Economics Commons^™

Essays On The Labor Market Outcomes And Location Choices Of Military Veterans, Brian Bifulco

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The economic outcomes of military veterans are a persistent source of interest for economists, policy analysts, and the public in the United States. Veterans' outcomes bear directly on the decision of prospective recruits to join the military and current service-members to exit the military, informing policymakers about the long-term sustainability of the all-volunteer force. This dissertation focuses on veterans' economic outcomes by examining their relationship with market entry conditions and the location decisions veterans make when they exit the military.

Chapter 1 examines the earnings and employment outcomes of new military veterans associated with market entry conditions. This chapter intersects …

Parental And Individual Correlates Of Work Ethic In Young People In Albania, Eljona Elmazi

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The purpose of this study was to investigate the work ethic strength, dimensions, and correlates in young people in Albania. The review of the available research concluded that, regardless of the attention that youth-related topics have received in the last decade, there was a considerable gap in the understanding of the state and correlates of the work ethic in this group. Using the Multidimensional Work Ethic Profile – Short Form, the work ethic strength and dimensions were explored in an Albanian sample of (N = 501) 18 to 24 years old, otherwise known as Generation Z. Data were collected via …

Essays On Labor Market Size And Job Match Quality, Lan Lan

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This dissertation is comprised of two essays that delve into the construction of a major-related labor market and its correlation with college graduates’ job match quality. Investigating the job match quality of college graduates for different majors in large cities is crucial, as it provides evidence on which majors tend to yield better job matches. This contributes to the study of the return on major while also shedding light on how city size impacts individuals’ ability to find jobs that align with their educational level and major, thereby enriching the study of the benefits of agglomeration.

The first chapter examines …

Two Essays In Human Capital, Illia Polovnikov

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This dissertation is comprised of two essays on human capital. I analyze how early-life human capital boost shapes micro-level outcomes among disadvantaged children in the US. In the second chapter, I study the productivity convergence among OECD countries and evaluate to what extent the labor force’s sectoral allocation (due to different human capital profiles across countries) contributes to it. In the first chapter, which is joint work with Jorge Garc´ia and William Dougan, we analyze a large-scale trial of an early-childhood education program targeting premature, low-birthweight children, thereby oversampling twins. We find that failing to account for this oversampling obscures …

Qualitative And Quantitative Analysis Of Wage Differentials Using Nonparametric Methods, Eric Makela

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The vast empirical literature on wage differentials reflects extreme interest in the subject from economists, social scientists, and policymakers alike. A review of the literature reveals two noticeable shortcomings. First, nearly all past studies have assumed a linear relationship between earnings and worker characteristics without consideration as to the potential specification error this imposes on their estimates. Second, researchers have generally focused on simple mean effects rather than estimating the effects of characteristics and wage rates on earnings distributions as a whole. Using data from the American Community Survey, this Dissertation addresses both issues with a simple nonparametric approach, and …

Essays In Labor Economics, Adam Blott

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The three chapters of this dissertation are closely related to one another and pertain to work flexibility. The first chapter uses an occupational choice model to estimate how workers value schedule flexibility in terms of other on the job characteristics. The second chapter also estimates how workers value flexibility using a hedonic wage approach. This method provides an estimate of how workers value schedule flexibility in terms of real wages. In the third chapter I estimate the impact of family structure on the probability that men choose a flexible job.
Flexible work schedules are becoming an increasingly important characteristic for …

Migration And Child Educational Production: Aggregated Vs. Disaggregated Resource Modeling, Guo Li

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This paper studies the sensitivity of estimates on various assumptions about aggregation in modeling the school's effect in child educational production. By controlling for the endogeneity of school qualities in the production function, we evaluate the performance of a 'correct' aggregation educational production model versus simple aggregation educational production model in predicting the school resources' effect on academic outcome. Monte Carlo simulations on different modeling specifications shows that simple aggregation of school resources over a geographic area causes serious specification errors, and thus generates biased estimates for the marginal contribution of the school resources to test scores. The two aggregation …

Essays On Knowledge, Technology, And Economic Growth, Sung-Min Kim

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This thesis is motivated by the question, how does computer-related technological change affect the individual's incentive to acquire specialized knowledge? Specifically, will the impact of technological change be homogeneous for all workers regardless of their idiosyncratic characteristics such as educational attainments or occupation? If not, then how do the heterogeneous effects from advances in computer-related technology change the labor market? Based on the related theoretical frameworks from the literature, Chapter 2 focuses on the empirical implementations of heterogeneous impacts of information and communication technology on between-occupation wage differentials and within-group wage differentials, and Chapter 3 examines the impact of computerization …

Employment-Based Health Insurance And The Minimum Wage, Laura Bucila

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This dissertation contains a detailed picture of the employment-based health insurance coverage in the past twenty years, and it provides new estimates of the effects of increased federal and state minimum wages on the coverage of low-wage workers by this type of health insurance. I use March Current Population Surveys collected from IPUMS, for 1988 to 2005. Previous studies have found no significant evidence that increased minimum wages reduce fringe benefit receipt (Beeson Royalty 2000; Simon and Kaestner 2003). In contrast to these studies, I use a difference-in-difference approach and I define treatment groups as being individuals in the lowest …

Essays On Wage Inequality And Economic Growth, Jin-Tae Hwang

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This thesis is about the relationship between wage inequality and minimum wage, and then about parental choice and the impact of this on economic growth. First, it empirically examines the relation between wage inequality and the federal minimum wage. Then it develops a theory of how a parent of children with heterogeneous abilities makes choices on (a) investments in education for her children and (b) on the number of children she will have. Parental choices on these margins are shown to affect the rate of economic growth.
Chapter 1 briefly introduces my studies for the dissertation. In Chapter 2, I …

Essays In Defense Economics: Veterans' Human Capital Accumulation And Military Procurement Choice, Sebastian Negrusa

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The first chapter estimates the effect of aid on schooling decisions by analyzing the education subsidy provided through the Montgomery GI Bill. The effects are identified by exploiting unanticipated variation in the real value of education benefits between the time an individual joins the military and the time of separation. Using micro-level panel data, we find that military veterans have an elasticity of college attendance with respect to the subsidy that ranges from 0.4 to 0.6. Recruits and veterans are allowed to form expectations under different scenarios about the real future value of the benefits. We find little effect of …

Qualitative Aspects Of Mate Availability And Their Effects On Intra-Household Bargaining Power, Brighita Negrusa

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This dissertation studies the impact of changes in outside marriage market opportunities on intra-household bargaining power. In the first chapter, I analyze the impact of the availability of healthy mates on intra-household bargaining power. I specify a marriage market matching model and test the main prediction that in marriage markets in which both healthy and frail men marry, an increase in the relative scarcity of healthy women enhances wives' bargaining power. This effect is estimated in a collective labor supply framework in which spousal bargaining power and labor supply are inversely related. I use CPS data and Census data on …