Browsing by Subject "Wages"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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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 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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    Essays on structural change, trade, and development.
    (2009-05) Bermudez, Miguel Fernando Ricaurte
    The essays in this dissertation employ models of heterogeneous agents or firms to focus on these two aggregate-level issues: (1) structural change and labor market outcomes, and (2) trade and foreign direct investment. Chapter 1 surveys the literature on industrial and sectoral wage differentials. It begins with a review of the empirical evidence and methods to estimate wage differences. Later, it shows estimates of these differentials for the United States using Current Population Survey (CPS) data from 1968 to 2008. The presence of interindustry wage differentials is reported for a number of different specifications. A key finding is that while wage differentials have monotonically decreased for male workers over the period analyzed, the inclusion of female workers disrupts this trend. Chapter 2 studies the reasons why services became the dominant sector in industrialized economies. I argue that institutional differences which affect the degree of competition in labor and goods markets explain: (a) the rise in the service sector share of output and employment, (b) international differences in sectoral structure, and (c) changes in relative sectoral wages. I use evidence on market imperfections to calibrate a two-sector model where household unions bargain with firms for wages. The least competitive sector pays higher wages, and employment is restricted accordingly. The model produces time series consistent with the service revolution as it happened in the United States and European economies between 1950 and 2000. The model's contribution is to offer an explanation for relative wage differences, in the context of structural change. In particular, while generating changes in shares of output and employment, the model offers an explanation for relative wage differences, which the standard literature misses. Chapter 3 (co-authored with Katherine Lande-Schmeiser) studies the striking differences in industry level data on ratios of exports to sales of foreign affiliates (i.e., FDI sales). We determine what is needed to endogenously generate this pattern of export and FDI sales. By calibrating a model of monopolistic competitive firms, we find that tradability of goods is not enough to capture the observed sectoral differences, as is commonly assumed. We explore variants of the model and show that sector-specific taxes on multinationals and home bias allow us to replicate these differences.
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    Essays on teacher labor markets
    (2012-11) West, Kristine Lamm
    This dissertation is comprised of three essays related to teacher labor markets. The first essay describes a theoretical model which incorporates an oft overlooked fact of educational production, namely the fact that teachers are asymmetrically well informed about what actions are best for their specific classes. The model shows that to take advantage of teachers' local knowledge, districts should offer contracts with output-based pay for performance coupled with decentralized decision making and support for teachers to help them set locally appropriate goals. I use data from Minnesota's Q-Comp program to empirically test the model. The data, however, do not confirm (or reject) the theory. The second essay investigates the impact of collective bargaining on teacher contracts using the 2003-04 and 2007-08 Schools and Staffng Survey (SASS) and data from a survey that I administered. Contracts negotiated via collective bargaining have greater returns to experience than do districts without collective bargaining. Unions do not appear to be a roadblock to basing compensation on student performance but they do oppose basing compensation on administrator review and basing tenure on student performance. The third essay turns to an analysis of average hourly wages. Using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), I compare teachers' wages to demographically similar workers in other occupations. First I estimate that teachers work an average of 34.5 hours per week annually. Using the ATUS data, I conclude that high school teachers earn approximately 11% less than full time college educated workers in other occupations; but elementary, middle and special education teachers are not underpaid relative to full time college educated workers in other occupations.
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    The Impacts of Education Credentials and Training Options on Exit Wages of Women in MFIP
    (Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, 2013-05-20) Justilien, Romilda; Mom, Sophak; Truong, Jonathan; Walker, Patrick