high-skill jobs. While demand for high-skill workers has been increasing, high-skill jobs often require workers to make a decision, facing uncertainty underlying their tasks. Highly skilled professionals have deep insights to pick up meaningful patterns of information. Therefore, if they are in an environment that allows them to learn additional information from co-workers, their productivity can improve. In this paper, I examine the productivity effects of learning among high-skill peers about uncertain conditions underlying their tasks with variations in the "space of ideas," exploiting a unique, novel dataset from professional bowling competitions. Specifically, a bowler learns about lane conditions in part by watching his competitor bowl on the same lane. A right-handed bowler learns more relevant (to his task) information from competing with another right-hander than with a left-hander, as the used part of the lanes (the proximate space of ideas) varies with handedness. I compare the probabilities of bowling a strike of bowlers matched with like-handed competitors versus opposite-handed competitors. I find a large impact of the same ideas space on learning, e.g, being paired with a like-handed bowler increases strike probability by 14 percentage points. This finding adds evidence for the existence of peer effects in high-skill jobs. I also show that learning curves exist only when bowlers are in same-handed match-ups, by examining how these differences change from one frame to the next over a game. Another calculation is determining how much total scores could be increased by pairing bowlers to raise the proximity in the space of ideas. These results are suggestive of how much workplaces might increase productivity by optimally pairing workers based on the proximity of the space of ideas. The second topic of this dissertation is non-cognitive skills such as conscientiousness, self-control and social skills. Conventionally, economists have assumed that measures of cognitive skills such as IQ were sufficient to represent the role of human capital in production. However, a growing body of research suggests that non-cognitive skills are important factors in educational attainment and labor outcomes. Recent research in psychology shows that bilingualism can help strengthen social skills and self-control. In the second essay, joint with Tracy Regan and titled Bilingual Advantage in Non-cognitive Skills, we examine the causal relationship between bilingualism and non-cognitive measures, exploiting a large dataset from Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002). To isolate the causality, we use an indicator for whether either parent was foreign-born as an instrumental variable for bilingualism. We find that raising the degree of speaking a language other than English to parents from none to all of the time can increase a student's percentile in the U.S. national distribution by 36 percentage points for conscientiousness (being well organized and working hard) and by 39 and 50 percentage points for instrumental motivation (academic motivation to achieve external goals such as better job opportunities) and persistence (keeping working even in difficulties). In particular, the bilingual advantage in persistence turns out to be significant only for disadvantaged children (the lowest socioeconomic status quartile) but insignificant for the others. These results suggest that bilingualism can be promoted as a policy tool to reduce inequality and call for further research on the relationship between bilingualism and non-cognitive skills. In the final essay, titled Simple Transformation for Finding a Maximum Weighted Matching in General Digraphs, I propose a novel, simple procedure using an existing efficient algorithm to find an optimal pairing that can produce the maximum output. As shown in the first essay, this algorithm can be useful for the optimal deployment of workforces with the consideration of peer effects. Particularly, the procedure is applicable to cases in which the order in a pair matters. The order can complicate the problem of finding optimal pairings, because a pair can have two orders. To address this ordered pairing problem, I devise a simple transformation of a general directed graph to a proper (undirected) graph. Using the transformed graph, a maximum weighted matching can be found, using any existing polynomial-time algorithm for undirected graphs. By recovering orientations in the found matching, a maximum weighted matching for the original directed graph can be found. I prove the matching from the suggested algorithm is always a maximum weighted matching in the directed graph. This thesis contributes to Labor Economics by adding evidence in newly-rising topics. The first chapter shows evidence of peer effect--learning from competitors--among high-skill workers. The second chapter suggests that bilinguals have an advantage in forming non-cognitive skills. The third chapter proposes an algorithm for finding an optimal pairing to maximize the aggregate productivity in the consideration of the learning effect found in the first chapter. I hope that the findings in the thesis will meaningfully contribute to the developing literature of Labor Economics
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

My thesis combines three distinct papers in labor economics. The first chapter is a collaborative work with Bernd Fitzenberger and Karsten Kohn. In this chapter we scrutinize the effects of union density and of collective bargaining coverage on the distribution of wages both in the covered and the uncovered sector. Collective bargaining in Germany takes place at either the industry or firm level. Collective bargaining coverage is much greater than union density. The share of employees covered by collective bargaining in a single firm can vary between 0% and 100%. This institutional setup suggests that researchers should explicitly distinguish union density, coverage rate at the firm level, and coverage at the individual level. Using linked employer-employee data, we estimate OLS and quantile regressions of wages on these dimensions of union influence. A higher share of employees in a firm covered by industry-wide or firm-specific contracts is associated with higher wages, but there is no clear-cut effect on wage dispersion. Yet, holding coverage at the firm level constant, individual bargaining coverage is associated with a lower wage level and less wage dispersion. A greater union density reinforces the effects of coverage, but the effect of union density is negative at all points of the wage distribution for employees who work in firms without collective bargaining coverage. Greater union density thus compresses the wage distribution while moving the distribution in firms without coverage uniformly. The second chapter evaluates the impact of the UK Working Time Regulations 1998, which introduced mandatory paid holiday entitlement. The regulation gave(nearly) all workers the right to a minimum of 4 weeks of paid holiday per a year. With constant weekly pay this change amounts effectively to an increase in the real hourly wage of about 8.5% for someone going from 0 to 4 weeks paid holiday per year, which should lead to adjustments in employment. For employees I use complementary log-log regression to account for right-censoring of employment spells. I find no increase in the hazard to exit employment within a year after treatment. Adjustments in wages cannot explain this result as they are increasing for the treated groups relative to the control. I also evaluate the long run trend in aggregate employment, using the predicted treatment probabilities in a difference-in-differences framework. Here I find a small and statistically significant decrease in employment. This effect is driven by a trend reversal in employment, coinciding with the treatment. The third chapter considers how the availability of a personal computer at home changed employment for married women. I develop a theoretical model that motivates the empirical specifications. Using data from the U.S. CPS from 1984 to 2003, I find that employment is 1.5 to 7 percentage points higher for women in households with a computer. The model predicts that the increase in employment is driven by higher wages. I find having a computer at home is associated with higher wages, and employment in more computer intensive occupations, which is consistent with the model. Decomposing the changes by educational attainment shows that both women with low levels of education (high school diploma or less) and women with the highest levels of education (Master's degree or more) have high returns from home computers.

