College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item Essays in Labor Economics(2023) Gonzalez Prieto, Nathalie; Abraham, Katharine G; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation has as a unifying theme the analysis of labor markets. It includes three papers that analyze labor markets from three different perspectives: the role of firms in workers’ careers, the effect of public policies on firms’ decisions, and the aggregate labor market effects of individual migration choices. These diverse perspectives show the complexity of labor markets and highlight some ways in which labor markets affect workers, firms and communities.In the first essay, the objects of study are the career outcomes of workers. More specifically, using Chilean employer-employee data, we provide evidence of the divergent trajectories of workers’ careers based on the type of firms they work at. We focus on earnings, periods of employment, and the number of jobs held over the five years after a job transition. Our findings indicate that there is an earnings penalty of 6.7% for joining a startup vs. an established firm. Workers who join a startup have a lower probability of being employed and hold fewer jobs over the five years we follow them. The second chapter focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of a public policy implemented at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when mandated quarantines prevented firms from operating, to maintain existing job relationships by providing liquidity in the form of payments to furloughed workers. We leverage a discontinuity in the eligibility for the policy and are able to identify a positive effect on the likelihood of job survival for workers with short tenure. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the effect was larger in sectors more affected by the pandemic and for more vulnerable workers. Finally, the third chapter looks at the aggregate labor market effects of experiencing a labor demand shock in a Commuting Zone (CZ) in the US. The main goal of that chapter is to better understand why local labor markets in the US experience a persistent decline in labor force participation following a recession. Using uniquely granular data from the Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), we show that there is a differential migration response to local demand shocks based on the age of individuals. In particular, we find that younger adults increase their in-migration to CZs experiencing a positive labor demand shock. Additionally, while the in-migration response of the retirement-age population also is positive, it is muted and their out-migration response to a positive shock is positive, effectively delivering a negative net migration response to a positive labor demand shock for this age group. The combination of these results indicates that following a positive labor demand shock, local labor markets in the US experience a persistent re-composition of their age structure that leaves them with a higher proportion of young people. On the flip side these results point to the fact that labor markets experiencing a negative demand shock being left with a higher proportion of retirement-age people as the product of the age differentiated migration.Item WORKING FOR PAY OR RAISING A FAMILY? THREE PAPERS ON WOMEN'S WORK EXPECTATIONS AND MARKET OUTCOMES(2013) García-Manglano, Javier; Bianchi, Suzanne M; Kahn, Joan R; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the gender revolution of the 1970s, we have learned a great deal about the determinants of female employment. One of the themes most frequently discussed in the literature refers to the role played by work expectations in shaping women's market achievement. As a supply-side explanation for women's market performance, work expectations emphasize women's internalized attitudes and preferences, which might lead some of them to make work and family decisions that will curtail their options down the road. To this point, most scholars have favored demand-side and contextual accounts of women's market achievement; these highlight mechanisms such as workplace discrimination against women or mothers, and similar structural constraints embedded in the larger cultural, social and economic systems. In this dissertation, I use longitudinal data to expand our understanding of women's work expectations in three directions. First, I revisit the neoclassical human capital argument's claim that individuals with low work expectations will invest less in human capital and choose jobs with lower penalties for work interruptions. I find support for this argument: work expectations are relatively good predictors of early baby-boom women's human capital accumulation, job characteristics, employment rates, hourly wages, and occupational prestige. Second, I explore variation in the role of work expectations across two cohorts of American women, early and late baby boomers. I find that rapid social change made it easier for later cohorts to absorb the negative market consequences of holding low work expectations in young adulthood. Third, I model the life-course employment trajectories of early baby boomers from ages 20 to 54, and find that a significant proportion of them exhibited intricate work patterns throughout adulthood, with periods in which they were focused on their career and other periods in which they seemed to pursue other life interests. My research shows that -when observed over time- most women's work behavior is characterized by a high degree of complexity. This calls for a more nuanced approach to the study of women's market performance, one that -together with the structural forces constraining their action- explicitly accounts for women's subjective expectations, preferences and attitudes towards work and family.