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My dissertation explores the macroeconomic implications of heterogeneity in labor markets and the role of public policy in improving labor market efficiency. First, I aim to shed light on the importance of individual and firm level decisions in determining aggregate labor market outcomes such as the level of mismatch in worker skills and job requirements. Second, I analyze the role of public policy in affecting these decisions and hence, the economy wide aggregates.
My dissertation consists of three chapters studying the heterogeneity in the labor market. Chapter 1 studies the by-age employment heterogeneity in response to technology shocks. Chapter 2 studies the by-age labor force participation heterogeneity in response to macroeconomic shocks. Chapter 3 studies the effect of monetary policy on the employment of occupations with different levels of routine task intensity. A central question in macroeconomics is how employment changes in response to technological progress. In Chapter 1, I broaden this question by investigating if there exist age-specific effects. I use the mixed autoregression (MAR) model to explicitly model the employment to population ratio as a function of age. The results show the responses of young and old employment ratios are much more negative than prime-age, and the response of the young is three times lower than that of the old. Moreover, the forecast error variance decomposition results show that technology shocks' contribution decreases by age. The labor force participation rate is weakly procyclical, as opposed to employment, which is strongly procyclical. Therefore, labor force participation is mostly assumed to be constant in the literature. However, the young, prime-age, and old participation rates are heterogeneous in cyclicality and volatility. In Chapter 2, I study the heterogeneity in the participation of 16-65 old in response to important macroeconomic shocks. I extend the identification scheme in the MAR model from zero to sign restrictions, which enable me to include labor market shocks important for explaining participation rate fluctuations. The results show that young, prime-age, and old participation rates respond differently to the technology, demand, labor supply, and wage bargaining shocks.Routine occupation employment share has decreased, while non-routine occupation employment share has increased since the 1980s. This trend of job polarization has been contributing to the growth in wage inequality in the US. In Chapter 3, I study the effect of a contractionary monetary policy shock on occupational employment with different levels of routine task inputs in a MAR model. I show that routine occupation groups' employment, especially those with higher offshorability, are disproportionally affected by a contractionary monetary policy shock.
In this dissertation, I build macroeconomic models to answer questions of empirical relevance for the study of labor markets. The dissertation consists of an introductory overview and three research essays. The first essay is devoted to duration dependence in unemployment, namely the fact that recently unemployed workers have a signicantly better chance of finding a job than the long-term unemployed. I build a directed search model to quantify the importance of three common explanations for this fact: (i) unobserved worker differences, (ii) skill loss, and (iii) job-search effort decline. Two novel results emerge: first, the bulk of the effect of unobserved heterogeneity is concentrated in the first six months of the unemployment spell; the drop in job-finding rates observed at longer spells is mostly a result of skill loss and lower search effort. Second, skill loss has a vastly greater impact on job-finding than the decline in search effort. These results have two clear implications for labor market policy: (i) the impact of active labor market programs is expected to be larger for the long-term unemployed; (ii) job-training programs are expected to be more effective than job-search assistance policies at reducing long-term unemployment. In the second essay I study how information obtained by a worker while trying to find a job affects her job-search effort. Specically, I analyze how a worker, who is uncertain about her labor market traits and learns about them while looking for a job, allocates her search effort over the unemployment spell. The main result is that search effort is increasing over time when the worker is optimistic about her traits but decreasing when the worker is pessimistic about her traits. This result can explain discrepant empirical findings from previous literature on search effort. The final essay is devoted to job-search effort as an insurance channel. I build a model in which workers face substantial risk in the labor market but they have two means of self-insurance against this risk: increase their savings and their search effort. The main result is that when labor market risk becomes more severe workers increase both their savings and search effort but the increase in savings is twice as large as the increase in search effort. That is, workers make use of search effort as an insurance channel but much less than the savings channel.
This paper analyzes the macroeconomic effects of fiscal and labor market policies in developing countries. The basic framework considers a small open economy with a large informal production sector and a heterogeneous work force. The labor market is segmented as a result of efficiency considerations and minimum wage laws. The basic model is then extended to account for unemployment benefits, income taxation, and imperfect labor mobility across sectors. The analysis indicates, among other results, that a reduction in unemployement benefits has a positive effect on output of tradable goods by lowering both the level of efficiency wages and the relative rent captured by skilled workers.