This thesis titled “Essays in Labour Economics” is comprised of three essays investigating various determinants of earnings inequality. Chapter 1 provides a novel explanation for labor market polarization—the rise in employment shares of high and low skill jobs at the expense of middle skill jobs, and the fall in middle-skill wages. We argue that recent and historical episodes of polarization resulted from increased automation. In our theoretical model, firms deciding whether to employ machines or workers in a given task weigh the cost of using machines, which is increasing in the complexity (in an engineering sense) of the task, against the cost of employing workers, which is increasing in training time required by the task. Some tasks do not require training regardless of complexity, while in other tasks training is required and increases in complexity. In equilibrium, firms are more likely to automate a task that requires training, holding complexity constant. We assume that more-skilled workers learn faster, and thus it is middle skill workers who have a comparative advantage in tasks that are most likely to be automated when machine design costs fall. In addition to explaining job polarization, our model makes sense of observed patterns of automation and accounts for a set of novel stylized facts about occupational training requirements. Chapter 2 establishes a novel source of wage differences among observationally similar high skill workers. We show that degree class — a coarse measure of performance in university degrees — causally affects graduates’ earnings. We employ a regression discontinuity design comparing graduates who differ only by a few marks in an individual exam, and whose degree class is thus assigned randomly. A First Class is worth roughly three percent in starting wages which translates into £1,000 per annum. An Upper Second is worth more on the margin—seven percent in starting wages (£2,040). In addition to identifying a novel source of luck in the determination of earnings, our findings also show the importance of simple heuristics for hiring decisions. Chapter 3 asks whether public policy affects the degree of intergenerational transmission of education. The chapter investigates this question in the context of secondary school transitions in Germany. During the last three decades, several German states changed the rules for admission to secondary school tracks. Combining a new data set on transition rules with micro data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP), I find that allowing free track choice raises the probability of attending the most advanced track by five percentage points. However, the effect is twice as large for children of less educated parents. The results suggest that the correlation between parents’ and children’s educational attainment may be reduced by more than one third when no formal restrictions to choosing a secondary school track exist.

Economics
Ph.D.
This dissertation, in the standard three-essay format, studies three distinct but closely related aspects of the United States labor markets. Chapter 1 attempts to identify the main drivers of potential migration to the United States by using administrative data from the United States Diversity Visa Lottery. Estimating fixed effects panel data models that control for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity in source-country level determinants of potential migration, I find that income levels in source countries and educational attainment of the source-country population play important role in determining migration intentions. Specifically, a one percent increase in per capita Gross Domestic Product of a source country decreases the potential migration rate from that country to the US by 1.36%. Similarly, a one percent increase in the educational attainment of source population (measured as the percentage of population with at least secondary education) decreases potential migration rate by 1.16%. The results obtained in this chapter improve our understanding of the composition of US labor markets by identifying the most important socio-economic variables that drive migration to the US. Chapter 2 estimates the causal impact of a change in supply of immigrant entrepreneurs on entrepreneurial propensities of natives. I draw data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey and use withinstate variation in supply of immigrant entrepreneurs for identification. To address concerns of endogeneity in the supply of immigrant entrepreneurs, I take advantage of a quasi-experiment provided by the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. I find that, on average, immigrants self-employed in unincorporated businesses have no discernible impact on self-employment propensities of natives. However, immigrants self-employed in incorporated businesses crowd in natives into incorporated self-employment. Specifically, a 1% increase in incorporated immigrant entrepreneurs increases the supply of incorporated native entrepreneurs by 0.11%. Furthermore, various sub-sample analyses demonstrate substantial heterogeneity in the impact of immigrant entrepreneurs on entrepreneurial propensities of natives. The results obtained in this chapter have important implications for policies related to immigration and entrepreneurship development. Finally, Chapter 3 exploits the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to investigate the impact of publicly funded health insurance coverage for children on labor supply of adults. Using data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey and triple difference identification strategy, the analysis demonstrates that public health insurance for children decreases labor supply of women, both at the extensive and the intensive margin, but increases that of men at the extensive margin. The estimates obtained in this chapter highlight the labor supply distortions associated with welfare benefits.
Temple University--Theses

In my first chapter, I consider the long-term effects of World War II on women. WWII drew women into the workforce in unprecedented numbers and, often, into atypical occupations. After the war, they returned home where they became the mothers of the baby boom generation. Their daughters changed the female labor force by pursuing higher education and careers. My research analyzes whether cultural change during World War II helped to produce this break with the past. I use data on war manufacturing infrastructure and armed forces mobilization rates to predict whether the daughters were affected by the war's impact on their mothers. I also construct a measure of predicted war plants using pre-war infrastructure to remove the possibility of an endogenous decision to locate plants where women were particularly amenable to employment. My analysis shows that these war-related variables increased baby boomer women's education, although not their labor force participation. The primary impact was on their attainment of a college degree. The Quiet Revolution in women's employment, careers and education was therefore impacted greatly by their mothers' experiences before their daughters were born. My second chapter also considers intergenerational impacts on women's careers, though in a more contemporary context. This chapter considers the effect of a stay-at-home mother on her daughter's career choice, specifically her tendency to choose her father's career. I provide some descriptive statistics of women who choose to be homemakers and those who have chosen their parents' occupations. I hypothesize that a woman with a stay-at-home mom is more likely to choose her father's career, given that she lacks a female occupational role model in the home. I find no conclusive evidence of this, even when I only examine women in competitive careers. However, I do find statistically significant effects of the community in which she grows up. Women who grew up in communities where women were employed in competitive careers are less likely to choose their father's careers. Communities with men who are employed in competitive careers are more likely to produce women who inherit their father's occupation. Such a decision proves highly advantageous, since women in their father's careers earn more, while women in their mother's careers earn less. My final chapter focuses on the rural South and analyzes trends in segregation due to private schools. Though in less extreme conditions than during the 1960's, school children are still segregated by race. Throughout the United States, this primarily occurs because of residential segregation. But there exists a unique pattern and opportunity in the heart of the South, its rural communities. Segregation in the rural South occurs largely through the presence of private schools. This is fascinating in that different races can live relatively near each other but never go to school together. White students' enrollment in private schools is highly dependent on the black proportion of the student population. Thus, black students in public schools in largely black areas have even fewer white peers. Segregation due to private schools is highest within the Cotton Belt, a region historically known for racism. The evidence is also consistent with a detrimental effect of private schools on public school funding. I find that rural Southern school districts with high levels of private school segregation also have low levels of school resources per student, even after controlling for what the median voter could afford. Using votes for segregationist presidential candidate Strom Thurmond as an instrument for segregation due to private schools only strengthens the results. Moreover, the recent increases in white enrollment at private schools may be slowly increasing racial separation due to private schools.
Business Economics

This thesis considers how potentially vulnerable populations are affected by various economic and policy shocks. In the first chapter, I investigate the impact of natural resource booms on crime by estimating the effect of the coal boom and bust of the 1970s and 1970s on reported crime rates. I begin by demonstrating that changes in the value of coal reserves affected local economic conditions and population composition, both of which have theoretical and empirical links to crime. The net effect is theoretically ambiguous. The estimates suggest that the immediate impact of increasing the value of natural resources is to depress crime rates, primarily through changes in property crime, but these changes erode over time. My findings are consistent with an initial change in criminal activity in response to local labor market conditions that is subsequently offset by selective migration. Individuals who are charged with committing a crime often find themselves behind bars while their case is adjudicated. In the United States, over 400,000 individuals are in jail each day waiting for their criminal cases to be resolved. The majority of these individuals are detained pretrial due to the inability to post low levels of bail (less than $3,000). In chapter 2, my coauthor and I estimate the impact of being detained pretrial on the likelihood of an individual being convicted or pleading guilty, and their sentence length, using data on nearly a million misdemeanor and felony cases in New York City from 2009 to 2013. Causal effects are identified using variation across arraignment judges in their propensities to detain defendants. We find that being detained increases the probability of conviction by over seven percentage points by causing individuals to plead guilty more often. Because pretrial detention is driven by failure to post bail, these adverse effects disproportionately hurt low-income individuals. While some public policies create burdens that fall most heavily on low-income people and households, the public safety net is comprised of programs intended to protect and support this vulnerable population. In chapter three, my coauthors and I examine whether programs that provide vouchers to households can continue to influence behavior even after the household leaves the program. Using detailed scanner data, we test whether benefit vouchers received through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) change household purchasing decisions and whether these changes continue to persist even after households are no longer eligible to participate in the program. In 2009, the package of goods available through WIC vouchers changed to include additional items and place nutritional restrictions on other items. Examining variation due to this package change, we show that the WIC vouchers change purchasing decisions consistent with the nutritional guidelines of the program. However, we find evidence of limited persistence post-eligibility, and that households exposed longer to the revised package are generally not more likely to continue to purchase these items after eligibility ends.

