Essays in Labor Economics / Hanna Wang.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Wang, Hanna, author.

Contributor:

Todd, Petra, degree supervisor.

University of Pennsylvania. Department of Economics, degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Economics.

Labor economics.

Economics--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--Economics.

Local Subjects:

Economics.

Labor economics.

Economics--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--Economics.

Genre:

Academic theses.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (119 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 81-04A.

Place of Publication:

[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] : University of Pennsylvania ; Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

This thesis consists of two chapters and examines questions centered around human capital and labor market outcomes. Chapter 1 studies how a variety of child-related policies affect women's decisions to work and have children over the course of their lives. With the dramatic fall of fertility rates in the recent decades, developed countries are facing a crisis to sustain social infrastructure for an aging population. This acts as one of the main reasons for the implementation of a range of pronatalist policies, some of which are simultaneously aimed at increasing labor supply among mothers. I analyze these policies in the context of Germany from two different perspectives. First, I study two recent reforms: a change in paid parental leave from fixed payments to wage-contingent payments for a shorter duration and an expansion of low-cost public childcare. Then, I investigate how to optimally design of a set of five different policies, including childcare, parental leave, and other forms of child subsidies. The objectives I consider are maximizing overall fertility with utility constraints and maximizing welfare with fertility constraints. I develop and estimate a dynamic discrete-choice model of fertility and female labor supply with endogenous human capital accumulation and exogenous marriage and divorce. Overall, I find that policies differ substantially in their effects on women with different characteristics. The parental leave reform increases fertility and lowers employment rates but only among highly-educated women, whereas the childcare reform increases fertility and employment evenly across all women. With regards to optimal policy, the solution for maximizing fertility increases unconditional per-child subsidies and decreases the wage replacement rate of parental leave pay to encourage fertility among less educated women. The solution for maximizing welfare increases childcare subsidies to achieve higher employment and consumption. Both solutions cut taxes for single mothers, thereby also providing insurance against divorce to married mothers. The first solution is able to increase fertility by 4% and the second achieves a welfare gain equivalent to 0.5% of consumption.In Chapter 2 my coauthor Joonbae Lee and I investigate how workers with different qualifications competing for the same jobs differ in their search effort. The importance of search effort for employment outcomes has long been recognized and a number of papers examine its determinants for identical workers. We are interested in the incentives of heterogeneous workers, in particular, does a more or less qualified worker send out more applications and how likely is each to be hired? For this we consider a large anonymous labor market in which workers with a continuum of types choose a number of costly applications to send out. The applications arrive randomly at firms offering the same wage. We argue that this setting applies to the labor market for public school teachers among others. Firms have common preferences over the worker type and will hire the most preferred applicant possible. In this setting is not obvious how rank considerations affect search effort. Sending out one more applications can insure against the event in which all other applications fail. However, if the success probability per application is too small, the worker finds it too costly to send many applications. We show that in equilibrium the number of applications first increases in worker rank and then decreases. Thus low ranked workers below a threshold not only have a lower per-application success rate compared to their higher ranked counterparts but also send out fewer applications, resulting in an even lower employment probability. Contrary to that, when the social objective is to maximize the number of matches, we find the planner's solution has number of applications monotonically decreasing in rank.

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 81-04, Section: A.

Advisors: Todd, Petra E.; Committee members: Hanming Fang; Andrew Postlewaite; Andrew Shephard.

Department: Economics.

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2019.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9781088368176

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.

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