Essays in Labor Economics

Essays in Labor Economics
Author: Martina Uccioli
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Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
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This dissertation studies two distinct issues in the field of labor economics: the labor supply of new mothers and firms' adjustments to changing labor costs. In both cases, I study the effect of labor market policies, both because they provide quasi-exogenous variation in otherwise endogenous variables of interest, and because of the intrinsic interest in studying the welfare implications of specific policies that governments have direct control over. The first two chapters, written jointly with Ludovica Ciasullo, consider how maternal labor supply is impacted by working conditions, and how it in turn affects intrahousehold bargaining and task allocation within the household. In the first chapter we study which work arrangements new mothers choose when allowed to do so, and whether these work arrangements affect their labor supply choices. We exploit the Australian 2009 Fair Work Act, which explicitly entitled parents of young children to request a (reasonable) change in work arrangements. Leveraging variation in the timing of the law, timing of childbirth, and the bite of the law across different occupations and industries, we establish two main results. First, if allowed to request a change in work arrangements, new mothers ask for regularity in their schedule. Second, with regular schedules, working mothers' child penalty declined from a 47 percent drop in hours worked to a 40 percent drop. For the most exposed mothers, the Fair Work Act led to both a doubling in schedule regularity, and a 30% decrease in the child penalty in hours of work. After establishing that an increase in schedule regularity leads to an increase in maternal labor supply, in the second chapter we study how this translates into division of labor within the household. First, we document that at baseline children bring a 40% increase in their parents' active time -- that is, total time spent on paid work, housework, or parenting -- and that this increase falls disproportionately on mothers, by a 2-to-1 ratio. Second, by exploiting the improvement in maternal labor market conditions brought about by the Australian 2009 Fair Work Act, we show that this gendered allocation of time is not affected by improved labor market prospects for women. Finally, we show that mothers who work longer hours reduce housework, but not time spent directly with children, mitigating concerns that maternal participation in the labor market comes at their children's expense. The third chapter, written jointly with Andrea Manera, focuses on how labor costs -- via stringency of labor regulations -- influence firms' innovation choices. We study the impact of employment protection legislation (EPL) on firms' innovation, through an event-study analysis of labor market reforms occurring in Europe over 2000-2016. Data from the Community Innovation Survey reveal that substantial drops in EPL for temporary workers prompt a reallocation of innovation towards the introduction of new products, away from process innovation aimed at cutting labor costs. Among innovative firms, the share of product innovators increases by 15% of the pre-reform value, while the share of firms specializing in process innovation falls by 35%. We develop a theoretical framework of directed technical change to rationalize our findings.

Three Essays in Labor Economics and Applied Econometrics

Three Essays in Labor Economics and Applied Econometrics
Author: Maria Adelaida Lopera
Publisher:
Total Pages: 64
Release: 2016
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This thesis is a collection of three essays in labour economics and applied econometrics. The first two essays investigate workers productivity and their effort choice in a tree-planting firm. The third essay studies community cooperation in a public good experiment. Beyond the econometric techniques, the convergence point of this thesis is the question of how individuals incorporate external factors into their choices. How work fatigue affects productivity, how productivity shocks affect workers' choice of effort, and how social interactions affect community cooperation. Understanding and measuring the relevance of these external factors is important for designing incentives that influence individuals to act in a desired way. Appropriate incentives are the best way to regulate behaviour without imposing restrictions and rules that are costly to enforce and may create social frictions. From the first two chapters on productivity of tree planters two interesting findings stand out. First, workers' earnings can be increased by simply rearranging the working week in different work spells. This could be an inexpensive way for certain firms to increase their labour productivity. Second, planters' optimal choice of effort depends on productivity shocks. This means that effort incentives may have heterogenous effects due to the particular shocks experienced by each worker. From the third chapter, I find that involving community leaders in the decision of contributing or not to a public good enhance community cooperation. The presence of local leaders triggers cooperative behaviour that is unconditional and independent of the expected actions of other community members.