The first chapter in this dissertation discusses the results of a field experiment that lasted three weeks at a firm in Saudi Arabia where we randomized an attention to variability or mindfulness training program. We conducted a baseline and end-line survey 3 months post training, collecting measures on non-cognitive skills, beliefs, affect, and employee performance and productivity. The training program was incentivized as managers’ reports on employees’ performance get reflected in future raises and bonus pay. We converted the measures to z-scores (unit standard deviation, mean zero) to standardize the scaling across measures. We found that mindfulness improved by 0.485 standard deviations in the treatment group. This effect is mediated by an increase in employees’ engagement. The extent to which locus of control is internal improved by 0.344 standard deviations, meaning that employees who took the training gave a greater weight to effort verses luck in determining their life outcomes. On the other hand, we found that work locus of control became more external by 0.646 standard deviations, and that employees perceived a greater degree of ethnic discrimination. On average, employees’ performance improved by about 0.5 standard deviations as measured by managers’ direct reports and punctuality. We explain the improvement in general locus of control but decrease in work locus of control with the gains in productivity and performance through a compensating story. Being more aware of variability has arguably led employees to perceive more discrimination in the environment, resulting in employees perceiving their work locus of control as more external. But employees improved their performance as a compensatory measure for perceived discrimination. The second chapter discusses the results of two lab experiments where we measure the effects of a negative shock on wage under uncertainty on subsequent efforts decisions under certainty. We found that students in the negative shock treatment do not optimize their effort, decreasing their total payout. This is explained through a tax in beliefs on the relationship between effort and reward in life, and trust in life. Even though the lab experiment was local, the students generalize what they learnt to their life beliefs. Furthermore, we conduct a second experiment to test that it is the uncontrollability of the negative shock rather than the negative shock per se that caused this. While this is a lab experiment and it is likely that these effects do not last in the long term, these results can be put in perspective when one thinks about the uncontrollability of the shocks that the poor are exposed to in the long-term, and their effect on life beliefs and effort decisions. The final chapter provides support to how the poor are more likely to experience learned helplessness and larger magnitude of learned helplessness. The effects of initial levels of capital, institutions, and differences in expected utility on learned helplessness is explored. We also provide evidence that once learned helplessness occurs, it is more likely that it will occur in the future providing evidence for poverty traps. We discuss the effects of noncognitive skills in decreasing the probability that learned helplessness will materialize, and in breaking the cycle.
Public Policy

This dissertation consists of three independent chapters. Chapter 1 examines the determinants and welfare implications of the increased geographic of workers by skill from 1980 to 2000. I estimate a structural spatial equilibrium model of local labor demand, housing supply, labor supply, and amenity levels. The estimates indicate that cross-city changes in firms' demands for high and low skill labor were the underlying forces driving the increase in geographic skill sorting. I find that the combined effects of changes in cities' wages, rents, and endogenous amenities increased well-being inequality between high school and college graduates by a significantly larger amount than would be suggested by the increase in the college wage gap alone.
Economics

This thesis consists of three essays. In the first essay, I empirically evaluate the importance of wait unemployment. Instead of taking the next best job, a displaced worker has an incentive to stay unemployed and wait for a vacancy that matches his skills. Using a difference-in-difference approach for identification, I find that this mechanism is an important component of aggregate unemployment in the U.S. labor market. In the second essay (co-authored with Thijs van Rens), we propose an accounting framework to decompose mismatch unemployment into different components and analyze its behavior over the business cycle. In the third essay, I reevaluate the evidence for job polarization in the U.S. labor market. I find that existing evidence is biased. What really mattered for changes in the occupation structure since the 1990s was the education-premium.
Esta tesis consta de tres ensayos. En el primer ensayo, se evalúa la importancia del desempleo de espera, en el cual se asume que una persona que ha perdido su empleo, preferirá esperar una vacante que cumpla con sus habilidades, en lugar de tomar el primer empleo disponible. Usando un enfoque de “diferencias en diferencias” por identificación, se encuentra que el desempleo de espera es un componente significativo del desempleo en E.U. En el segundo ensayo (escrito en colaboración con Thijs van Rens), se propone un marco conceptual para descomponer el desempleo estructural y se analiza el comportamiento de cada uno de sus componentes en el ciclo de negocio. En el tercer ensayo, se reevalúa la evidencia empírica existente de la polarización del mercado en el mercado de trabajo de E.U. y se encuentra que la evidencia empírica existente esta sesgada. El principal factor que ha influido en los cambios en la estructura de ocupación desde los 90s ha sido la prima educativa.

In this dissertation, we first develop a simple two-period model to examine the parent's optimal choice of children's time. We identify factors such as wage rate, school fees, education returns, degree of children's altruism toward their parents and the parents' discounting rate that influence the parents' optimal choice, and discuss their impacts on the optimal choice. Children's time is an important resource for rural households in developing economies, and it is typically allocated by the parents. Two basic uses for this resource are: working in the labor market and attending schools. Schooling today may make children more productive in the future. The opportunity cost of schooling is the forgone wage rate in the labor market. Allocation of children's time is therefore mainly determined by education return, wage rate in labor market and school fees. Many existing models in the literature cannot explain the coexistence of schooling, poverty and the coexistence of child labor and affluence. We extend our basic model to explain the above two paradoxes. We show that, when education return is high and the household is willing to endure extra hardship caused by the child attending school, the coexistence of schooling and poverty can emerge. On the other hand, when the wage rate for child labor and schooling fees are higher than education return, affluence and child labor can co-exist. Governments have adopted various policy tools to fight against child labor, among which the compulsory education law and free education programs stand out. Our basic model is then extended to examine how these two types of government policies may impact child labor. We show the relative performance of the two policies depend crucially on several factors, including the enforcement and the costs to the household of the compulsory education law. We use the recent Chinese experience in changing the compulsory education law to free education plan to illustrate and verify our theoretical prediction.

