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Browsing by Subject "Occupation"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Essays in Inequality and Heterogeneity
    (2019-07) Ocampo, Sergio
    Recent trends in both developed and developing economies show increasing inequality in income and wealth. Technological change is reshaping the nature of work for many, as automation, offshoring and other practices are adopted by firms around the globe. These changes to the type of jobs workers have are linked to changes in wages and labor earnings, in particular the adoption of new (worker-replacing) technologies has been linked to decreases in wages and increases in income inequality. Simultaneously, the trend towards higher inequality has sparked questions about the desirability (optimality) of inequality and whether governments should use the tools at their disposal to try to curb these trends. My dissertation contributes to the discussion on these topics in two distinct ways. The first two chapters deal with the effects of technological change in the nature of occupations, and its effects for wage inequality, while the third chapter deals with the implications of fiscal policy (particularly capital income and wealth taxation) in the face of wealth inequality caused by differences in the rate of return across individuals. The first part of my dissertation develops a new theory of how the specific tasks carried out by workers are determined, providing a flexible framework in which to study the implications for workers of automation, offshoring, skill-biased technological change among others. I use this framework along with U.S. occupational data to study the recent adoption of automation and its effects on the wage structure. The final chapter shows how the determinants of inequality matter for determining the optimal policy in the face of inequality. In the presence of rate of return heterogeneity wealth taxes dominate capital income taxes. Relative to capital income taxes, wealth taxes benefit the individuals who are more productive, increasing the allocative efficiency in the economy, in turn leading to potentially large welfare gains despite increases in inequality.
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    Essays in macro and labor economics
    (2013-06) Wiczer, David Geoffrey
    The first chapter studies the rate of long-term unemployment, which spiked during the Great Recession. To help explain this, I exploit the systematic and counter-cyclical differences in unemployment duration across occupations. This heterogeneity extends the tail of the unemployment duration distribution, which is necessary to account for the observed level of long-term unemployment and its increase since 2007. This chapter introduces a model in which unemployment duration and occupation are linked; it measures the effects of occupation-specific shocks and skills on unemployment duration. Here, a worker will be paid more for human capital in his old occupation but a bad shock may make those jobs scarce. Still, their human capital partly ``attaches'' them to their prior occupation, even when searching there implies a longer expected duration. Hence, unemployment duration rises and becomes more dispersed across occupations. Redistributive shocks and business cycles, as in the Great Recession, exacerbate this effect. For quantitative discipline, the model matches data on the wage premium to occupational experience and the co-movement of occupations' productivity. The distribution of duration is then endogenous. For comparison's sake, if a standard model with homogeneous job seekers matches the job finding rate, then it also determines expected duration and understates it. That standard model implies just over half of the long-term unemployment in 1976-2007 and almost no rise in the recent recession. But, with heterogeneity by occupation, this chapter nearly matches long-term unemployment in the period 1976-2007 and 70% of its rise during the Great Recession. The second chapter studies the link between wage growth and the match of a worker's occupation and skills. The notion here is that if human capital accumulation depends on match quality, poor matches can have long-lasting effects on lifetime earnings. I build a model that incorporates such a mechanism, in which human capital accumulation is affected by imperfect information about one's self. This informational friction leads to matches in which a worker accumulates human capital more slowly and has weaker earnings growth. To get direct evidence, the chapter pieces together two sets of data on the skills used by an occupation and the skills a worker is particularly good at. Data on occupations describes occupations by the intensity with which they use many dimensions of workers' knowledge, skills and abilities. To pair, we have data on tests taken by respondents in a panel that tracks occupations and earnings. The test designers created a mapping between their tests and the occupational descriptors, which allows us to create two measures. The first measure of match quality is just the dot product between the dimensions of workers' skills and utilization rate of these skills by occupations. The second measure mismatch relative to an optimal matching computed using the Gale-Shapley algorithm for stable pairs. In both, worse matches have significantly slower returns to occupational tenure. With the most conservative estimate, plus or minus one standard deviation of mismatch affects the return to occupational tenure by 1% per year.
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    The rhetoric of Red Power and the American Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969-1971)
    (2009-06) Kelly, Casey Ryan
    Beginning with Congressional efforts to terminate the sovereignty of federally-recognized tribes in 1953, the federal government's final efforts to assimilate American Indians parodoxically created the conditions for an urban pan-Indian movement for self-determination. Cities such as San Francisco swelled with alienated and militant young Indians seeking to reestablish a sense of place and community. On 20 November, 1969 a group calling themselves the Indians of All Tribes seized and occupied Alcatraz Island in the name of "all tribes." The 19-month long occupation grew into the crucible of contemporary American Indian activism, symbolizing a larger project of reclaiming a homeland for the indigenous peoples of North America. The occupation is referred to by many as the foundation of the concept of Red Power: a militant language, or way of speaking, that channels the American Indian community's intellectual and rhetorical power into the creation of a homeland. This project examines the rhetoric of the Indians of All Tribes to explain the features, tropes, symbols, utterances, and performances which constitute Red Power. Starting with the emergence of self-determination in separatist American Indian literary, underground press, and the speeches and minutes of emergent radical protest organizations, this project historicizes the concept of Red Power that informed the occupant's rhetorical and material practices. This dissertation examines the rhetoric of the Indians of All Tribes to demonstrate the ways in which the group's militant demands, radical interpretation of American history, and defense of traditional Indian practices constructed and affirmed a positive collective identity for many alienated and disempowered Indians grappling with the intersectional experience between urban and reservation life.