Browsing by Subject "Labor markets"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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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 on Social Insurance and Labor Markets
    (2019-04) See, Kurt
    This dissertation consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, I study the macroeconomic and welfare consequences of introducing a universal healthcare system to replace the existing employer-based set-up in the U.S., paying particular attention to the reform's labor market effects. To study the policy, I develop an incomplete asset markets model with labor market frictions and medical expenditure risk over the life cycle. First, I compare the model-implied partial equilibrium employment responses to public health insurance generosity to existing empirical evidence. The model partially reconciles the puzzlingly wide range of estimates found in three microeconomic experiments conducted in Tennessee, Oregon, and Wisconsin. Next, I use the model to understand the general equilibrium effects of switching to universal healthcare. I find that it results in higher reservation wages and a corresponding reduction in firm vacancy creation, both of which lead to a quantitatively large decline in the job finding rate. The negative impact of the lower job finding rate outweighs the insurance benefits of generous public health coverage, resulting in substantial welfare losses among low-wealth households for whom employment is most valuable. In the second chapter (joint with Serdar Birinci), we investigate how unemployment insurance generosity should vary with the business cycle. We find that the optimal policy is countercyclical. Not only does the policy smooth the consumption of job losers, but also provides insurance against aggregate risk by reducing the need for excess savings during recessions. Meanwhile, the moral hazard effects of generous benefits are attenuated in recessions because jobs are scarce and thus, the forgone value of job search is low. In the third chapter (joint with Anmol Bhandari, Serdar Birinci, and Ellen McGrattan), we study survey data used for measuring business income and valuations. We document large inconsistencies between survey data and aggregated administrative data for statistics such as the level and distribution of business income, and the number of returns. These inconsistencies are attributable to both non-representative samples and measurement errors. Non-representativeness results from undersampling businesses with low income owners. Measurement errors emerge because respondents do not use relevant financial documents as basis for their responses while some survey questions suffer from framing problems.
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    Modeling Commuter Flows Among Local Labor Markets in Minnesota, 1970-1990
    (1994-07) Wyly, Elvin K.; Adams, John S.; Loughlin, Melissa J.
    Between 1970 and 1990 the share of Minnesota commuters working outside their county of residence increased from 18 to 29 percent. This study analyzes this trend by examining commuter flows among labor markets in a 120-county study area encompassing Minnesota and counties in adjacent states. A series of maps and statistical models relate commuter flows to changes in demographic and employment conditions over the past two decades. Commuter flows have strengthened since 1970, becoming more important in declining rural counties as well as growing suburban and exurban labor markets. Longer work journeys in declining rural areas appear to reflect individual coping strategies, as workers search farther afield for opportunities in a regional labor market undergoing a geographic transformation. For most types of jobs, employment growth is dispersing outward from metropolitan cores, while in non-metro areas jobs are consolidated into widely-spaced regional centers. These trends have created a network of diffuse labor markets in which commuter flows link widely-scattered communities of labor deficits to areas with labor surplus, in patterns too complex to be modeled solely in terms of aggregate population and housing variables.
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    Transportation Use in Minnesota: An Analysis of the 1990 Census of Population and Housing
    (Minnesota Department of Transportation, 1994-09) Adams, John S.; Loughlin, Melissa J.; Wyly, Elvin K.
    This report summarizes research contained in MnDOT report numbers 94-24, 94-25, 94-26, and 94-27 covering one project. The project examines the variation in people's need for and use of transport services by posing four research questions and answering them with transportation related data from the 1990 Census of Population and Housing. Questions posed are: 1) What is the socioeconomic profile of Minnesota's long-distance commuters? 2) How do Minnesota's counties and urban neighborhoods vary according to transport needs and use? 3) How can census data be used together with travel surveys to study the socioeconomic characteristics of travelers? and 4) How has interaction among the state's local labor markets changed in the last twenty years? The main findings are summarized in this report both verbally and graphically. References to the other four reports are given.