This dissertation includes three essays investigating the effects of such diverse factors as government regulations, expansion of government spending, and physical appearances on (individual) labor market outcomes. The first essay, entitled "Physical Attractiveness and Earnings: Evidence from a Longitudinal Survey", examines how individual earnings in the long-run can be affected by adolescent physical attractiveness endowment across genders. In recent years, labor market discrimination against the physical attractive/unattractive has brought increasing attention primarily because the number of employment-related discrimination claims based on employees' appearance has continued to increase. Therefore, the evaluation of the beauty premium/plainness penalty in the labor market sheds light on explaining existing wage discrimination, gender wage gaps, and inform policy makers with respect to anti-discrimination legislation. Using a unique Wisconsin dataset, I specifically examine occupational sorting through which physical attractiveness may affect long-run individual earnings. Consistent with previous studies, I find that physical attractiveness is positively associated with individual earnings for both men and women. In the long-run, the results suggest that the beauty premium for men develops during their career but that for women fades over time. Although attractive women prefer certain occupations, sorting does not explain the women's beauty premium. The second essay, entitled "Environmental Regulation and Coal Mining Industry Labor Demand", examines how the behavior of coal mines that supply raw material for power plants changes in response to the Acid Rain Program (thereafter, ARP) that was intended to shape the behavior of U.S. coal-fired power plants. Although the ARP's objective was to reduce power plants' annual SO₂ emissions it might also curb labor market activities and cause job losses. Therefore, quantifying the cost of unintended labor market consequences helps accurately estimate the full effects of environmental regulations and informs policy makers about how to design employment transition assistance programs that provide job training and temporary compensation for job losses arising from unintended adverse effects of the regulations. Utilizing variation across coal mines' regulatory status and time, I obtain the main employment effect estimates using a difference-in-difference model controlling for annual or quarterly nation-wide shocks, time-invariant mine attributes, and regional trends. This study expands the small amount of existing literature that examines the unintended labor market effects of non-targeted industries resulted from the environmental regulation. Additionally, it expands the perspective from solely investigating the effect of the ARP to a more comprehensive analysis. Specifically, I have examined the role of state Public Utility Commission cost recovery rules, state incentives that promote local high-sulfur coal, and of coal mine labor unions in addition to the ARP. The results suggest that the ARP Phase I, from 1995 to 1999, increases low-sulfur coal mine employment but decreases high-sulfur coal mine employment. The third essay, entitled "Effects of New Deal Spending on Labor Market Outcomes", explores a unique episode in American history, the Great Depression, and investigates the medium-term effects of various New Deal programs that aimed to promote the recovery of the economy, on the U.S. labor markets. We use county level data on New Deal spending on the relief, public works, and Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) farm programs from 1933 to 1939 and individual characteristics and earnings in 1939 and 1940. We find that relief and AAA spending were associated with negative effects on individual earnings while public works spending was associated with positive effects on earnings. Although most of our estimated coefficients on New Deal expenditures are statistically significant, their corresponding magnitude are fairly close to zero indicating these New Deal effects are negligible. It appears that possible positive labor market effects that were induced by demand stimulus, labor supply crowding-out, and labor productivity increase are offset by negative labor market effects were generated by workers' skill degradation, labor demand crowding-out, and dismissal of relief workers in 1939.

This dissertation is composed of three self-contained papers addressing specific research quest ions in distinct topics in applied labor economics. The first paper is joint work with my advisors. It makes a methodological point on the estimation of matching functions and shows its quantitative importance with an application to the United States (US) labor market. The second paper is joint work with two fellow doctoral students at the University of Bristol. It develops and estimates a search and matching model of the labor market to replicate stylized facts pertaining to racial discrimination in the US labor market. The third paper is sole-authored. It documents new facts concerning the role of part-time jobs in the macroeconomic employment adjustment in the United Kindgom's labor market during the Great Recession.

Cette thèse se compose de trois chapitres en économie du travail en mettant l'accent sur l'éducation et les migrations. Le premier chapitre concerne la relation entre les différents niveaux d'éducation et le revenu global pour plusieurs pays. Les deux derniers chapitres concernent le niveau de scolarité et les performances sur le marché du travail des immigrés en France en utilisant des données provenant d'une enquête récente. Le premier chapitre étudie d’une manière empirique l'impact de l'éducation sur la croissance et la productivité des pays, en fonction du niveau de développement et de la qualité de l'enseignement. Plus précisément, ce premier chapitre estime les gains des différents niveaux d’éducation (primaire, secondaire, et tertiaire) en utilisant le concept de fonction de production. Les estimations, qui utilisent diverses méthodes en données de panel, indiquent des impacts hétérogènes des niveaux de scolarisation entre les pays. En particulier, l'enseignement supérieur semble avoir un effet plus important dans les pays développés avec une qualité d'enseignement élevée, tandis que l'enseignement primaire et/ou secondaire semble jouer un rôle plus important dans les pays en développement avec une plus faible qualité de l'enseignement. Ces résultats présentent aussi des implications pour les politiques de développement en termes d’éducation et d’investissement dans le capital humain, afin de stimuler la productivité et la croissance. Dans le deuxième chapitre, un travail en collaboration avec Ana Ferrer (Université de Waterloo), nous étudions d’une manière empirique les performances en termes d’éducation et sur le marché du travail de diverses populations en France, en utilisant des données provenant d’une enquête récente. Nos résultats indiquent que les immigrés ont en général un niveau d’éducation moins élevé que les natifs, et que ces différences peuvent être la conséquence de caractéristiques socio-économiques. De plus, il existe un écart salarial important entre les immigrés et les natifs, mais cette différence est réduite et disparaît après avoir corrigé le biais de sélection. En général, les différences qui subsistent en matière d'éducation et de performance sur le marché du travail semblent liées à la région d'origine et à l'éducation achevée en France. Le troisième chapitre, en utilisant des données identiques, se concentre sur la relation entre les résultats sur le marché du travail et les types de visa d'entrée des immigrés. Ainsi, ce chapitre analyse les caractéristiques socio-économiques de plusieurs groupes d'immigrés en fonction de leurs catégories de visa à l'entrée: visa de regroupement familial, visa de travail, visa de réfugiés, et visa d’étudiants. En particulier, cette étude met en évidence de nouveaux phénomènes à partir des informations sur les catégories de visas, afin de mieux comprendre les performances sur le marché du travail. Les résultats suggèrent que les immigrés avec un visa de travail sont plus susceptibles de participer à la force de travail que les immigrés avec un visa de regroupement familial. Cependant, ces différences disparaissent après avoir corrigé certaines caractéristiques (sauf pour les femmes). En termes de salaires, les immigrés venus en France en tant que travailleurs ou étudiants bénéficient d’une rémunération plus élevée que les immigrés avec un visa de regroupement familial. Enfin, cette étude montre que les immigrés avec un statut de réfugiés ont un succès équivalent aux immigrés avec un visa de regroupement familial sur le marché du travail
This thesis is composed of three chapters in empirical labor economics with emphasis on education and migration. The first chapter is on the link between various levels of education and aggregate income across countries. The two remaining chapters focus on the educational attainment and labor market outcomes of immigrants in France based on a recent survey. In Chapter 1, I conduct an empirical study of the impact of education on the growth and productivity of countries depending on their level of development and the quality of schooling. Specifically, my paper provides cross-country panel estimations of the returns to the stages (primary, secondary, and tertiary) of education using an aggregate production function approach. My estimates from various panel data methods point to heterogeneous impacts of schooling by levels across countries. In particular, tertiary schooling seems to have a more important effect in countries with a higher level of development and schooling quality, while primary and/or secondary schooling seems to play a more important role in relatively less developed countries with lower schooling quality. My results are ultimately related to development policies in education and human capital investment to boost productivity and growth. In Chapter 2, which is a joint work with Ana Ferrer (University of Waterloo), we provide a detailed analysis of the educational attainment and labor market performance of various sub-populations in France using a recent survey. Our results indicate that immigrants in France are less educated than the native-born population and that these differences can be tracked down to differences in socioeconomic backgrounds for most groups of immigrants. Similarly, there is a significant wage gap between immigrant and native-born workers, but this is reduced and sometimes disappears after correcting for selection into employment. In most cases the remaining differences in education and labor market outcomes seem related to the area of origin of the immigrant as well as where the education of the immigrant is obtained. In Chapter 3, using the same data, I look at the relationship between the labor market outcomes and the entry visa types of immigrants. To this end, I analyze the socioeconomic characteristics of four groups of immigrants based on their visa categories at entry: family migrants, work migrants, refugees, and students. In particular, my paper provides evidence from information on visa categories to gain further insights into the labor market analysis of immigrants. The estimation results suggest that work migrants are more likely to participate in the labor force and be employed than family migrants. However, these gaps disappear after netting out the differences in observable characteristics (except for women). In terms of wages, migrants who came to France as workers or as students earn significantly more than the family migrants. Finally, the paper finds that refugee migrants are not less successful than the family migrants in the labor markets