Essays on Labor Economics

Essays on Labor Economics
Author:
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Total Pages: 95
Release: 2016
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This dissertation has two self-contained chapters in labor economics. In the first chapter, I exploit variation in job arrival rates due to the recession in the early 1980s to understand the relative importance of three main channels — skill accumulation, search, and learning — to an individual's lifetime wage growth, and analyze how these channels interact. Specifically, I construct and estimate a model of on-the-job search, dynamic wage growth, and occupational choice using data from the NLSY79 and O*NET. In my model, workers are heterogeneous in initial cognitive and manual skills, while jobs differ by how intensively these skills are used. Over time, workers sort into occupations for which they are well suited by searching either on the job or off the job as they learn about their comparative advantages and accumulate skills. The estimated model shows that, first, all three channels are important in explaining life-cycle wage growth. Second, the interactions of the three components also play a significant role in life-cycle wage growth. Finally, I use my estimated model to understand the persistent wage losses of individuals who graduate during a recession. I find that skill accumulation, both alone and interacted with the other two channels, is the primary contributor to the long-term effect. Richer parents tend to have richer children, and richer individuals tend to be healthier, especially later in life. In the second chapter, we quantify how much of health and wealth outcomes can be explained by parental inputs made in childhood. To this end, we present a model in which parents invest in the health and human capital of their children, while also allowing for adults to invest in their own health and human capital once they are adult. We calibrate the model to available data on intergenerational health and earnings persistence as well as the cross-sectional distribution of health, wealth and earnings. The model allows us to quantify the intergenerational effect of parental investments on the child's human capital, health and wealth outcomes separately from the effects of the child's own investments as an adult. As a result, the calibrated model sheds light on how income redistribution policies may affect health outcomes, and conversely how health policies can affect income distribution, and importantly how the impact of both types of policies may spill over to subsequent generations.

Essays on Labor Economics

Essays on Labor Economics
Author: Chenyan Lu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2016
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ISBN:
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This dissertation has two self-contained chapters in labor economics. In the first chapter, I exploit variation in job arrival rates due to the recession in the early 1980s to understand the relative importance of three main channels — skill accumulation, search, and learning — to an individual's lifetime wage growth, and analyze how these channels interact. Specifically, I construct and estimate a model of on-the-job search, dynamic wage growth, and occupational choice using data from the NLSY79 and O*NET. In my model, workers are heterogeneous in initial cognitive and manual skills, while jobs differ by how intensively these skills are used. Over time, workers sort into occupations for which they are well suited by searching either on the job or off the job as they learn about their comparative advantages and accumulate skills. The estimated model shows that, first, all three channels are important in explaining life-cycle wage growth. Second, the interactions of the three components also play a significant role in life-cycle wage growth. Finally, I use my estimated model to understand the persistent wage losses of individuals who graduate during a recession. I find that skill accumulation, both alone and interacted with the other two channels, is the primary contributor to the long-term effect. Richer parents tend to have richer children, and richer individuals tend to be healthier, especially later in life. In the second chapter, we quantify how much of health and wealth outcomes can be explained by parental inputs made in childhood. To this end, we present a model in which parents invest in the health and human capital of their children, while also allowing for adults to invest in their own health and human capital once they are adult. We calibrate the model to available data on intergenerational health and earnings persistence as well as the cross-sectional distribution of health, wealth and earnings. The model allows us to quantify the intergenerational effect of parental investments on the child's human capital, health and wealth outcomes separately from the effects of the child's own investments as an adult. As a result, the calibrated model sheds light on how income redistribution policies may affect health outcomes, and conversely how health policies can affect income distribution, and importantly how the impact of both types of policies may spill over to subsequent generations.

