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Browsing by Subject "Human capital"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Essays in Labor Markets and Human Capital
    (2018-07) Garcia-Cabo Herrero, Joaquin
    This thesis studies how labor market institutions affect the careers of workers. To do so, I exploit the availability of Spanish Social Security data on workers' labor histories. Chapter 1 introduces the topic and presents an overview of the results of this thesis. Chapter 2 studies the impact of these regulations. In particular, it examines the effect of firing costs on human capital accumulation, cyclicality of job creation, and persistence of job loss. Chapter 3 presents macroeconomic evidence that the correlation between productivity and employment is negative in southern European countries, and assesses the role of two-tier labor markets in generating that correlation. Chapter 4 documents the determinants of becoming self-employed in labor markets characterized by high unemployment and low job stability.
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    Essays in macroeconomics
    (2014-06) Lopez Martin, Bernabe
    In the first essay I develop a quantitative framework of firm dynamics where the size of the informal sector is determined by financial constraints and government taxation. Informal sector firms do not pay taxes but have no access to external finance. For taxes and financial constraints parameterized for a country like Egypt, I find losses in total factor productivity of over 28% and in output per worker of 60% relative to the US benchmark. The effects of the elimination of formal sector registration costs are small. Improving the access to credit for formal sector firms increases wages, aggregate TFP and output per worker while reducing the size of the informal sector.In my second essay I study the consequences of low financial development in an environment where firms can invest to increase productivity. Lower financial development increases the dispersion of the marginal productivity of capital across firms lowering aggregate production efficiency. However, models of firm dynamics with financial constraints generate modest losses due to misallocation relative to those found in the empirical literature. I construct a quantitative model of firm dynamics with endogenous accumulation of firm productivity where financial constraints diminish the incentives of firms to invest in productivity, reducing firm productivity growth. This channel amplifies the losses from misallocation. The model can partially account for the lower life-cycle productivity growth of firms in economies with underdeveloped financial markets. In the last essay of this thesis, Naoki Takayama and I study the consequences of recessions for young individuals and the impact of government taxation. Recessions generate increases in youth unemployment and significant losses in the expected value of labor earnings. We build a life cycle model with on-the-job human capital accumulation, aggregate and idiosyncratic productivity shocks and heterogeneous workers. We find that in countries where the tax-wedge is higher, unemployment rates are amplified. We compute the long-term earnings losses of individuals that lose their job in different states of the economy and find that losses are bigger: in worse aggregate states of the economy, for younger individuals, in economies with a higher tax wedge, for ex-ante lower ability individuals.
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    Essays in Macroeconomics and Labor Economics
    (2024-05) Pedtke, Joseph
    This dissertation studies topics at the intersection of macroeconomics and labor economics, focusing on three areas: (1) inequality and intergenerational mobility, (2) macroeconomic crises and labor markets, and (3) employment effects of expansions of public healthcare. In Chapter I, I evaluate driving forces of trends in inequality and intergenerational mobility in the United States. Parents devote considerable resources towards their children's development, making trade-offs between time and education investments and working, consumption, and leisure. In recent decades, families in the United States experienced rising rates of single parenthood, increasing education prices, and changes to taxes and transfers, which altered available resources and trade-offs to investments across families. This chapter explores the implications of these trends for inequality and intergenerational mobility. After documenting changes in family resources and parental investments over time, I develop a dynastic model of human capital investment to quantify the contributions of these trends to increases in inequality and intergenerational persistence. I find that single parenthood is a major contributor through two channels: (1) less available time for single parents limits work hours, family income, and investments for their children’s human capital development and (2) the resulting lower human capital comes with a greater probability of becoming a single parent as an adult, as single parents tend to have less education and lower wages. Education prices, on the other hand, had only minimal effects as families reduce investments at similar rates in response to price increases. Moreover, changes to taxes and transfers had heterogeneous impacts on parental investments by producing differing income and substitution effects depending on family characteristics. The results highlight the importance of considering parental investments when designing assistance programs. In Chapter II, in joint work with Kevin Donovan, Will Jianyu Lu, and Todd Schoellman, we characterize how labor markets transmit aggregate shocks to idiosyncratic earnings risk experienced by households. This chapter uses both aggregate and micro data from quarterly labor force surveys to document four new findings about how they do so. First, the distribution of unemployment responses to recessions includes a long tail. In the most severe decile of recessions, unemployment rates rise by 5--20 percentage points and take 16--33 quarters to begin to recover. Second, there is a close relationship between these severe crises and a small set of shocks, including financial crises, house price busts, and sudden stops. Third, manufacturing and construction play a key role in all recessions, including crises, accounting for more than half of employment losses. Fourth, crises fall most on young and less-educated workers, who are likely to have low income and wealth and hence be less able to self-insure against idiosyncratic earnings risk. Taking into account both the large aggregate shocks and their incidence, the welfare costs of business cycles are likely to be larger than standard calculations imply. In Chapter III, in joint work with Sean Bassler, we measure the effect of Medicaid Expansion on the work arrangements of low-income adults. Before the expansion, many of these individuals only had access to subsidized health insurance through a traditional full-time job. After the expansion, they also had access to Medicaid, potentially allowing them to change their labor supply decisions. Using American Community Survey data, we built a sample of low-income adults who only had access to subsidized health plans through a typical full-time job or the Medicaid Expansion. Adults in the sample are childless, spouseless, non-disabled, and reside in states without confounding state-level policies. To identify the effect of newly-found Medicaid access on this sample, we use a difference-in-difference design from Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021). We find that the expansion had a statistically insignificant effect on the share of our sample in several labor market arrangements: traditional full-time employment, part-time employment, self-employment, unemployment, and not participating in the labor force. These results are robust to including pre-treatment covariates and adjustments to our underlying sample framework. We further decompose treatment effects into short- and long-term effects and find both are statistically insignificant. We conclude that Medicaid Expansion had a negligible impact on both the work arrangements for low-income workers.
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    Essays on human capital and macroeconomic policy.
    (2010-09) Dubovyk, Tetyana
    This dissertation studies the role of endogenous human capital accumulation in evaluating tax and Social Security policies. There are number of proposals to reform Pay-as-You-Go (PAYG) Social Security system in the U.S. and the number of countries has implemented such reforms. I study the effect of macroeconomic policies on the saving behavior of agents and macroeconomic performance of the economy in the overlapping generations framework. I consider two economic environments with borrowing constraints: one with exogenous human capital and a second with human capital accumulation through time investment. The second chapter considers the options for reforming the U.S. retirement system. Baseline environments are calibrated to the U.S. tax and Social Security system. Two alternative Social Security arrangements are analyzed: (a) voluntary and (b) mandatory retirement savings accounts. I find that the welfare ranking of these alternatives depends on the endogeneity of human capital investment. Both systems are welfare improving when compared to the baseline. However, the system with mandatory (voluntary) accounts leads to lower welfare gains in the endogenous (exogenous) human capital environment. The benefits of system with voluntary retirement accounts are higher rates of return on contributions made to the system and higher level of aggregate savings. At the same time, the transition generations have to incur costs, in terms of reduced consumption or higher market hours, to implement the new system. By implementing reforms in both environments, I study behavior and welfare losses/gains of transition generations. The results of third chapter show that the level of compensation depends on the economic environment considered. The amount of resources that have to be transferred to transition generations is higher in the environment with endogenous human capital. In 1990s, several pension reforms had been adopted to insure financial sustainability of Italian retirement system. The fourth chapter studies two main features of reforms: (i) adoption of notional defined contributions formula; (ii) price indexation of benefits as compared to wage indexation prior to 1992. The reforms decrease financial obligations of pension system. I study labor market decisions of and quantify the effect of the reforms on transition generations.
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    Essays on Human Capital Disruption
    (2015-07) Dahlen, Heather
    This dissertation is comprised of three essays related to disruptions in human capital production. In the first essay, the impact of maternal depression on child cognitive and non-cognitive measures for elementary school-aged children is estimated. After applying a bounding methodology to address the methodological concern of endogeneity, maternal depression negatively affects test scores and reduces a child's ability to learn in the classroom environment, self-control, and interpersonal skills, and increases problem behavior. The second essay examines the effect of earlier school start times on classroom outcomes of fifth grade children. The panel of data follows the same children over time, allowing for a methodology that nets out time-invariant unobserved characteristics that might be influencing results. Findings suggest small movements in start time (1-29 minutes earlier) have no impact on cognitive or non-cognitive outcomes, but large movements (60 minutes earlier or more) lead to lower math scores for girls, lower reading scores for boys, and impaired performance in socioemotional measures for both genders. The last essay measures the effect of "aging out"� of the dependent coverage provision of the Affordable Care Act. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that turning 26 leads to increases in labor force participation and directly purchased private insurance for young men and increases in health insurance plan dissatisfaction for both young men and women.
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    An Examination of how participation in a cohort-based leadership development program for high-potential employees contributes to the development of leaders at a Major Professional services firm in the United States
    (2014-12) Bialek, Tani K. Keenlyne
    This case study examined the leadership development experience of employees who participated in a high-potential leadership development program within a major professional services firm in the Midwest United States. Leadership development is a top priority for many organizations and a critical driver of success. Effective leadership is also recognized as a source of sustainable competitive advantage and greater market value. Despite these compelling factors, the need for developing leaders has been listed among organizations' top concerns for more than a decade. These factors create challenges in developing the talent needed for organizations to remain competitive. As these challenges converge they intensify the need for well-planned, consistent, and rigorous development of high-potential talent. These needs support the call for a greater understanding of how participation in a cohort-based leadership development program contributes to high-potentials' development as leaders.