Browsing by Subject "Labor Economics"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Essays on Labor Market Frictions and Macroeconomics
    (2015-08) Seliski, John
    This dissertation investigates the macroeconomic consequences of frictional labor markets in the United States and in Europe. It consists of three essays. In Chapter 2, Jiwoon Kim and I develop a model with both frictional labor markets and financial frictions to explore how the dynamics of real and financial variables are affected by `financial shocks'. We evaluate how important the inclusion of financial shocks is in accounting for labor market fluctuations by using a standard real business cycle model with search and matching as a benchmark. We find that the inclusion of financial frictions and financial shocks improves a standard matching model's ability to account for the observed dynamics of labor market variables. Financial frictions are able to generate more volatile hours per worker, labor shares, and employment relative to our benchmark matching model, bringing simulated moments closer to observed fluctuations. Chapter 3 documents the cyclical properties of labor market flows in the United States and in Europe at business cycle frequencies. I create comparable quarterly estimates of the hazard rates across 19 European countries and the United States using the methodology pioneered by Shimer (2012). I then quantitatively assess the contribution of the job-finding and separation rates to the variability of unemployment over the business cycle in each country. In the United States, the job-finding hazard rate accounted for over three-quarters of the variation in unemployment while the separation rate accounted for the remainder. Most European labor markets have a 60:40 split between the job-finding rate and the separation rate, respectively. Chapter 4 studies policy issues related to precarious forms of employment over a worker's life-cycle. A search and matching model with dual labor markets, overlapping generations of workers, and general and match-specific skills is presented in order to quantify and evaluate the effects of loosening restrictions on temporary forms of employment. Despite the increased likelihood of being employed, workers will be worse off due to a greater share of workers starting their careers in low-paying temporary positions, limiting young workers' ability to upgrade their skill level early in the life-cycle.
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    Neoliberalism’s Last Days: Amazon and the Rise of America’s New Working Classes
    (2022-09) Cox, Spencer
    This dissertation asks the questions: What is neoliberalism? How is it ending? And, from the perspective of political strategy, what can be done to make what emerges next more just? Drawing on long-wave Marxist theory, I argue neoliberalism is first and foremost a popular political bloc led by the financial and entrepreneurial wings of the bourgeoisie in alignment with broader ‘middle-layers’ in the US class structure. Rather than viewing neoliberalism as a process driven solely by the economic logic of the pursuit of surplus profits, I argue that creative destruction is a political process, with an ascendant neoliberal political bloc emerging in response to the profitability crisis in the 1960s. The neoliberal bloc sought to restore the rate of profit and US global economic hegemony, and to do so, aggressively suppressed the US working class directly through the exercise of political power, and indirectly through the structural reorganization of capital accumulation. The structural and organizational decomposition of the working class diminished its power, with large sections of the class protesting – often in vain - its dissolution via defensive struggles. Concomitantly, as the trajectory of long-wave shifted from the pursuit of surplus profits to the stabilization of the system to extract profits from new waves of fixed capital investment, neoliberal hegemony faces a legitimacy crisis. With right populism and reformed liberalism two competing blocs, the trajectory of the new bloc depends on the loyalty of the working classes. Today, the US working classes remain deeply fragmented and atomized despite re-composition into new spaces and workplaces, diminishing the ability of the class to exercise power to enact changes the class broadly desires. Strategically imperative to a more just future is creating new class organization that bridges the divides in the new working classes. I argue that Amazon.com is at the heart of working class re-composition in the United States, socializing both high skilled tech workers and diverse low wage suburban logistics workers into shared spaces of exploitation and domination. Structurally located in the heart of capital accumulation, organized Amazon workers contain both the potential structural and associational power to shift the dynamic of capitalist restructuring more in the working class’s favor as the long-wave cycle matures. Building autonomous class organization – at Amazon and in other workplaces and working class neighborhoods - is crucial for not just winning reforms, but also generating a counter-hegemonic force that, in the long-run, may challenge bourgeois political hegemony in an era of increasing calamity.
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    Three Essays in Applied Microeconomics
    (2018-03) Jatusripitak, Napat
    This dissertation consists of three independent chapters that study how to improve public policies and reduce the level of social injustice through the lens of microeconomics and the innovative use of new data sets. In the first chapter, I test the impact of neighborhood heterogeneity on the private contribution of local public goods. Using a panel data set containing over two million non-emergency service requests and detailed census-tract level data on socioeconomic characteristics from the American Community Survey, I find that, contrary to the prevailing view in the literature, racial and linguistic heterogeneity have little to no negative effect on private voluntary contributions to local public goods. Income inequality, on the other hand, reduces private contributions by a significant margin. In the second chapter, my coauthors and I examine how job transfer rules and preferences affect labor market efficiency and access to quality teachers. To do so, we recover teacher and school preferences using data from Minneapolis Public Schools’ web-based internal teacher labor market. Overall, we find that the average teacher prefers schools serving already-advantaged students and the average school prefers applicants who are more effective, hold an advanced degree, and not in their early-career. These preferences help explain why we observe the troubling sorting patterns among teachers and suggest that further liberalizing the teacher labor market may exacerbate the inequitable distribution of quality teachers. Finally, the third chapter evaluates a hidden social cost of air pollution beyond hospital admissions and premature deaths: student achievement. Given the strength of evidence linking academic performance to long-term life outcomes and the fact that disadvantaged and marginalized communities tend to get more exposure to air pollution, this additional cost should be identified and quantified correctly. Using an exogenous source of variation in the levels of air pollution from the closure of an airport terminal, I find that the closure led to a roughly 2 percent of a standard deviation increase in high-stakes test scores.
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    Three Essays in Development Economics
    (2023-12) Vu, Khoa
    Vietnam has risen to become one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, yet the path to sustainable long-run economic growth remains elusive. This goal is further complicated by concerns about inequity and the recent global pandemic. In this dissertation, I tackle three important issues related to the quest for sustainable economic growth in Vietnam. I first examine whether expanding access to higher education has any impact on productivity at the worker level and firm level. I found that exposed workers are more likely to work in the service sector and, thus, the productivity of service firms rises in the long run. Second, I examine whether extending the maternity leave requirement has any implications on women's decisions to work in the formal sector. My findings indicate that women are more likely to move from informal work into formal jobs when the government extends the required maternity leave length from four months to six months. Third, I propose a new method to understand the impacts of the global pandemic on food security in Vietnam at a granular level.