This dissertation consists of three essays in applied microeconomics. These essays investigate different aspects of the impact of technology on labor market outcomes and firm strategy. The first essay, co-authored with Ronald L. Oaxaca, is in the area of labor economics and it investigates the relation between non-neutral technological change and the gender gap in wages. This essay is the first to address the issue of the recent narrowing of the gender wage gap in the context of technological change by using a novel approach to separately estimate the effects of technological change and discrimination on the gender wage gap. Using a constant elasticity of substitution production function and Current Population Survey data on employment and wages by industry and occupation, the results show that changes in non-neutral technological change explain between 5% and 9% of the narrowing of the wage gap between 1979 and 2001. The latter two essays span topics across applied industrial organization, firm strategy and labor economics. The second component of my dissertation investigates the relation between technological knowledge diffusion through the labor mobility of scientists and the organization of R&D activities by innovative firms. Using a labor mobility measure from the Current Population Survey March Supplements as a measure for inter-firm technology spillovers and a panel of R&D alliance data for 18 U.S. industries between 1989 and 1999, a Poisson estimation shows that firms facing a 10% increase in the labor mobility of scientists have a 5% increase in the annual number of R&D collaborations. The third essay is an empirical analysis of the impact of knowledge dissemination generated by the labor mobility of scientists and engineers on a measure of the pace of innovation. Using an unbalanced panel of firms containing patent data matched with firm data across eight innovative industries, from 1989 to 1998, along with a measure of the labor mobility of scientists and engineers, this essay provides evidence that firms in industries exposed to levels of labor mobility of scientists and engineers that differ by 1%, have an expected time lag between sequential generations of technologies that differs by 0.56 years.

This dissertation examines the effects of career interruptions on workers’ wages. In chapter four I examine whether controlling for the type of interruption differently affects men’s and women’s wages and therefore can be used to explain the remaining gender wage differences. The increased participation of married women in the labor force has increased their wages from just 30% of men’s wages in 1890 to nearly 80% as of 2001. Thus, although the gender wage gap has narrowed over time, it has yet to be eliminated. One argument for the persistence of the gender wage gap is that previously researchers have used poor measures of experience to estimate men’s and women’s wages. Although previous studies have made strides in measuring experience, including controls for the timing of work experience, the gender wage gap persists. I extend the wage-gap literature by including controls for the types of interruptions men and women encounter. Because they typically experience different types of interruptions, I examine whether the varying types affect wages differently. I control for the types of interruptions and find similar effects for men’s and women’s wages. My study shows that types of job interruptions do not explain the remaining wage differentials. The fifth chapter extends from the fourth chapter by including controls for all periods of unpaid leave from work. I examine whether wage differences exist between workers who return to their current employer post-interruption versus those who change employers post-interruption. I find differences in the wage effects from different types of unpaid leave for men and women. Chapter six extends from previous chapters by including controls for all periods of paid leave from work in addition to unpaid leaves from work. I examine whether depreciation effects occur when women spend time out of work but receive compensation through paid maternity leaves. I find no evidence that time out of work because of paid maternity leaves depreciates skills.

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This dissertation consists of three chapters concerning topics in economic history and labor economics. The first chapter studies how the 1906 San Francisco Fire impacted the biographies of those who lost their homes in the fire, while the second chapter shows that destination quality is a key determinant for the returns to childhood migration. The third chapter proposes a novel strategy to estimate the gender wage gap. The first chapter explores the short- and long-run consequences of the 1906 San Francisco Fire, one of the largest urban fires in American history. I use linked US Census records to follow San Francisco residents and their sons from 1900 to 1940. Implementing a spatial regression discontinuity design across the boundary of the razed district to identify the effect of the fire, I find that the fire displaced households away from San Francisco in the short- and medium-term, it forced men into lower-paying occupations, and out of entrepreneurship. Constructing a novel measure of kin presence, I provide suggestive evidence for risk-sharing among extended family in San Francisco, which mitigated the disruptive effects of the fire. While individuals recover over time in many dimensions, the negative effect on business ownership is persistent over decades. Moreover, affected children have lower educational attainment. Therefore, my findings reject the hope for a “reversal of fortune” for the victims, in contrast to what is found for more recent natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina. In the second chapter, I show that destination quality, measured as average educational attainment among permanent residents, is a key determinant for the returns to childhood migration in Indonesia. First, I document that average differences in educational outcomes are small between children who moved domestically and those who did not. However, conditional on having migrated, destination turns out to be very important. Exploiting variation in the age of migration, I show that children who spend more time growing up in better districts have higher graduation rates and more years of completed schooling. These effects are persistent and result in better labor market outcomes. In the third chapter (joint with Hannah Illing and Linh Tô), we propose a novel strategy to estimate the gender wage gap by comparing men and women who succeed each other in the same job position. We identify unexpected worker deaths in German social security data in 1980-2019, and then compute the wage gap between the deceased worker and their successor for different gender combinations. We find that holding the job position constant, men who replace deceased women earn substantially higher wages. The opposite is true when women follow deceased men. The implied "replacement gender wage gap" in the 1980 to 2019 period is about 15 to 19 percent. In addition, we find that the gap has decreased over time, and it is higher in West Germany compared to East Germany.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(経済学) / 甲第23669号 / 経博第652号 / 新制||経||300(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院経済学研究科経済学専攻 / (主査)教授 山田 憲, 教授 西山 慶彦, 准教授 高野 久紀 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Economics / Kyoto University / DGAM

