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In this dissertation I examine changes in wage inequality in two chapters. In the first chapter, I examine the slowdown in the relative demand for college-educated labor in the U.S. since the early 1980s. A large literature suggests that this puzzling slowdown is primarily the result of non-monotone changes in the demand for skill, particularly since the mid-1990s, induced by the introduction of computers to the labor market. In these two essays, I develop a complementary result: I show that roughly 10-60% of the gap in the annual growth rates of the relative demand for college-educated workers between the 1963-1982 and 1982-2008 periods can be closed by adjusting for shifts in supply and demand within schooling groups; however, a slowdown in relative demand growth beginning in 1993, well-documented in the literature and potentially-related to recent technological changes, remains pronounced across all specifications.
Whilst there is widespread agreement about the goals of economic policy, consensus about how best to achieve them can be harder to achieve. No issues are more contentious than employment and income distribution. In recent years full employment and a just distribution of incomes have been downgraded as policy objectives, as greater priority has been given to price stability and balance of payments objectives. This emphasis has been supported by a mainstream economic theory which has an unswerving belief in the ability of market forces to achieve a satisfactory regulation of employment and income distribution Other economists have remained more sceptical, and none more so than Kurt Rothschild. This new volume collects together his twenty two most important essays in the area, many of which are appearing in English for the first time. Throughout pure theory is linked to relevant practical investigations.
This collection of essays honors a remarkable man and his work. Erik Thorbecke has made significant contributions to the microeconomic and the macroeconomic analysis of poverty, inequality and development, ranging from theory to empirics and policy. The essays in this volume display the same range. As a collection they make the fundamental point that deep understanding of these phenomena requires both the micro and the macro perspectives together, utilizing the strengths of each but also the special insights that come when the two are linked together. After an overview section which contains the introductory chapter and a chapter examining the historical roots of Erik Thorbecke's motivations, the essays in this volume are grouped into four parts, each part identifying a major strand of Erik's work—Measurement of Poverty and Inequality, Micro Behavior and Market Failure, SAMs and CGEs, and Institutions and Development. The range of topics covered in the essays, written by leading authorities in their own areas, highlight the extraordinary depth and breadth of Erik Thorbecke's influence in research and policy on poverty, inequality and development. Acknowledgements These papers were presented at a conference in honor of Erik Thorbecke held at Cornell University on October 10-11, 2003. The conference was supported by the funds of the H. E. Babcock Chair in Food, Nutrition and Public Policy, and the T. H. Lee Chair in World Affairs at Cornell University.
This dissertation explores questions in labor economics with a particular focus on economic inequality. As one might expect, race, gender, and location are recurring themes. The dissertation makes headway on long-standing questions in economics, in large part, through the collection of administrative datasets, and complementary field experiments. In the first chapter, I present evidence that employers pay a premium to equalize pay between workers if those workers can share information about their compensation. To establish a causal relationship between pay transparency and wage compression, I work with the operator of an online labor market who granted me access to detailed records of the tasks that employers advertise and the prices at which workers are willing to do them. These data capture the entire wage determination process, making it possible to observe the drivers of wage compression and the gender wage gap. Three facts emerge. First, for a particular multi-worker setting, pay between any two workers differs on average by over fifty percent when workers propose a price for their services. Second, when workers are in the same location, employers deliberately raise the pay of lower bidders, reducing dispersion, irrespective of differences in assessed productivity or reservation values. Finally, employers who compress pay when workers work in the same place will allow disparities when workers are physically separated. Overall, we find that even in this short-term spot market for labor, consideration of relative pay are quantitatively important for both wages and labor supply. We combine these online platform data with a field experiment to show that, with few institutional constraints, paying a premium to compress pay may be efficient when workers can communicate pay. Our field experiment shows that when pay is unequal, workers strategically use information about co-worker pay to negotiate higher wages that can double the time it takes to complete a job. Worker morale response to lower relative pay can lead quality of output to fall by a full standard deviation. An employer can make trade-offs between these costs by adjusting the terms of negotiation or compressing pay. A profit maximizing employer may optimally equalize wages ex-ante in equilibrium. An important extension to this empirical result is the effect of gender on the ramifications of pay transparency. While a male worker who communicates with co-workers is, on average, able to close the wage gap between the highest paid work and himself by 85 percent, a female worker in the same position closes the gap by 12 percent. This result may give pause to advocates of pay transparency policies if their goal is more equal pay for men and women. The second and third chapter examine the relationship between place and productivity. In the second chapter, I study the impact on aggregate productivity of policies that affect a firm's choice of where to locate. In particular, I study the relationship between state corporate taxes and the investment of firms in R& D, as captured by new patents. While tax advantaged-areas make investment cheaper for firms, they often require firms to locate where their productivity will be lower. In this chapter, I create a unique patent-establishment panel dataset by linking the residence of scientists on each patent application granted, over a thirty-year window, with the address of U.S. establishments. With this dataset, I show that innovation productivity is lower in low tax places, suggesting that place-based productivity is a more important determinant of innovative activity than traditional explanations which focus on