Full Citation

Title: Essays on the Youth and Low-Skilled Labor Market

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2008

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Abstract: his dissertation consists of three chapters on the youth and low-skilled labor markets. In Chapter 1, I show that teen employment is significantly more responsive than adult employment to immigration, and that growth in low-skilled immigration appears to be a partial explanation for recent declines in teen employment rates. Using variation in immigrant shares across metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2000, I demonstrate that the impact of immigration on youth employment is at least twice as large as the impact on adults, and that immigration affects school enrollment decisions and the type of jobs held by native youth. These effects are strongest for black youth and youth from poorer and less educated families. The estimates suggest that a 10 percentage point increase in the immigrant share of a city's low-skilled population reduces the teen employment rate by 5 percentage points, implying that between one-third and one-half of the fall in teen employment between 1990 and 2005 can be explained by increased immigration. In Chapter 2, co-authored with David H. Autor and Alan Manning, we offer a fresh analysis of the effect of state and federal minimum wages on earnings inequality over 1979 to 2007, exploiting substantially longer state-level wage panels than were available to earlier analyses as well as a proliferation of recent state minimum wage laws. We obtain identification using cross-state and over-time variation in the 'bite' of federal and applicable state minimum wages, as per influential studies by Lee (1999) and Teulings (2000, 2003).

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Authors: Smith, Christopher L.

Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Department: Economics

Advisor: David Autor and Joshua Angrist

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Publisher Location: Cambridge, MA

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration, Other

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