Labor Economics Commons^™

Essays On Technology And The Labor Market With Search Models, Soonhong Min

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation focuses on the impact of technological changes on workers based onthe task-based model. In the first chapter, I first investigate the impacts of two types of technologies on employment and job choices in the directed search model. The relationship between technology and labor with respect to complementarity and substitutability defines technology as labor-augmenting and labor-saving. Progress of labor-augmenting technology mainly works in jobs hiring highly-skilled workers in positive ways while labor-saving technological development affects jobs with middle-skilled workers in destructive ways during the last two decades in KLIPS data. The consequence of technological advances intensifies the advantage of …

The Great Resignation: A Content Analysis Of News Sources' Portrayals Of The Covid-19 Labor Shortage., Mackenzie Williams

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

When workers left the labor market in large numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic, proclamations of a labor shortage emerged extensively throughout the news. In this study, I analyze the coverage of the worker shortage among three news sources with different political orientations. Several themes emerged from analyzing a total of 75 articles. The findings showed that the perspective shown in the article, the cause of the labor shortage, restaurant worker portrayal, support of solutions, and opinion of the labor shortage all differed based on the political identity of the news source. This research supports previous findings that show there is …

Labor Market Institutions And The Incidence Of Payroll Taxation, Jinyoung Kim, Seonghoon Kim, Kanghyock Koh

Research Collection School Of Economics

Despite the unambiguous predictions of the canonical model of a competitive labor market, empirical studies of the labor market effects of payroll taxation provide conflicting evidence. We estimate the labor market impacts of payroll taxation in Singapore, the country with the most competitive and flexible labor market among the countries investigated in the literature. By exploiting the sharp reduction in payroll tax rate when workers turn 60, we find that the reduced payroll tax rate in Singapore has a large effect on wages without changes in employment. Our meta-analysis shows consistent evidence that varying degrees of labor market competitiveness across …

Privatizing Retirement: The Case Of The Female Chilean Worker, Teresa A. Renier

CSB and SJU Distinguished Thesis

Chile has been called the “promised land” of Latin America, a First World country, and an economic miracle. Privatizing social security in Chile has often been hailed by economists as the key for their unprecedented economic growth and success within the past few decades—so much so that other countries have adopted similar pension models within their own countries. Somewhere along this path of astonishing economic growth, Chile, like other developed nations, has arrived at a point where it can no longer assume that the typical worker is a man. Yet as the gap continues to decrease between female and male …

The Effect Of Covid-19 On The Low-Wage Workforce Nationwide, Katie Gilbertson

Undergraduate Research Symposium Podium Presentations

Key Takeaways: 1. Each low-wage occupation pays less than the mean hourly wage in their respective MSA. 2. Least amount of wage variance among MSAs in 2019. 3. In Las Vegas 2/3 of occupational wages increased, but employment dropped in 14/15 occupations. Leisure and hospitality occupations hardest hit and slowest to recover.

Reemployment Services And Eligibility Assessments (Resea) In Maryland—Formative Evaluation, Program Year 2019, Christopher J. O'Leary, Gabrielle Pepin, Ting Zhang, Conrad Helms

Upjohn Institute Technical Reports

Unemployment insurance (UI) exists to provide temporary partial wage replacement during periods of involuntary unemployment while beneficiaries are actively seeking reemployment. The reemployment effort required of UI beneficiaries, which balances the work disincentive of income replacement, ensures that UI is social insurance rather than social welfare.

In 2017, Congress appropriated funding to provide reemployment services and eligibility assessments (RESEA) to UI beneficiaries. The legislation also required that states receiving RESEA conduct annual evaluations to produce causal evidence that reemployment services and eligibility assessments are effective.

In this formative evaluation, we produce the first causal effect estimates of the Maryland RESEA …

Economic Impact Of The Montcalm County Wind Energy Project, Jim Robey

Reports

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Student Debt On Career Choices Among Doctor Of Public Health Graduates In The United States: A Descriptive Analysis, Chulwoo Park, Eric Coles

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

(1) Background: As gaps in the public health workforce grow in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, graduates of the schools of public health, especially Doctors of Public Health (DrPH), are poised to offer relief. While there are some known recruitment issues, student debt and debt impact on career choices are understudied. (2) Methods: In the present study, we perform a descriptive analysis of the potential impact of student debt on career choices among DrPH students and alumni in the United States using a cross-sectional national online survey. A total of 203 participants (66: alumni and 137: current students) completed …

Wage Inequality Amongst Artists, Raegan Christianson

INSPIRE Student Research and Engagement Conference

Presents research on hypotheses on pay differentials for artists.