This thesis is composed of three independent essays in heterogeneous agent macroeconomics. They all explore how family structure affects investment choices and labor market outcomes of individuals. The first chapter, Housing and Savings Behavior Across Family Types, studies how family structure in the form of marital status and changes thereof affect housing demand. I develop a life-cycle model of housing and financial portfolio choice with dynamic and heterogeneous family types that I calibrate to household survey data from the United States. My findings indicate that divorce risk encourages precautionary savings of couples and reduces their demand risky assets and for indivisible housing. Prospective marriage, lower income levels and larger exposure to income fluctuations prevent singles from becoming homeowners. As a result, abstracting from distinct family types overstates the effectiveness of housing policies such as lowering property taxes and reducing housing transaction costs by up to over 100%. This misspecification is largest among young households, who are most likely to be single and whose marital transition risk is highest. In contrast, regulations that facilitate stock market participation help to foster wealth accumulation, because they encourage investment in high return assets that are cheaper to liquidate in the event of a marital or labor income shock. In the second chapter, The Gender Investment Gap over the Life-Cycle, I document with data from the Survey of Consumer Finances that single women hold on average less risky portfolios than single men. To understand the sources of this "Gender Investment Gap", I develop a life-cycle model of portfolio choice that allows for gender differences along observable characteristics and stochastic processes. The model is able to replicate the empirical patterns without introducing gender heterogeneity in preferences. Counterfactual simulations reveal that lower income levels and larger household sizes (mainly through the presence of children) of single women make it optimal for them to invest less risky. Hence, the gender wage gap gets amplified because it results in investment behavior that pays on average lower returns. Importantly, not only current-period income levels and number of household members help to explain this finding but also expectations over their future realizations. The third chapter, Joint Search over the Life-Cycle, co-authored with Philipp Grübener and Lukas Nord, focuses on labor market outcomes and couples. Specifically, we study how intra-household insurance against individual job loss through increased spousal labor market participation, also called the added worker effect, varies over the life cycle. First, we show in U.S. data that the added worker effect is much stronger for young than for old households. A stochastic life cycle model of two-member households with job search in a frictional labor market is capable of replicating this finding. The model suggests that a lower added worker effect for the old is driven primarily by better insurance through asset holdings. Human capital differences between employed young and old contribute to the difference but are quantitatively less important, while differences in job arrival rates play a limited role.
This thesis is composed of three independent chapters, but all centered around the broader topic of how macroeconomic policies interact with various aspects of household heterogeneity. Monetary Policy and Inequality under Labor Market Frictions and Capital-Skill Complementarity We provide a new channel through which monetary policy has distributional consequences at business cycle frequencies. We show that an unexpected monetary easing increases labor income inequality between high and less-skilled workers. In particular, this effect is prominent in sectors intensive in less-skilled labor, that exhibit high degree of capital-skill complementarity (CSC) and are subject to matching inefficiencies. To rationalize these findings we build a New Keynesian DSGE model with asymmetric search and matching (SAM) frictions across the two types of workers and CSC in the production function. We show that CSC on its own introduces a dynamic demand amplification mechanism: the increase in high-skilled employment after a monetary expansion makes complementary capital more productive, encouraging a further rise in investment demand and creating a multiplier effect. SAM asymmetries magnify this channel. Monetary-Fiscal Interactions and Redistribution in Small Open Economies Ballooning public debts in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic can present monetary-fiscal policies with a dilemma if and when neutral real interest rates rise, which might arrive sooner in emerging markets: policymakers can stabilize debts either by relying on fiscal adjustments (AM-PF) or by tolerating higher inflation (PM-AF). The choice between these policy mixes affects the efficacy of the fiscal expansion already today and can interact with the distributive properties of the stimulus across heterogeneous households. To study this, I build a two agent New Keynesian (TANK) small open economy model with monetary-fiscal interactions. Targeting fiscal transfers more towards high-MPC agents increases the output multiplier of a fiscal stimulus, while raising the degree of deficitfinancing for these transfers also helps. However, precise targeting is much more important under the AM-PF regime than the question of financing, while the opposite is the case with a PM-AF policy mix: then deficit-spending is crucial for the size of the multiplier, and targeting matters less. Under the PM-AF regime fiscal stimulus entails a real