This dissertation consists of three essays in labor economics. The first essay models how migrants crossing the border between the United States and Mexico respond to increases in border enforcement. We model a potential migrants' joint decision of whether to cross the border and, if so, where to cross the border using a random utility function. Our model allows us to calculate the migrants' substitution patterns: does more enforcement primarily on one part of the border primarily deter migrants from crossing the border altogether, or simply divert them to other parts of the border? We find that a substantial proportion of migrants are indeed diverted. These findings should serve as a caveat to policy makers who seek to address immigration reform issues primarily through tightening the border.The second chapter models the internal migration decisions of U.S. households during the period 935 to 1940. We measure the impact of spending on New Deal programs on migration patterns. Using a model of random utility similar to that in prior chapter, we find that more public works and relief spending in a region made it more attractive to potential migrants, while additional spending on the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) made the locale less attractive. The structural nature of our model allows us to compute counterfactual estimates to assess the overall impact of these programs. We find that regional disparities in spending on public works and relief programs we responsible for nearly 20% of long distance moves made between regions during this period.In the third chapter, we decompose the gap between mean sentences for males and females in the U.S. criminal justice system into the portion that can be explained by differences in the average severity of the crime committed by males and females and the portion explained by differences in how males and females who commit the same crime are treated. We find that differences in characteristics of the defendant can explain only half of the gap between mean male and females sentences, suggesting that women receive more lenient treatment in the U.S. criminal justice system.

This dissertation contains three essays on topics including crime, credit constraints, education, athletics and health. Tying the works together is a set of empirical tools that have come to define the field of labor economics and the pursuit of causal inference. Chapter II contains an analysis of the effects of a school-based incentive program on children's exercise habits. The program offers children an opportunity to win prizes if they walk or bike to school during prize periods. I use daily child-level data and individual fixed effects models to measure the impact of the prizes by comparing behavior during prize periods with behavior during non-prize periods. Variation in the timing of prize periods across different schools allows me to estimate models with calendar-date fixed effects to control for day-specific attributes, such as weather and proximity to holidays. In Chapter III, I present evidence of the causal effects on crime of access to small, high cost, short term consumer credit, known as payday lending. Using within-state geographic as well as inter-temporal variation in access to payday loans, I estimate the effect of access to payday lending on all types of crime. I find a substantial effect only for financially motivated offenses, with access to payday lending leading to approximately five additional arrests per 100,000 residents monthly. The estimated effects are concentrated in larceny, fraud, and forgery. The final chapter turns back to education to assess high school athletics' role in affecting athletes' attendance patterns. The key result that emerges from the analysis is that in-season athletes miss significantly less school relative to athletes out-of-season. School absences in boys decline by nearly 8% as a result of being in-season, though the effects are much larger for black boys, particularly with respect to unexcused absences. Paying careful attention to issues of identification, this dissertation presents three essays contributing to the literature broadly categorized as labor economics. Each seeks to understand the role of changing incentives and opportunities on individuals' decision making processes, in order to inform policy makers wishing to craft effective public policies. This dissertation includes previously published co-authored material.
10000-01-01

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2015.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (page 16).
In this paper we aim to test the extent of labor risk sharing exists in thai village economies. Specifically we test the null hypothesis of full risk sharing at the village level. We outline a simple planner's problem that motivates our empirical specification. Our empirical specification consists of two equations, a labor supply equation that determines how many hours you work conditional on participating in the labor market, and a selection equation which determines the probability of working positive hours. Our empirical specification allows for fixed effects that correspond to different Pareto weights for the agents. Our dataset, an unusually long panel survey spanning over 160 months conducted in 16 villages in Thailand, allows us to deal with these fixed effects. Our results lead us to reject the null of full risk sharing since non-labor income has a significant negative effect on participation. In most specifications it also has a significant but small negative effect on hours worked conditional on participation. In light of these results we reject the null of full risk sharing.
by Lucas Manuelli.
S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008.
Title from electronic title page (viewed Feb. 17, 2009). "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Economics." Discipline: Economics; Department/School: Economics.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2010.
Title from first page of PDF file (viewed June 10, 2010). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis is composed of three distinct chapters. The first two contribute to the economics of higher education literature, while the third estimates a structural model of household behavior. Chapter 1 presents a study assessing the impact of grading standards (GS) in Italian departments on the labor market outcomes of university graduates. The influence of heterogeneous GS on labor market performance can occur through two different channels: a productivity and a signaling effect. The empirical papers trying to answer the same research question are quite rare due to limitations in data availability. This study provides first evidence on the dynamic effects of GS on university graduates in Italy, evaluating the impact on wages, employment and overeducation. The analysis is performed using unique data provided by Almalaurea on graduates in years 2008 and 2009 matched with department-level information on research quality and resources. Italy is an interesting case study since university graduation rates are low but, at the same time, returns to higher education are below the average of other developed countries. The human capital accumulated is also quite low. The PIAAC data, measuring the level of skills in OECD countries by level of education, place Italian university graduates at the bottom of the ranking. For these reasons it is important to find policies that can increase the average productivity of highly educated workers. Furthermore, in the last decades the increased supply in the market for higher education and the 3+2 reform lead to a larger heterogeneity in quality and in GS between institutions. The estimation strategy is divided in two steps. Firstly, we estimate a proxy for GS as the part of final grades which cannot be explained by differences in individual characteristics (student's quality) and other relevant inputs (quality of the institution attended). Then, the effect of GS on wage and other labor market outcomes is estimated. We show that differences in GS are large across departments. More generous grades are associated to a wage penalty on the labor market 5 years after graduation. In particular, graduates from 'generous' departments earn 3.4% less than people who studied in the 'strict' departments, they have a lower employment rate and a higher probability of being too educated for their jobs. The effects on wages are stronger for high ability workers while employment is more affected for low ability and female graduates. Chapter 2 assesses the impact of the first Italian Research Evaluation Exercise (REE) on students' enrollment choices. All Italian REEs have been followed by lively debates. Critics of REE maintain that they are very expensive and excessively based on quantitative (e.g., bibliometric) indicators. Advocates of REEs rebut that in a period of shrinking public funding of Higher Education it is more important than ever to allocate resources in an effective and efficient way. However, there is no evidence on the effect of the REE on students' choices. Our paper is related to the literature which, especially in the US, has investigated the effects on student application and matriculation decisions of ratings and rankings of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) produced by private `intermediaries'. We provide a first assessment of the impact of the 'Valutazione Triennale della Ricerca' (VTR) on student choices using a before-after estimator which exploits differential treatment intensities across HEIs. In particular, we investigate whether departments that received a better score also beneted of more student enrolments and enrolments of students with better entry qualications after the VTR. This identication strategy enables us to control for both department-specific time invariant unobservable heterogeneity and pre-existing department trends. The analysis is performed using data on enrollment at the department level between 2002 and 2011 merged with data on research quality of departments from the first REE accomplished in Italy (the VTR). Italy is an interesting case study since enrollment has been decreasing in Italy in the last decade, especially in the South, so assessing the effect of research quality on the quantity and quality of enrolled students is important. Our analysis demonstrates that increasing the percentage of excellent products by one standard deviation at the department level increases student enrollments by 6.5 percent. Effects are larger for high quality students, namely those with better high school final marks (10 percent) or coming from the academic track (11.8 percent). Departments in the top quartile of the quality distribution gained more from a good performance in the evaluation exercise. Effect magnitudes appear to be similar across all macro-regions (North, Centre and South and Islands), but are precisely estimated only for universities in Northern Italy. Finally, Chapter 3 presents and estimates a model of household behavior with endogenous labor supply and fertility choices. The estimated model is then used to assess the effect of a childbirth transfer on household decisions. We contribute to the recent literature (Adda et al., 2015) performing ex-ante structural evaluations of policies having the objective to modify the fertility and labor supply behavior of households. The model is estimated using the Italian Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) for the period 1984-2014, a dataset collected by the Bank of Italy every two years. The model parameters are estimated through the Method of Simulated Moments. We obtain moments from households in the 1960 cohort, i.e. people born in years 1957-1963. Structural estimation offer some important advantages with respect to reduced form approaches. First, it allows to model different sources of endogeneity (ex. self-selection into labor market participation). Second, it provides parameters from a theoretical model that can be used to simulate the effects of policy experiments. The model is able to explain quite well the behavior of men and women in the cohort. Preliminary results show that the permanent childbirth transfer is successful in increasing the total fertility rate of married women, even if it has a negative effect on employment.

En esta tesis doctoral, he explorado el rol de las características no observados de los recursos humanos en la definición de la productividad organizacional. La literatura económica ha establecido que existen diferenciales de productividad significativos que no son atribuibles a factores de producción tradicionales como son el capital y la mano de obra. Así, yo estudio la conexión entre productividad organizacional y capacidad gerencial u otros elementos intangibles en el ámbito laboral, tales como la motivación, en los sectores privado y sin fines de lucro. Utilizo una combinación de análisis de datos longitudinales y metodologías experimentales. En el Capítulo 1 utilizo un panel de datos empresa-empleado que permiten analizar la relación entre la calidad del director (CEO) y la productividad de la empresa en el sector privado. En este capítulo tomo como referencia la literatura que utiliza los cambios de empresa de los CEOs para medir su calidad. Esta metodología excluye la posibilidad de que haya complementariedades entre CEO y empresa que afectan la productividad. El aspecto novedoso es que tomo en cuenta el tiempo previo a que el CEO asuma el rol de liderazgo gerencial, a fin de poder evitar errores de medida que podrían surgir de la selección inherente en la movilidad de los CEOs. Encuentro que una desviación estándar en el incremento de la calidad del CEO se traduce en un incremento del 5% en la productividad de la empresa. Cabe mencionar que los resultados econométricos alcanzados resaltan la importancia de estudiar en mayor profundidad el proceso de compatibilidad entre CEO y empresa, así como su impacto en la productividad. En el Capítulo 2, uso las conclusiones alcanzadas en el capítulo anterior como motivación para un modelo de asignación entre el CEO y la empresa, en el cual éstos son parte de una función productiva indivisible. Este modelo permite la existencia de (i) movilidad endógena de CEOs basada en la realización de compatibilidad de ingresos realizados y (ii) complementariedades irrestrictas entre CEOs y empresas que impactan en los resultados de la empresa. Utilizo un modelo mixto finito con clases discretas de empresas y CEOS de tipo latente. La compatibilidad entre el tipo de CEO y el tipo de empresa produce una distribución diferente de realizaciones de ingresos que incluyen las complementariedades CEO-empresa. Encuentro que existe un significativo impacto de complementariedades CEO- empresa en la producción. A través de un ejercicio contra-factual, en el cual aleatoriamente re-asigno CEOs a empresas, encuentro que existen complementariedades entre el CEO y la empresa, y que éstas juegan un rol determinante en la productividad (2/3% de diferencia respecto al promedio) de la misma. En el Capítulo 3, estudio el impacto que genera la introducción de incentivos no financieros en el comportamiento prosocial de los trabajadores en el sector sin fines de lucro. Este proyecto incluye un experimento de laboratorio finalizado y un experimento de campo proyectado con una ONG internacional de envergadura. En el experimento de laboratorio, que describo en detalle en esta disertación, introduzco en forma aleatoria seis diferentes incentivos no financieros, en una tarea de trabajo real. Los voluntarios son conscientes de que el beneficio de esta tarea se destina a una ONG de renombre. Cada incentivo no financiero busca complementar un tipo específico de motivación intrínseca. Tras identificar cual incentivo no financiero le fue asignado, cada persona decide (i) participar o no como voluntario y (ii) cuanto tiempo donar a la ONG. Encuentro que la probabilidad de contribuir como voluntario es mayor cuando a la persona le es asignado el incentivo de su preferencia mayor (compatibilidad exacta). Asimismo, el tiempo donado es mayor cuando existe una compatibilidad exacta entre incentivos y motivaciones. Los resultados sugieren que los incentivos que apuntan a la motivación relacionada con la identificación con la causa son los más efectivos para aumentar la productividad., mientras que aquellos relacionados con la percepción tangible (monetaria) de una recompensa son menos efectivos.
In this dissertation, I explore the role of unobserved labor-related inputs in determining organizational productivity. It is well-established in the economics literature that there are significant productivity differentials across organizations which are not attributable to traditional production factors such as capital or labor force. I study the connection between organizational productivity and management quality and intangible labor inputs, such as motivation and information, in private and nonprofit sectors. I use a combination of panel data analysis and experimental methodologies. In Chapter 1, I use a matched employer-employee longitudinal data set to analyze the relationship between CEO quality and firm productivity in the private sector. In this chapter, I build on existing literature which uses CEO job switches across different firms to measure their quality. This implies the assumption that CEO and firm productivity contributions are perfectly separable, and that there is a universal ranking of CEOs. In other words, this approach precludes systematic CEO-firm match complementarities in revenue productivity. The novelty of my approach is that I use the time period before the CEO has assumed the lead managerial role so as to avoid the potentially confounding effects arising from selection in CEOs mobility. I find that a one standard deviation increase in CEO quality translates into a 5% increase in firm productivity. Importantly, the econometric findings point to the importance of further studying the CEO-firm match process and its productivity impact. In Chapter 2, I take the findings in the previous chapter to motivate a matching model in which CEO and firm are part of a non-separable joint production function. This model allows for (i) endogenous CEO mobility based on match revenue realizations and (ii) unrestricted CEO-firm match complementarities to impact firm’s outcomes. I use a finite mixture model with discrete firm classes and latent CEO types. The match between a CEO type and firm class produces a different set of revenue realizations, which embed the match complementarities. I find there is a significant impact of CEO-firm complementarities in production. In a counterfactual exercise, in which I randomly assign CEOs to firms, I find that complementarities between CEO and firm play an important role in determining firm productivity. On average, 2-3% of the firm productivity is accounted by those complementarities. In Chapter 3, I study the impact of introducing non-financial incentives on prosocial behavior in the nonprofit sector. This project includes a finished lab experiment and a projected field experiment with a large international NGO. In the lab experiment, which I describe in detail in this dissertation, I randomize the introduction of six non-financial incentives in a real effort task. Volunteers know that the proceeds of this task revert to a well-known nonprofit. Each non-financial incentive intends to match a specific type of intrinsic motivation. After knowing which non-financial incentive was assigned to them, subjects decide (i) whether to participate as a volunteer and (ii) how much time to donate. I find that the likelihood to contribute as a volunteer is greater when the subject is assigned to the incentive she most prefers (exact matching). Moreover, time donated is also greater under exact matching between incentives and motivations. Results suggest that incentives targeting motivation related to identification with the cause are the most effective in increasing productivity, whereas those concerning perceived tangible (monetary) rewards are less effective.