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Irrespective of professional experience and educational background, gender pay disparity is a problem in the federal government. Women have to overcome salary barriers, such as agency segregation, position segregation, and invisible barriers known as the glass ceiling and the glass wall. Recent studies have indicated that human capital variables, people skills, discrimination, and policies all contribute to gender pay disparity in America's workforce. However, there are limited studies that focus on the indirect factors that also contribute to gender pay inequality. The purpose of this quantitative research was to investigate the relationship between wages and job responsibility (as defined by an employee's job series) for all federal employees within the GS14 pay grade working in the state of Virginia. The data source for this retrospective study came from the December 2014 archived federal employee records that were retrieved from the Office of Personnel Management website. Ordinary least square regression modeling was used to analyze the data collected from the Office of Personnel Management central personnel data file. The results from the data analysis demonstrated a significant relationship between job responsibility and wages. The results from the data analysis demonstrated that men earned higher wages than did their female counterparts and were given more authority in the technical and professional job series. This study promotes positive social change because it confirms and extends understanding of the gender wage gap in the federal workforce. The findings from this research encourage policy makers to revisit existing policies and implement new policies aimed at ensuring women receive pay equal to their male counterparts.

[pt] Essa tese é composta por três artigos empíricos independentes. No primeiro capítulo é avaliado em que medida diferenças no histórico profissional entre os gêneros influenciam o diferencial de salários observado no mercado de trabalho formal brasileiro. Para isto, utiliza-se uma amostra aleatória e representativa de 1 porcento dos trabalhadores presentes na RAIS / MTE entre os anos de 1994 e 2009. A partir dessas informações é reconstruída a trajetória profissional dos indivíduos pertencentes à amostra. As estratégias empíricas exploram a característica longitudinal dessa base de dados para gerar informações complementares acerca do diferencial de salários entre gêneros. Os resultados revelam que as medidas de histórico profissional têm impactos economicamente relevantes sobre os rendimentos individuais. Períodos de ausência no mercado de trabalho reduzem em média os rendimentos e um maior engajamento dos trabalhadores implica salários maiores. Entretanto, a inserção dessas medidas mais fidedignas de histórico profissional dos trabalhadores acarreta uma diminuição de no máximo 10 porcento na magnitude do coeficiente associado ao diferencial de salários entre os gêneros, ou seja, um impacto bastante reduzido. O segundo capítulo investiga a importância relativa de duas dimensões da qualidade dos professores para a aprendizagem em matemática e língua portuguesa dos alunos da oitava série do ensino fundamental na rede de ensino paulista. Com este propósito, adota-se uma abordagem de função de produção educacional e a principal especificação utiliza um modelo de valor adicionado com controle para o desempenho passado dos estudantes. Os resultados mostram que tanto o conhecimento quanto as atividades pedagógicas dos professores em sala de aula têm impacto positivo e estatisticamente significante sobre a aquisição de habilidades cognitivas. Entretanto, o efeito do conhecimento dos docentes apresenta uma magnitude pequena em termos econômicos. Já os impactos associados à adoção frequente de práticas pedagógicas eficazes tem magnitude bastante relevante. Por exemplo, a intervenção de substituir um professor de matemática que não passa lição de casa sempre por outro que o faz aumenta a proficiência dos alunos em aproximadamente 12 porcento de um desvio padrão da distribuição de notas. O terceiro capítulo analisa a relação entre identidade partidária e as escolhas políticas para o contexto das municipalidades brasileiras no ciclo político entre 2004 e 2008. Para isto, utiliza-se o arcabouço de regressão com descontinuidade para estimar o efeito causal local de um município ser governado por um partido de esquerda ao invés de um de direita sobre as políticas públicas. Os resultados apontam que governos de esquerda gastam proporcionalmente menos com urbanismo e saúde e mais com administração. No entanto, esses maiores gastos administrativos não estão associados a um inchaço da máquina pública com servidores. / [en] This thesis is composed of three independent empirical articles. In the first chapter is evaluated to what extent differences in labor supply factors and careers by gender influence the wage gap observed in the brazilian formal labor market. For this, we use a 1 percent representative random sample of the workers in RAIS / MTE between the years 1994 and 2009. From this information is retrieved the career path of individuals in the sample. The empirical strategies exploit the longitudinal feature of this database to generate complementary information about the gender wage gap. The results show that the labor market history measures have economically relevant impacts on individual incomes. Career interruptions reduce average earnings and workers with continuous labor market attachment have higher wages. However, the inclusion into the analysis of these more reliable job experience variables results in a reduction of up to 10 percent in the magnitude of the gender wage gap estimates. This represents a quite reduced influence. The second chapter investigates the relative importance of two dimensions of teacher quality for the learning in mathematics and Portuguese of eighth graders of the elementary school in São Paulo state. For this purpose, we adopt an approach based on the educational production function and the main specification uses a value added model with control for the students past grades. The results show that both the teachers knowledge and pedagogical activities inside the classroom have a positive and statistically significant impact on the acquisition of cognitive skills. However, the teachers knowledge effect has a small economic magnitude. Yet the impacts associated with the frequent application of effective teaching practices are quite large. For instance, the intervention defined by the replacing a math teacher who does not always give homework for another that does it, increases the students proficiency in approximately 12 percent of a standard deviation of the grades distribution. The third chapter examines the relationship between political partisanship and government size for the context of the brazilian municipalities after 2004 local election. In order to achieve this, we use a regression discontinuity research design to estimate the local causal effect on political choices of a municipality being governed by a left-wing party instead of a right-wing one. The results show that left-wing governments spend proportionately less on urbanism and health, and more on administration. Nevertheless, this higher administrative spending is not associated with an excessive hiring of public employees.

TITLE: THE GENDER WAGE GAP OF CIVIL SERVICE EMPLOYEES AT ILLINOIS PUBLIC FOUR-YEAR UNIVERSITIES

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