Worth In The Workforce: How To Reform The Fair Labor Standards Act 14(C) Provisions For Persons With Disabilities, Todd Robatin

Helm's School of Government Conference - 2021-2024

No abstract provided.

Building The Tribal Vocational Rehabilitation Self-Employment Toolkit, University Of Montana Rural Institute

Employment

RTC:Rural researcher Dr. Catherine Ipsen details the collaborative work that went into designing a Vocational Rehabilitation toolkit specifically for Native American and Alaskan Native Tribal Vocational Rehabilitation Programs.

Understanding Campus Environmental Sustainability: A Thematic Analysis Of Interviews With Facilities Management Staff And Administrators At The University Of Denver, Alejandro Cerón, Dinko Hanaan Dinko, Izzy Beltran, Madeline Bonner, Mia Glover, Linh Nguyen, Madeline Ohaus, Maren Parchen, Quisi Rodriguez-Oregel, Delanee Taylor, Dani Thompson, Kansas Wood

Anthropology: Undergraduate Student Scholarship

This project sought to understand what influences sustainability choices on the University of Denver campus. Universities and colleges play a pivotal and influential role in shaping sustainable future discourse in society. As centers for innovation and research, universities continue to generate new knowledge and skills necessary to create awareness of the negative impact of human activities on the environment and pathways to mitigate these impacts. Over the past decades, there has been a growing transformation of universities from places of knowledge creation to places where created knowledge is implemented. Thus, in the field of environmental change, there is a growing …

Three Essays In Applied Microeconomics, Ding Liu

Economics Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is consist of three empirical studies in microeconomics. The first part explores how monopsony power affects the impact of robot adoption on US labor markets. Theoretically, I show that robots have stronger effects (either positive or negative) on employment and wages in a perfectly competitive labor market than a perfectly monopsonistic labor market. Moreover, the sign of the effects depends on whether robots and labor are substitutes or complements. The empirical results are consistent with the theory. The employment and wage effects diminish as labor market monopsony power grows and they become statistically insignificant in near-monopsonistic labor markets. …

Non-Profits And Living Wages, Jack Buckley

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Nonprofit Studies Capstone Projects

Non-Profit organizations must find ways to divide their budgets between staff wages and program services, as well as paying their staff a living wage. Unlike for-profits who can increase prices for consumers when they need to increase staff wages, non-profits do not have this luxury. The goal of this project was to collect data on how non-profits manage their budgets and if they provide staff with living wages. A survey was sent out with a total of eight responses, giving a breakdown of various non-profit’s budgets and if they pay a living wage. Overall, seven out of eight non-profits pay …

The Power Of The Middle Class In The United States And China, Sarah Kent

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The global middle class has been experiencing exponential growth, but because of differences among countries in regard to stages of development, the growth has not been spread evenly across the world. The United States and much of the Western World is undergoing a shrinking middle class due to economic deregulation and automation whereas China and other countries in the Eastern World have had middle class growth in recent years (OECD, 2019). The juxtaposition between the middle classes is also reflected in the juxtaposition of the respective countries’ GDP growth. Therefore, the United States and China, because of their pronounced systemic …

Takes Two To Tango: The Fusion Of Slow Fashion And Agroecology To Combat The Fast Fashion Industry, Sejal Krell

Undergraduate Theses, Capstones, and Recitals

Fast fashion has been around for longer than the world can remember, after all, there has always been a need for clothes. Nonetheless, it has not been until the past 50 years that fast fashion has become a titan within the industry. Many consider it to be the golden child of fashion with its low production costs, mass retailing, and low prices reaching consumers of all socioeconomic levels. However, the realities of this industry – specifically pertaining to the environment, economy, social sphere, and public health – reveal a different story, of injustice. After discussing the history and rise of …

Innovation And Productivity: Is Learning By Doing Over?, Ružica Bukša Tezzele

Economic and Business Review

Labour productivity is one of the key measures of economic performance. It represents the total volume of output produced per unit of labour. This paper examines the influence of business investments in research and development and education on labour productivity using system dynamics modelling. The results reveal that investments in education and training activities generate higher labour productivity growth. The impact of innovations largely depends on their diffusion and adoption that require educated and trained users. The new industrial era makes learning by doing quietly disappear and demand a great flexibility of workers and their ability to rapidly acquire new …

The Economic And Business Case For Ensuring High-Quality Childcare And Preschool, Timothy J. Bartik

Presentations

No abstract provided.