Essay 1: (co-written with Olof Åslund) We study the impact of family size on intermediate and long-term outcomes using twin births as an exogenous source of varia¬tion in family size in an unusually rich dataset. Similar to recent studies, we find no evidence of a causal effect on long-term outcomes and show that not taking selection effects into account will likely overstate the effects. We do, however, find a small but significant negative impact of family size on grades in compulsory and secondary school among children who are likely to be vulnerable to further restrictions on parental investments. Essay 2: This paper investigates the consequences of a series of Swedish policy changes beginning in 1989 where different regions started subsidizing the birth control pill. The reforms were significant and applied to all types of oral contraceptives. My identification strategy takes advantage of the fact that the reforms were implemented successively over time and targeted specific cohorts of young women, in particular teenagers. This generates plausibly exogenous variation in access to the subsidy. I first demonstrate that access significantly increased pill use. Using regional, temporal, and cohort variation in access, I then go on to examine the impact on abortions. The estimates show that the subsidy significantly decreased the abortion rate by about 8 percent. Furthermore, the results indicate that long-term access decreases the likelihood of teenage childbearing by about 20 percent. However, there is no significant effect on labor supply, marriage, educational attainment or welfare take-up. Essay 3: (co-written with Olof Åslund, Per-Anders Edin and Peter Fredriksson) We study peer effects in compulsory school performance among immigrant youth in Sweden. The empirical analysis exploits a governmental refugee placement policy that provides exogenous variation in the initial place of residence in Sweden; and it is based on tightly defined neighborhoods. There is tentative evidence that the share of immigrants in the neighborhood has a negative effect on GPA. But the main result is that, for a given share of immigrants in a neighborhood, the presence of highly educated peers of the same ethnicity has a positive effect on school grades. The results suggest that a standard deviation increase in the fraction of highly educated adults in the assigned neighborhood increases the compulsory school GPA by 0.9 percentile ranks. This magnitude corresponds roughly to a tenth of the gap in student performance between refugee immigrant and native born children. Essay 4: This paper investigates the consequences of residential segregation for immigrants’ health. To this end, I make use of a rich dataset covering the entire Swedish population age 16–74 from 1987 to 2004. The dataset contains annual information on the exact diagnosis for all individuals admitted to Swedish hospitals, as well as a wide range of individual background characteristics. It is however difficult to identify the causal link between segregation and health since individuals might sort across residential areas based on unobserved characteristics related to health. To deal with this methodological problem I exploit a governmental refugee placement policy which provides plausibly exogenous variation in segregation. The OLS estimates show a statistically significant positive correlation between segregation and the probability of hospitalization. Estimates that account for omitted variables are however in general statistically insignificant.

This dissertation comprises three chapters. The first chapter estimates the crowd-out effect of Social Security on private retirement saving. In a quasi-experimental research design, I analyze the effect of the 1990 federal mandate of Social Security coverage for all state and local government employees who were not covered by an equivalent state pension. Using a sample of more than 12 million employer-employee observations on earnings and contributions to retirement plans, I find that Social Security coverage induces approximately 16% of those affected who had previously saved in private retirement plans to stop contributing. For those who continue contributing, Social Security coverage crowds out about 23% of pre-reform contributions.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, September 2007.
"September 2006."
Includes bibliographical references.
This dissertation consists of three essays in empirical labor and health economics. The first chapter examines how the amount of time devoted to a leisure activity varies in response to temporary changes in the price of that activity. Specifically, I estimate the effect of changes in expected winnings in an online poker game on the probability that players quit playing. I find that expected winnings have a large negative effect on the probability that a player quits playing poker. A one dollar increase in expected winnings decreases the probability that a player quits playing altogether by 0.5 percentage points, compared to the mean of 1.1 percentage points. This corresponds to a price elasticity of demand for poker of -0.14. The second chapter develops and tests a model of how college students choose their field of study. The model combines features from learning and human capital models and captures several stylized facts from the empirical literature on choice of college major. I test the model's predictions using High School and Beyond data. I find three results that generally agree with the model's predictions. First, students with higher levels of ability choose majors with higher average earnings. Second, students who receive low grades in college are more likely to change their field of study. Third, students who switch majors in college subsequently earn less than students who do not change majors, but this difference is primarily due to major-switchers obtaining degrees in low-paying fields. The third chapter, coauthored with Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Gilles Postel-Vinay, provides estimates of the long-term effects on height and health of a large income shock experienced in early childhood.
(cont.) Phylloxera, an insect that attacks the roots of grape vines, destroyed 40% of French vineyards between 1863 and 1890, causing major income losses among wine growing families. We exploit the regional variation in the timing of this shock to identify its effects. We find that, at age 20, those born in affected regions were about 1.8 millimeters shorter than others. This estimate implies that children of wine-growing families born when the vines were affected in their regions were 0.6 to 0.9 centimeters shorter than others by age 20. This is a significant effect since average heights grew by only 2 centimeters in the entire 19th century.
by Timothy M. Watts.
Ph.D.

Thesis advisor: Andrew Beauchamp
Thesis advisor: Mathis Wagner
This dissertation considers changes of health insurance system of United States that affect health outcomes and labor market outcomes of population. The first chapter examines how Medicaid policy aimed to improve health status of low-income parents affects the health outcomes of young children. Estimates from variations in Medicaid rules across states and over time, show that there exist positive spillover effects on children from Medicaid expansions targeting parents. The child mortality declines more in states with higher level of generosity in Medicaid policy and the effect is larger among black children. Simulations indicate that recent Medicaid expansion under Affordable Care Act Reform can deepen the existing child mortality disparity across states due to different adoption of Medicaid expansion for low income adult population. The second chapter examines Massachusetts health care reform and its impact on labor market outcomes of older males approaching retirement. I find that older males are more likely to remain in full-time employed status rather to choose early retirement, and part-time employment increased only among low-income population who are eligible for subsidized health insurance. The results suggests that there exists employment-lock effect from increase of employers providing employersponsored health insurances following the reform
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

This dissertation consists of three chapters that use administrative matched employer-employee data to analyze firms' hiring and promotion strategies and to explore how firm-level personnel strategies affect individual firm performance and worker careers, but also aggregate outcomes of productivity, wage inequality and welfare. The first chapter studies how firms compete for managerial talent by using internal promotions versus external hiring to recruit managers. The second chapter analyzes how exporters adjust their organizational structure in response to international trade shocks and how these adjustments affect wage inequality within the firm. The third chapter focuses on the health care sector and uses a parental leave reform to analyze whether a sudden shortage in nurses affects patient health outcomes in hospitals and nursing homes.

