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Title: Essays on Finance and Labor
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2019
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Abstract: My dissertation applies different empirical methodologies with a variety of administrative datasets to investigate the interrelationship between firms and labor market outcomes. Chapter 1 examines how and why market power affect wages differently in financial industries. Increasing industry concentration has raised concerns that declining competition among firms for labor has led to slow wage growth. However, I find that finance wages have increased by almost three times the increase in non-finance wages, despite similar trends in market concentration. Using data from the U.S. Census, I construct measures of firm-specific market power and show that higher market power is associated with significantly higher wages in finance than in non-finance. I provide evidence that rent-sharing plays an essential role in driving the more pronounced effect of market power on finance wages for two reasons. First, financial firms with higher market power can extract relatively higher rents to share. Second, financial firms give a relatively higher share of rents to workers, especially high-skill workers, due to relatively higher worker bargaining power. As rents are disproportionally distributed to high-skill workers, financial firms with higher market power are associated with relatively higher within-firm inequality...
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Authors: Ma, Wenting
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Department: Economics
Advisor: Paige P. Ouimet and Neville Fancis
Degree: Ph.D.
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Pages: 172
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other
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