South Haven Community Health Assessment, Jim Robey, George Erickcek, Kathleen Bolter, Gerrit Anderson, Emily Boyle

Reports

No abstract provided.

Economic Impact Of Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School Of Medicine, Jim Robey, Kathleen Bolter

Reports

No abstract provided.

Monopsony In Manufacturing, Chen Yeh, Claudia Macaluso, Brad J. Hershbein

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.

Monopsony In The U.S. Labor Market, Chen Yeh, Claudia Macaluso, Brad J. Hershbein

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper quantifies the extent to which the U.S. manufacturing labor market is characterized by employer market power and how such market power has changed over time. We find that the vast majority of U.S. manufacturing plants operate in a monopsonistic environment and, at least since the early 2000s, the labor market in U.S. manufacturing has become more monopsonistic. To reach this conclusion, we exploit rich administrative data for U.S. manufacturers and estimate plant-level markdowns—the ratio between a plant’s marginal revenue product of labor and its wage. In a competitive labor market, markdowns would be equal to unity. Instead, we …

Ethical Ai Development: Evidence From Ai Startups, James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Lydia Reichensperger, Robert Seamans

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial Intelligence startups use training data as direct inputs in product development. These firms must balance numerous trade-offs between ethical issues and data access without substantive guidance from regulators or existing judicial precedence. We survey these startups to determine what actions they have taken to address these ethical issues and the consequences of those actions. We find that 58% of these startups have established a set of AI principles. Startups with data-sharing relationships with high-technology firms; that were impacted by privacy regulations; or with prior (non-seed) funding from institutional investors are more likely to establish ethical AI principles. Lastly, startups …

Why Aren’T People Leaving Janesville? Industry Persistence, Trade Shocks, And Mobility, Sebastian Ottinger, Michael Poyker

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Particular industries have dominated many locations in the United States for more than a century. We show that individuals residing in such locations were systematically less likely to move away from there during the past few decades. By identifying locations with sizable employment shares in the same manufacturing industries in 1870 and 1980, we documented less out-migration in the decades following 1980 than earlier. In response to the largest shock affecting manufacturing employment since then, these locations adjusted differently: the “China shock” led to higher unemployment in their communities, but fewer people moved away. Drawing on rich data of social …

Seeking For And Returning To Overseas Work? Developments Surrounding Filipinos’ Return To Overseas Jobs Beside A Pandemic, Alvin P. Ang, Jeremaiah Opiniano

Economics Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

How Receiving A Pell Grant Affects Students’ Work Hours, Michael S. Kofoed

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.

Essays On Labor Economics, Gabriel Movsesyan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the first chapter, I evaluate the wage impacts from exogenous and endogenous peer effects within different metropolitan areas. I construct comparison groups for workers within the same industry and Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA) residence based on support from existing literature on social networks, and estimate peer and network effects in a spatial auto-regressive model with a network structure that in- corporates group fixed effects. Inclusion of these effects reveals that both observed and unobserved factors within each network have significant effects on individual outcomes. This is the first attempt to estimate the social effects on wages using the …

Pell Grants And Labor Supply: Evidence From A Regression Kink, Michael S. Kofoed

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

A concern in higher education policy is that students are taking longer to graduate. One possible reason for this observation is an increase in off-campus labor market participation among college students. Financial aid may play a role in the labor/study choice of college students—as college becomes more affordable, students my substitute away from work and toward increased study. I use data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) to exploit nonlinearity in the Pell Grant formula to estimate a regression kink and regression discontinuity designs. I find that conditional on receiving the minimum of $550, students reduce their labor …

Place-Based Consequences Of Person-Based Transfers, Brad J. Hershbein, Bryan A. Stuart

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.

Place-Based Consequences Of Person-Based Transfers: Evidence From Recessions, Brad J. Hershbein, Bryan A. Stuart

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper studies how government transfers respond to changes in local economic activity that emerge during recessions. Local labor markets that experience greater employment losses during recessions face persistent relative decreases in earnings per capita. However, these areas also experience persistent increases in transfers per capita, which offset 16 percent of the earnings loss on average. The increase in transfers is driven by unemployment insurance in the short run, and medical, retirement, and disability transfers in the long run. Our results show that nominally place-neutral transfer programs redistribute considerable sums of money to places with depressed economic conditions.