In the first chapter, I use administrative matched employer-employee data from Denmark to provide the first comprehensive evidence how firms differ in using internal promotions and external hiring at the management level. The data cover the universe of firms and workers and allow me to track career paths both within and across firms based on worker occupations. I document that more productive firms hire more talented young workers, are more likely to promote managers internally, and match with better managers in terms of education and ability. Based on these facts, I develop an assignment model of the market for managers where heterogeneous firms compete for workers who differ in managerial talent. In the model internal labor markets arise from asymmetric learning and firm-specific human capital. Production complementarities between firm productivity and manager talent result in better firms investing in promising workers and in developing talent through firm-specific training and internal promotion. I estimate the model using the Danish data. Model simulations indicate that removing information frictions increases aggregate productivity by 22.5 percent. This gain is accompanied by higher wage inequality because better signals of talent increase competition for the best managers. This mechanism provides a new market-driven explanation for the increase in upper-tail wage inequality.

In the second chapter, I combine the administrative employer-employee data with firm-level trade data from Denmark to provide evidence for a novel mechanism through which trade affects wage inequality: changes in firm hierarchies. This mechanism is motivated by the empirical fact that within-firm wage variation across the hierarchical levels of top manager, middle manager, supervisor and worker accounts for an important component of wage inequality. It is comparable in magnitude to wage differences across firms. To identify the causal effect of trade shocks on firm hierarchies and wage inequality, I use two distinct research designs for firm-level trade shocks—one based on foreign demand and transportation costs, and the other using the Muslim boycott of Danish exports after the Cartoon crisis. Both identification strategies suggest robust effects of trade shocks on within-firm inequality through changes in hierarchies. Consistent with models of knowledge-based or incentive-based hierarchies, firm-level trade shocks influence organizational choices through production scale. Adding a hierarchy layer significantly increases inequality within firms, ranging from 2% for the 50-10 wage gap to 4.7% for the 90-50 wage gap.

The third chapter, which is joint with Martin B. Hackmann, Pennsylvania State University, studies unintended effects of a parental leave program on employers and consumers, specifically on the allocation of resources and the quality of care in the Danish health sector. Using matched employer-employee data, we estimate that a generous child leave program introduced in Denmark in 1994 led to a persistent decrease in the number of skilled nurses in Danish hospitals and nursing homes by more than 10% on average. Combining labor market and death register data, we analyze the effect of nurse shortages on patient mortality. Our empirical strategy exploits exogenous variation in net employment effects based on eligibility of the workforce across health sectors and counties. We find that the policy led to an average increase in mortality in nursing homes by 14% for the population aged 85 and older. Nurse shortages in nursing homes increase total mortality for this subpopulation at the county level one-to-one. This suggests that staffing needs for skilled nurses are a particular concern in nursing homes and of growing importance as the population ages and the demand for long term care services increases.

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Esta tese contém três artigos que investigam problemas relacionados à Economia do Trabalho, Desenvolvimento Econômico e Economia da Educação.
In this paper we study the allocation of public expenditures across educational stages in a developing country. We construct a general equilibrium model that features heterogeneous agents, credit restrictions, basic and tertiary education, public and private educational institutions. We calibrate the model’s parameters using Brazilian data. Simulations show three of the model’s features. First, economic inequality is mainly explained through endogenous educational decisions, instead of exogenous ability shocks. Second, abolishing public educational institutions contracts GDP by 5.5%, decreases welfare of households in the first income quartile by 7%, and does not affect significantly the welfare of the remaining households. Third, borrowing constraints are tight for the poorest agents in the economy. In the main exercise, we find that reallocating public expenditures from tertiary towards basic education to mimic Denmark’s allocation of public expenditures across educational stages decreases GDP, aggregate welfare and the Gini coefficient by 1.5%, 0.2% and 2%, respectively.

This dissertation provides program evaluation and policy analysis evidence from USA and Iran. The first chapter studies the impact of paid leave legislation on women employment. We employ California’s first-in-the-nation Paid Family Leave program to draw inference using difference-in-differences and triple differences methods. The change in the employment outcomes for women before and after this program is compared to the change in similar outcomes for a set of control groups. We find that women’s employment increased in the intensive margin but not extensive margin. We also find that wages increased for married prime-age and decreased for highly educated young women. The second chapter provides evidence on the impact of a nation-wide unconditional cash transfer program in Iran on labor supply. As compensation for the removal of bread and energy subsidies in 2011, the government of Iran started monthly deposits of cash into individual family accounts amounting to 29% of the median household income. A popular outcry against the subsidy reform program has focused on the negative labor supply effects of the cash transfers on the poor. We use panel data to study the impact of these transfers on the labor supply of poor households and individuals during the first two years of the program, before inflation reduced their value. We use the exogenous variation in the value of the cash transfers relative to household income to estimate the impact of the transfers on labor supply of individuals using fixed effects method. We also use a difference-in-differences methodology using the variation in the time households first started receiving transfers. Although everyone was eligible to receive cash transfers starting January 2011, about 20 percent of the households who for one reason or another did not submit their application in time, started receiving it three months later. Neither set of results support the hypothesis that cash transfers reduced labor supply as measured by hours of work or probability of employment. The third chapter analyses what happens to the welfare of households and the budget of the government if it implements further price reforms in Iran. Five years into the reform, energy prices in Iran were still well below international levels. The impacts of a gradualist approach to price increase versus a one-off approach are simulated in this chapter. Under the gradualist approach government savings (reduction in foregone earnings) from selling subsidized items will increase by 20.2 trillion Rials or 0.18 percent of GDP in 2014. Half of these savings is needed as transfers to households to keep the poverty rate constant by paying each person 17,059 Rials per month. A one-off price increase would have a large effect on poverty and would require transfers equivalent to 203,775 Rials per person per month. Government savings after transfers would equal 96.4 trillion Rials or 0.87 percent of GDP.
Ph. D.

In Chapter 1, I propose a growth theory-based framework for analyzing experimental research in the social sciences. I apply a number of variations of the two standard growth models---Solow-Swan model, and the Schumpeterial growth model---in the context of experimental research, and derive policy recommendations aimed at improving the technological state of the field. In Chapter 2, I lay out a functional specification of the Popper Framework---a suite of software tools designed to implement policy recommendations from Chapter 1. The specification provides a high-level description of four main functional components of the framework: Development Environment, Subject Pool Module, Popper Cloud, and Analysis Environment. The system enables multiple competing implementations for each for the functional components, which makes it extensible and robust to incremental changes of the technological landscape. In Chapter 3, we employ unique administrative data from Moscow to obtain a direct estimate of hidden incomes. Our approach is based on comparing employer-reported earnings to market values of cars owned by the corresponding individuals and their households. We detect few hidden earnings in most foreign-owned firms and larger firms, especially state-owned enterprises in heavily regulated industries. The same empirical strategy indicates that up to 80 percent of earnings of car owners in the private sector are hidden, especially in smaller companies and industries such as trade and services, where cash flows are easier to manipulate. We also find considerable hidden earnings in government services.