Three Essays in Labor Economics and Public Finance

Three Essays in Labor Economics and Public Finance
Author: Carolina Rodríguez-Zamora
Publisher:
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2009
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This dissertation consists of three essays. The first one brings together the areas of public and labor economics by developing a hypothesis that relates optimal taxation and time use. Using Mexican data on household time use and consumption, we find significant substitution between goods and time in home production and different elasticities of substitution for different house-hold commodities. Adding these findings to the optimal tax problem, we show it is optimal to impose higher taxes on market goods used in the production of commodities with a lower elasticity of substitution between goods and time. This is an analog of the classical Corlett and Hague (1953) result, differing in that we allow for the possibility of substitution between goods and time in the production of commodities. The second chapter is about international migration, in the area of labor economics. On one hand, surveillance of the border between Mexico and the United States by the U.S. government has increased dramatically over the last two decades. On the other hand, undocumented Mexican migrants often make multiple trips between the two countries. Thus, my hypothesis is that these migrants respond to heightened surveillance by increasing the length of stay of the current trip. I estimate a semi-parametric hazard model following Meyer (1990). Using data from the Mexican Migration Project I find no evidence that border enforcement affects the hazard of leaving the U.S. by undocumented Mexican Immigrants. The last essay is about mother's time and children related expenditures. Using data from the Mexican Time Use Survey and the National Household Survey of Income and Expenditure from 2002, I examine the time Mexican mothers dedicate to taking care of their children and the amount of money spent by the household in raising children. The main contribution of this paper is that it analyzes child care time use and child care expenditures simultaneously. The age of the youngest child is the most important determinant of both child care time and money expenditures. It is the case that more educated mothers spend more money on their children. With respect to child care time use, more educated mothers spend more or less time with their children depending on whether they are working or non-working mothers. At all levels of non-mother's income, working mothers spend significantly more money relative to time in child care than non-working mothers. For both groups the ratio of money over time increases at a decreasing rate; however, for non-working mothers the income expansion path is much flatter.

Short- and Long-Term Influences of Education, Health Indicators, and Crime on Labor Market Outcomes: Five Essays in Empirical Labor Economics

Short- and Long-Term Influences of Education, Health Indicators, and Crime on Labor Market Outcomes: Five Essays in Empirical Labor Economics
Author: Elisabeth Lång
Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press
Total Pages: 28
Release: 2017-09-11
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ISBN: 9176854639
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The objective of this thesis is to improve the understanding of how several individual characteristics, namely education (years of schooling), health indicators (height, weight, smoking, alcohol consumption, and exercise), criminal behavior, and crime victimization, influence labor market outcomes in the short and long run. The first part of the thesis consists of three studies in which I adopt a within-twin-pair difference approach to analyze how education, health indicators, and earnings are associated with each other over the life cycle. The second part of the thesis includes two studies in which I use field experiments in order to test the employability of exoffenders and crime victims. The first essay, Learning for life?, describes an analysis of the education premium in earnings and health-related behaviors throughout adulthood among twins. The results show that the education premium in earnings, net of genetic inheritance, is rather small over the life cycle but increases with the level of education. The results also show that the education premium in health-related behaviors is mainly concentrated on smoking habits. The influences of education on earnings and health-related behaviors seem to work independently of each other, and there are no signs that health-related behaviors influence the education premium in earnings or vice versa. The second essay, Blowing up money?, details an analysis of the association between smoking and earnings in two different historical social contexts in Sweden: the 1970s and the 2000s. I also consider possible differences in this association in the short and long run as well as between the sexes. The results show that the earnings penalty for smoking is much stronger in the 2000s as compared to the 1970s (for both sexes) and that it is larger in the long run as compared to the short run (for men). The third essay, Two by two, inch by inch, describes an analysis of the height premium among Swedish twins. The results show that the height premium is relatively constant over the life cycle and that it is larger below median height for men and above median height for young women. The estimates are similar for monozygotic and dizygotic twins, indicating that environmentally and genetically induced height differences are similarly associated with earnings over the life cycle. The fourth essay, The employability of ex-offenders, published in IZA Journal of Labor Policy (2017), 6:6, details an analysis of whether male and female exoffenders are discriminated against when applying for jobs in the Swedish labor market. The results show that employers do discriminate against exoffenders but that the degree of discrimination varies across occupations. Discrimination against ex-offenders is pronounced in female-dominated and high-skilled occupations. The magnitude of discrimination against exoffenders does not vary by applicants’ sex. The fifth essay, Victimized twice?, describes an analysis of whether male and female crime victims are discriminated against when applying for jobs in the Swedish labor market. This study is the first to consider potential hiring discrimination against crime victims. The results show that employers do discriminate against crime victims. The discrimination varies with the sex of the crime victim and occupational characteristics and is concentrated among high-skilled jobs for female crime victims and among femaledominated jobs for male crime victims.