Full Citation
Title: Essays in Labor and Macroeconomics
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2023
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI:
NSFID:
PMCID:
PMID:
Abstract: This dissertation comprises three chapters relating to how household characteristics can shape the impact of employment shocks and productivity shocks on households’ labor supply at the individual and aggregate level. In each chapter, I analyze household labor data and present empirical results that carry implications for aggregate labor. In the first two chapters, I also use models featuring search and matching between households and firms to explain the empirical results or derive implications. In the first chapter, I show that hourly workers tend to have more cyclically volatile hours per worker than salaried workers. Correlation between pay type and education can therefore partly explain the higher cyclical volatility of non-college graduates’ hours per worker. I use a model that distinguishes between hourly and salaried workers and features bargaining over hours between worker and firm to show how pay type itself can affect the behavior of a worker’s hours over the business cycle. Pay stickiness hinders worker and firm from adjusting hours in response to productivity changes, and a sticky salary is more constraining than a sticky wage. In the second chapter, I document that the cross-correlation in employed spouses’ transitions to unemployment, as well as in unemployed spouses’ transitions to employment, increased from 1976 to 2019. I model a labor market with married couples and correlated employment shocks to find the impact of these correlation increases on married women’s labor force participation rate. The rising overlap in spouses’ unemployment spells causes a decline in the value of a second earner, slightly reducing married women’s labor force participation. In the third chapter, I show that the share of workers in dual-employed households that share an occupation with their spouse rose from 3.5% to 6.8% over 1976 to 2022, nearly doubling, and that convergence of men’s and women’s occupational compositions can explain the majority of the increase. Full gender convergence would lead to a same-occupation rate of about 10%.
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Bush, Matthew
Institution: Indiana University
Department:
Advisor:
Degree:
Publisher Location:
Pages: 1-135
Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Gender, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Work, Family, and Time
Countries: