This thesis presents three essays, which each address a salient recent pattern in the British labour market. The first essay concerns whether or not men and women experience the business cycle differently, through their labour market outcomes, and why this might be the case. The second essay seeks to explain the cyclical amplification of unemployment duration, in particular the substantial and persistent increase in UK long-term unemployment observed during and since the Great Recession. The final essay studies recent changes in British wage inequality. To shed light on the possible factors driving these changes, it asks simply whether they are mostly determined by increasing or decreasing wage dispersion within or between firms. Gender and the business cycle: an analysis of labour markets in the US and UK Starting from an improved understanding of the relationship between gender labour market stocks and the business cycle, we analyse the contributing role of flows in the US and UK. Focusing on the post-2008 recession period, the subsequent greater rise in male unemployment can mostly be explained by a less cyclical response of flows between employment and unemployment for women, especially the entry into unemployment. Across gender and country, the inactivity rate is generally not sensitive to the state of the economy. However, a flows based analysis reveals a greater importance of the participation margin over the cycle. Changes in the rates of flow between unemployment and inactivity can each account for around 0.8-1.1 percentage points of the rise in US male and female unemployment rates during the latest downturn. For the UK, although the participation flow to unemployment similarly contributed to the increase of the female unemployment rate, this was not the case for men. The countercyclical flow rate from inactivity to employment was also more significant for women, especially in the US, where it accounted for approximately all of the fall in employment, compared with only forty percent for men. Long-term unemployment and the Great Recession: evidence from UK stocks and flows Although modest by historical standards, long-term unemployment nonetheless more than doubled during the UK’s Great Recession. Only a small fraction of this persistent increase can be accounted for by the changing composition of unemployment across personal and work history characteristics. Through extending a well-known stocks-flows decomposition of labour market fluctuations, the cyclical behaviour of participation flows can account for over two-thirds of the high level of long-term unemployment following the financial crisis, especially the procyclical flow from unemployment to inactivity. The pattern of these flows and their changing composition suggest a general shift in the labour force attachment of the unemployed during the downturn. Recent changes in British wage inequality: evidence from firms and occupations Using a linked employer-employee dataset, we study the increasing trend in British wage inequality over the past two decades. The dispersion of wages within firms accounts for the majority of changes to wage variance. Approximately all of the contribution to inequality dynamics from firm-specific factors are absorbed by controlling for the changing occupational content of wages. The modest trend in between-firm wage inequality is explained by a combination of changes in between-occupation inequality and the occupational composition of firms and employment. These results are robust to using weekly, hourly or annual measures of employee pay.

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Wage increases received outside of central agreements in Sweden have been declining since the turn of the millennia and are now at an almost non existing level. These wage increases are called wage drift and this study focuses on explaining the variables that determine the wage drift. Through time and sectoral analyses this study contributes with new perspectives regarding the wage setting process in Sweden looked past in earlier research. Our findings suggest an existing robust relationship between wage drift and inflation as well as unemployment. Additionally, central agreements were shown to have a significant effect on the wage drift. Finally, the foreign direct investments also had a somewhat weaker but still impactful effect on the wage drift. Our time period of 2001-2019 includes a financial crisis that heavily affected many of our explanatory variables. Our study concludes that the unemployment as well as the foreign direct investment have had a relatively larger impact after the crisis compared to before. On the contrary the central agreements seem to have had a relatively smaller impact on the wage drift after the crisis compared to before. When considering potential differences within our sectors and their impact on wage drift we found significant differences, especially regarding the central agreements.

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With the transition of the economy in China, migrants start holding a more and more important position in the labor market. Therefore, from this dissertation, we try to explore different topics related to the migrants in China. This dissertation consists of three essays on who chooses to migrate, how networks affect migrants' outcomes, and what is the intergenerational impact of parental migration on children's risk preferences. In the first chapter, we briefly introduce the motivation and contribution, and then we provide the methods and detailed findings in the following chapters. Chapter 2 examines the impact of the endogeneity of the decision to migrate on the wage differentials between migrants and non-migrants in China. We find that migrants are self-selected from the upper tail of the income distribution in their home location. Consistent with a theoretical model of migration choice, we show that the size of the selection effect on wage depends on the wage differences between the prefectures of origin and destination as well as migration cost. The selection effect also differs among workers with different education and in different cities. Chapter 3 studies how networks affect migrants' migration decisions, employment, and wage levels by using 2005 China's mini-census. Different from existing studies, this paper takes into account the existence of self-selection in the labor market. With the help of a theoretical model, we have a better understanding of the mechanism of networks as well as the different network effects on rural and urban migrants. We find out that networks affect both rural and urban migrants' migration decisions positively. In terms of employment, networks exert positive impacts on rural migrants but not on urban ones, which is due to the different quality drops between rural and urban migrants when the networks increase. Such employment effects also lead rural migrants to face a more severe negative wage impact than urban migrants. Chapter 4 investigates how parental migration affects left-behind underage children's risk preferences. By focusing on migrant parent groups, we are able to estimate whether the influence of nurture could also affect children's risk preference levels or not. The findings suggest that besides the intergenerational transmission of risk preferences between parents and children, parental migrations do have an influence on girls' risk preference levels. In addition, in terms of adult children's risk-related outcomes, we are able to find a positive parental migration impact on daughters' self-employment decisions. Findings help us have a better understanding of the relevant factors of risk preferences, and also confront the impact of the separation of parents and children. / Doctor of Philosophy / Nowadays, migration becomes increasingly common and migrants take a large proportion of the labor market. With the economic development and the closer connections among regions, people are more likely to study or work outside their home locations than before. Even though there is still a strict household registration system in China, we can find the migration supporting systems are becoming established, and facilitate easier migration for more and more people. Having a better understanding of migrants helps us make better policies as well as have the labor market and society develop better. This dissertation explores who choose to migrate (Chapter 2), how the social connections or networks affect migrants' employment and wages (Chapter 3), and whether there is any intergenerational impact on migrants' children in terms of risk preferences (Chapter 4) using methods from labor economics and economic theory. We conclude that the best works tend to migrate first in the labor market, and social connections have different impacts on rural and urban migrants in terms of employment and wages. Moreover, we notice that migrant parents affect the left-behind children's risk preferences by both influences of nature and nurture. In sum, we study different topics on migrants and have a deeper understanding of how migrants are affected in the labor market as well as how migrants affect their next generations.