exchange rate depreciation which might offset "import leakage" by stimulating net exports, if the share of hand-to-mouth households is low and trade is price elastic enough. Therefore, a PM-AF policy mix might break the Mundell-Fleming prediction that open economies have smaller fiscal multipliers relative to closed economies. Weak Wage Recovery and Precautionary Motives after a Credit Crunch During the economic recovery following the financial crisis many advanced economies saw subdued wage dynamics, in spite of falling unemployment and an increasingly tight labour market. We propose a mechanism which can account for this puzzle and work against usual aggregate demand channels. In a heterogeneous agent model with incomplete markets we endogenize uninsurable idiosyncratic risk through search-and-matching (SAM) frictions in the labour market. In this setting, apart from the usual precautionary saving behaviour, households can self-insure also by settling for lower wages in order to secure a job and thereby avoid becoming borrowing constrained. This channel is especially pronounced for asset-poor agents, already close to the constraint. We introduce a credit crunch into this framework modelled as a gradual tightening of the borrowing constraint (and utilizing a continuous time approach, known as HACT). The perfect foresight transition dynamics feature falling wages despite a tightening labour market and expanding employment. As households suddenly find themselves closer to the borrowing constraint, the increased precautionary motive drives them to accept lower wages in the bargaining process, while firms respond to this by posting more vacancies, leading to a tighter labour market and falling unemployment. If the household deleveraging pressure is persistent enough after the credit crunch, it can explain the weak wage recovery in spite of already stronger aggregate demand.
This thesis contains three essays on the macroeconomic effects of labor markets with a special emphasis on market power and the determination of wages. In the first chapter, Miguel Zerecero and I study the efficiency and welfare effects of employer and union labor market power. We use data of French manufacturing firms to first document a negative relationship between employment concentration and wages and labor shares. At the micro-level, we identify the effects of employment concentration thanks to mass layoff shocks to competitors. Second, we develop a bargaining model in general equilibrium that incorporates employer and union labor market power. The model features structural labor wedges that are heterogeneous across firms and potentially generate misallocation of resources. We propose an estimation strategy that separately identifies the structural parameters determining both sources of labor market power. Furthermore, we allow different parameters across industries which contributes to the heterogeneity of the wedges. We show that observing wage and employment data is enough to compute counterfactuals relative to the baseline. Third, we evaluate the efficiency and welfare losses from labor market distortions. Eliminating employer and union labor market power increases output by 1.6% and the labor share by 21 percentage points translating into significant welfare gains for workers. Workers' geographic mobility is key to realize the output gains from competition. In the second chapter, Miguel Zerecero and I propose a bias correction method for estimations of quadratic forms in the parameters of linear models. It is known that those quadratic forms exhibit small-sample bias that appears when one wants to perform a variance decomposition such as decomposing the sources of wage inequality. When the number of covariates is large, the direct computation for a bias correction is not feasible and we propose a bootstrap method to estimate the correction. Our method accommodates different assumptions on the structure of the error term including general heteroscedasticity and serial correlation. Our approach has the benefit of correcting the bias of multiple quadratic forms of the same linear model without increasing the computational cost and being very flexible. We show with Monte Carlo simulations that our bootstrap procedure is effective in correcting the bias and we compare it to other methods in the literature. Using administrative data for France, we apply our method by doing a variance decomposition of a linear model of log wages with person and firm fixed effects. We find that the person and firm effects are less important in explaining the variance of log wages after correcting for the bias. In the third chapter, I study peer effects at the workplace. I focus on how potential peers determine a worker's location and her future wage profile. I empirically disentangle if workplace peers affect each other through learning or network effects. Similarly to the literature, I document the importance of learning which is more pronounced for the youngest cohorts arguably with no networks. I propose a structural model to understand the mechanism behind learning. The final goal of the model is to quantify the impact of peer learning the firm geographical allocation of workers, and on the rising between firm wage inequality.
A companion to the bestseller, The Impact of Economic Policies on Poverty and Income Distribution, this title deals with theoretical challenges and cutting-edge macro-micro linkage models. The authors compare the predictive and analytical power of various macro-micro linkage techniques using the traditional RHG approach as a benchmark to evaluate standard policies, such as, a typical stabilization package and a typical structural reform policy.