the cost of investment. Our analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we analyze establishment mobility and show that lower taxes attract establishments. In particular, a one percent lower corporate tax rate increases the share of establishments in a local area by roughly 3.4%. Second, we exploit establishment migration to separate variation in innovation productivity due to establishment-specific and place-specific characteristics. We show that moving to a place that is 5% more productive increases a given firm's patent activity by 1 %. We follow this literature in evaluating the validity of this variation using pre-move behavior and control functions in the spirit of Dahl (2002). We then relate these place effects to corporate taxes and document that low tax places tend to have lower innovation productivity. The third chapter provides evidence that the voluntary choice of African-Americans to move from Northern regions in the U.S. to Southern regions is responsible in part for lower occupational standing and real income. I find that these migration patterns are also part of a trend that accelerated during the early 21st century among Northern born African-Americans. We combine evidence from four nationally-representative surveys, the U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, and the Survey of Income Program and Participation, to statistically assess the forces behind a reverse migration from North to South and associated economic trade-offs. Using variation in the precise timing of individual moves and a model of the wage process, I provide evidence that, on average, African-American are moving to places where their earnings are lower after adjusting for regional price differences, and much lower relative to non-Hispanic white migrants. As suggestive evidence about the reason for these moves, we find that the magnitude of the economic trade-off between origin and destination is proportional to the severity and duration of riots which occurred in Northern cities at the time of the earlier Great Migration. We conclude from this that attractive amenities of the South may play a minor role in driving a reverse migration relative to the failure of some Northern cities to integrate during the 20th century. In chapters 1 and 2, I work closely with co-authors Bobak Pakzad Hurson, currently a classmate of mine, and Juan Carlos Suarez Serrato, who was a post-doc at Stanford at the inception of our collaboration, and who has since take a faculty position at Duke University.
Contains 15 papers, which were presented at the Fourth Meeting of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, Catania, Sicily, July 2011. This title includes measuring segregation, welfare and liberty, the use of influence functions in distributional analysis, and the axiomatic approach to multidimensional inequality.
The first essay looks how the disability wage gap as well as the gender, race, and ethnicity wage gaps are affected by macroeconomic conditions. Even though a large literature looks at the trends of these wage gaps, very little research considers their cyclicality. I use the SIPP linked to administrative earnings records to look at how these gaps vary with local labor market conditions from 1978 to 2010. For annual earnings, the disabled and blacks seem to fare better than their counterparts as labor market conditions worsen while women seem to fare worse than men, and the results are mixed for Hispanics. For hourly earnings, the results are largely mixed and inconclusive. There is also evidence that these results vary by decade. The second essay asks whether the gender gap in total compensation is smaller than the gender wage gap. One potential explanation for the observed gender wage gap is that men and women value the nonwage aspects of a job differently. I construct two individual level measures of total compensation - one using supplemental CPS data on employer contribution to health insurance premiums and one using the NLSY linked to employer cost data. I find that the observed gender gap resulting from these measures of total compensation is almost identical to the observed gender gap in wages. The third essay considers how parents allocate scarce resources among children with different levels of initial endowment. Parents that are interested in maximizing the return on their investment might reinforce initial conditions, but parents motivated by equity might compensate. I use the SIPP to directly measured health endowment as whether the child has any health conditions and parental investment as the frequency with which parents do various activities with each child. The results show that there is some evidence that parents do not invest equally in children of different health endowments, but the evidence is far from overwhelming. Moreover, the results differ depending on parents' education and the children's age group. In general, these results seem to indicate that pattern of parental behavior depends crucially on the specific investment.
My thesis focuses on the determinants of wage differentials. I analyse some of the immediate causes for wage differentials including different types of experience and coworker characteristics. In order to understand poverty and intergenerational wage inequality for marginalized groups we need to look at academic achievement in early schooling, I also investigate how reading achievement of non-affluent groups may be improved. The first chapter focuses on the effect of industry experience on wages. I estimate a simultaneous equation model using a large panel of Italian workers for the years 1986-2004. I find that wage returns to industry experience are much higher than wage returns to job seniority, and that returns to general labour market experience dominate the effects of both industry experience and job tenure. The second chapter investigates the effect of coworker characteristics on wages. I measure coworker characteristics by the average labor market value of coworkers' observed and unobserved characteristics The effect of interest is identified from within-firm changes in workforce composition, controlling for person effects, firm effects, and sector-specific time trends. My estimates are based on a very large linked employer employee dataset of workers and firms from the Italian region of Veneto for the years 1982-2001. I find that a 10-percent increase in the average labour market value of coworker skills is associated with a 3.6 percent wage premium. Between 10 and 15 percent of the immigrant wage gap can be explained by differences in coworker characteristics. The last chapter investigates the effects of providing school districts with supplemental funding to support the language development of students who speak a non-standard English dialect. Exploiting the staggered uptake of this funding across school districts in British Columbia we find that the policy substantially improved the reading scores of Aboriginal students between grade 4 and grade 7.