The gender inequality in the labor market has long been a discussed and studied topic, and today it is acknowledged that women are discriminated against and face disadvantages in earnings compared to men. This study aims to further investigate if immigrant women face additional earnings differentials due to their ethnicity, more specifically in the Norwegian labor market. By using census data on incomes from a 2019 wave in Norway, this dissertation runs two separate regressions including variables based on diverse socio-demographic characteristics to estimate the regression. Results show that there are evident differences in wages for being a woman and being an immigrant, as the first regression gives statistically significant evidence of negative correlations between logarithmic income and the variables gender and immigrational status. In order to answer the research question an interaction variable is added. The interaction variable, female*immigr, gives statistically significant results in the second regression. The positive estimate of the interaction variable between being a female and being an immigrant implies that immigrant women actually have a smaller disadvantage than native women regarding the gender wage gap of wage earnings. This estimate proves the opposite of our hypothesis and previous research. Furthermore, male immigrants tend to show a greater wage disadvantage than immigrant women. When separating the regression by gender and adding new variables, the outcome implies that men’s wages are more positively affected by being married compared to women. Women on the other hand are more positively affected by educational level. However, women face a larger disadvantage if also being immigrants when moving up the educational ladder, while men practically keep a constant correlation regardless of educational level. The findings from this dissertation moreover provides support for the notion of discrimination on wages as an important factor behind gender differentials in the Norwegian labor market.

As far as wage disparity and its social, political and economic consequences are concerned, one can easily see that it is a popular topic on which many studies and research have been conducted. The recent financial turmoil drew the people`s attention on the issue of wage disparity, and the people started to discuss this issue on the equity and fairness grounds, but the only thing that economists can do is to examine the economic consequences of the wide wage disparities. It is much easier to conduct a study on the issue of wage disparity by using the data on the professional sport teams due to their several advantages and in this paper I chose to study the relationship between intra-team wage dispersion and teams` performance by using data on randomly chosen 16 teams from the National Football League over the sample period of 2000-2008. First of all, a general introduction to the issue takes place. Then a detailed theoretical background is provided. After mentioning some previous evidence and methodology, empirical results are revealed. Those results show us that Ramaswamy`s and Rowthorn`s Damage Potential Hypothesis is supported over Levine`s Cohesiveness Hypothesis by the data.

<p>As far as wage disparity and its social, political and economic consequences are concerned, one can easily see that it is a popular topic on which many studies and research have been conducted. The recent financial turmoil drew the people`s attention on the issue of wage disparity, and the people started to discuss this issue on the equity and fairness grounds, but the only thing that economists can do is to examine the economic consequences of the wide wage disparities. It is much easier to conduct a study on the issue of wage disparity by using the data on the professional sport teams due to their several advantages and in this paper I chose to study the relationship between intra-team wage dispersion and teams` performance by using data on randomly chosen 16 teams from the National Football League over the sample period of 2000-2008. First of all, a general introduction to the issue takes place. Then a detailed theoretical background is provided. After mentioning some previous evidence and methodology, empirical results are revealed. Those results show us that Ramaswamy`s and Rowthorn`s Damage Potential Hypothesis is supported over Levine`s Cohesiveness Hypothesis by the data.</p>

I have targeted to analyze the patterns of wage development in the changing macroeconomic conditions. According to the expectations the evolution of nominal and real wages is inter alia positively affected by the changes in labor productivity and negatively influenced by the deviation of unemployment rate from NAIRU. The evidence of procyclical behavior of real wages is not very robust as there was not found significant correlation in the time of decreasing real GDP. The most of results of the models applied on post Lehman Brothers period are consistent with the regressions based on complete data set. The chosen data proved to be not very suitable to show the extent of wage rigidity. The significant negative relationship between the development of real wages and changes in inflation rate implies the visibility of symptoms of wage rigidities even when we work with average macroeconomic variables.

I depart from traditional theories of production fragmentation to allow for the explicit consideration of frictions on the labor and product markets. These are crucial in yielding outcomes that cast some shadows on “optimistic” views of outsourcing that emerge from frictionless models. While in general the overall positive welfare effect is confirmed, the distributional consequences may be particularly adverse for some categories of workers. The three chapters that constitute the thesis deal, respectively, with the role played by the imperfect mobility of workers, imperfect competition in outsourcing industries, and imperfect factor price adjustments.