Download Free Three Essays In Applied Labor Economics Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Three Essays In Applied Labor Economics and write the review.

This thesis is composed of three chapters, each with its own theme and contribution to the applied microeconomics literature.
This thesis is a collection of three essays in labour economics and applied econometrics. The first two essays investigate workers productivity and their effort choice in a tree-planting firm. The third essay studies community cooperation in a public good experiment. Beyond the econometric techniques, the convergence point of this thesis is the question of how individuals incorporate external factors into their choices. How work fatigue affects productivity, how productivity shocks affect workers' choice of effort, and how social interactions affect community cooperation. Understanding and measuring the relevance of these external factors is important for designing incentives that influence individuals to act in a desired way. Appropriate incentives are the best way to regulate behaviour without imposing restrictions and rules that are costly to enforce and may create social frictions. From the first two chapters on productivity of tree planters two interesting findings stand out. First, workers' earnings can be increased by simply rearranging the working week in different work spells. This could be an inexpensive way for certain firms to increase their labour productivity. Second, planters' optimal choice of effort depends on productivity shocks. This means that effort incentives may have heterogenous effects due to the particular shocks experienced by each worker. From the third chapter, I find that involving community leaders in the decision of contributing or not to a public good enhance community cooperation. The presence of local leaders triggers cooperative behaviour that is unconditional and independent of the expected actions of other community members.
This dissertation includes three essays: Spatio-temporal analysis of labor turnover statistics develops regularized dynamic spatio-temporal methods for selecting the sparse set of geographic, industrial, and demographic local-area job separation rates that best predict future rates in a given area using the public use Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) made available by the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program; it is the first paper to quantify the extent to which geographic, industrial, and demographic networks explain the dispersion of local-area labor market statistics through space and time. Detecting and Repairing Data Errors in the Public Use Quarterly Workforce Indicator Data develops methods for detecting and repairing missing or erroneous observations in the QWI data. Real Options in Resource Economics reviews the application of options valuation techniques from finance to capital budgeting decisions affecting real investments (real options) in the existing literature in forestry, fishery, water, and nonrenewable resources.