We study the labor market impact of opening borders to low-wage countries. The analysis exploits time and regional variation provided by the 2004 EU enlargement in combination with transport links to Sweden from the new member states. The results suggest an adverse impact on earnings of present workers in the order of 1 percent in areas close to pre-existing ferry lines. The effects are present in most segments of the labor market but tend to be greater in groups with weaker positions. The impact is also clearer in industries which have received more workers from the new member states, and for which across-the-border work is likely to be more common. There is no robust evidence on an impact on employment or wages. At least part of the effects is likely due to channels other than the ones typically considered in the literature.

This dissertation explores the effect of teen childbearing on the adult mother’s employment, earnings and welfare participation. This study contributes to the literature on the consequence of teen childbearing by relying on original datasets and using an array of samples and econometric methods to test the robustness of the results. We use state administrative data from several sources including the Georgia subset of the Vital Statistics for the years 1994-2002, the Wage and Employer files for the years 1990-2003, and the Welfare dataset for the years 1990-2005. We select three samples. The first sample is constructed with sisters raised in families on welfare, where one sister is a teen mother and the other a non-teen mother. The second sample is composed of young mothers who were pregnant as teens and whose first pregnancy ended with either a birth (teen mothers) or a fetal death (non-teen mothers). A third sample is selected by the propensity score matching technique on a subset of the second sample. For the labor market outcomes, this study suggests that teen childbearing has a negative effect on the employment and earnings of Blacks in the miscarriage sample and in the propensity score sample. However, White teen mothers are more likely to be employed and to earn more than the White non-teen mothers in the miscarriage sample. In contrast, the sisters’ sample does not show any statistical significant effect of teen childbearing on employment or earnings. These mixed results are probably due to the different distribution of the mothers’ race and socioeconomic status before pregnancy. Concerning welfare receipt, very few mothers in the sisters’ sample and no mothers in the propensity score sample receive welfare during the years of study. For the miscarriage sample, White teen mothers are less likely than the White non-teen mothers to receive welfare at any time. Blacks become less likely to receive welfare as their child’s age increases. The effect on Blacks might be due to the welfare reform that tightened the rules for welfare eligibility. This research suggests that as far as employment and earnings are concerned, policy dollars aimed at preventing teenage childbearing would be more efficiently used for the Blacks and low-income populations. However, the small magnitude of the teen coefficients in the employment and earnings analyses suggests that teen pregnancy prevention only will not have a very dramatic influence on the adult mothers’ standards of living. Therefore, policy dollars should also be directed to issues correlated with teen childbearing such as poverty or low education attainment. As for welfare participation, teen mothers are no more likely to rely on public assistance than non-teen mothers so their welfare dependence should not be a concern.

<p>Longitudinal surveys have revolutionized empirical research and our understanding of the dynamic processes that affect the economic prosperity, health and well-being of the population. This dissertation explores and provides evidence, through three empirical applications, on the costs and benefits of designing, implementing and using data from a new, innovative longitudinal survey, the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS). The survey, which is representative of the Mexican population living in Mexico in 2002, is designed to follow movers within Mexico and also those who move to the United States. This design lies at the center of the contributions of my research to the scientific literature.</p><p>Attrition is the Achilles heel of longitudinal surveys. The first essay of the dissertation focuses on the cost of attrition for scientific knowledge. Following the same individual through time allows a researcher to trace the evolution of a respondent's behaviors and outcomes in a dynamic framework; however, if attrition is selected on unobserved characteristics, the advantage of using panel data could be severely hindered. Exploring different methods to adjust for attrition, this essay provides evidence of limitations of standard post-survey adjustments strategies that are the standard in the literature. These approaches, exploit only baseline characteristics of the respondents and, conditional on those characteristics, treat attriters as missing at random. I provide evidence that this assumption is substantively important and rejected in the MxFLS in spite of the fact that attrition in that survey is low relative to other nationally-representative surveys conducted in the United States and abroad. </p><p>The second essay in this dissertation exploits the fact that MxFLS follows movers within Mexico and those who move across the Mexico-US border to provide new insights into the mechanisms that underlie the selectivity of migrants within Mexico, how they differ from migrants who move from Mexico to the U.S. and how those who return contrast with the migrants who remain in the U.S. more permanently. The results provide evidence that human capital is predictive of migration within Mexico and to the United States, but that there is little indication that the decision to stay in the United States is highly correlated with education. In contrast, having relatives in the United States is not only a powerful predictor of migration to the United States, but it is also predictive of successful economic assimilation. </p><p>The third essay exploits a different dimension of the longitudinal survey in order to address an important question regarding the impact of unanticipated crime and violence on population well-being. To wit, the essay rigorously examines the impact of the recent surge in violent crime in Mexico on the labor market outcomes, migration, and wealth of the Mexican population. The timing of the last two waves of the MxFLS paired with the panel nature of the survey, allows the comparison of outcomes of the same individual in periods of low and high violence, which removes the potentially endogenous time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity between respondents. Moreover, due to the fact that the MxFLS was designed to follow migrant respondents, this study is able to directly test whether there is a systematic migratory response to crime. The results from this analysis find that crime predicts migration and it negatively affects the labor outcomes of self-employed individuals. In addition, the negative effects on the labor outcomes have translated into reductions in per capita expenditure at the household level, which suggests that the recent wave of violence in Mexico may have long-term consequences on the wealth and well-being of Mexican households.</p> / Dissertation

<p>How households and individuals respond to adverse and unanticipated shocks is an important concern for both economists and policy makers. This is especially true in developing countries where poverty, weak infrastructure, and a lack of social safety nets often exacerbate the effects of adverse shocks on household welfare. My research addresses these issues in the context of three economic outcomes and behaviors - early life health and the accumulation of human capital, willingness to take on financial risk, and behavior in the labor market. The results of this research project both adds to our understanding of how life experiences shape individuals' well-being and behavior and how policy can help individuals achieve long-term improvements in the lives following adverse events.</p><p>My research focuses on households and individuals affected by a large-scale natural disaster, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. I utilize data from the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR), a unique longitudinal survey of individuals and households living in coastal communities in Aceh and North Sumatra, Indonesia, at the time of the tsunami. The STAR surveys were conducted annually for five years after the disaster and include a wide range of demographic, economic, and health measures.</p><p>In the first chapter, Child Height after a Natural Disaster, co-authored with Elizabeth Frankenberg, Duncan Thomas, and Jed Friedman, we investigate the immediate and long-run impacts on child health of in utero exposure to stress induced by the tsunami. We investigate whether in utero exposure to stress, as measured by tsunami-induced maternal posttraumatic stress, affected the growth of children born in the aftermath of the tsunami in the critical first five years of their lives. Although previous studies suggest that in utero exposure to stress is related to a number of adverse birth outcomes such as prematurity and lower birth weight, there is little evidence of the impact on linear growth, a strong correlate of later life income. We find evidence that children exposed to high levels of stress beginning in the second trimester experienced reduced growth in the first two years of their lives. We also find evidence that growth reductions largely disappear by age five. This suggests that significant catch-up growth is possible, particularly in the context of pronounced post-disaster reconstruction and economic rehabilitation.</p><p>In the second chapter, The Impact of a Natural Disaster on Observed Risk Aversion, I investigate the short and long-term impacts of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on attitudes toward risk. Attitudes toward risk are important determinants of economic, demographic, and health-related behaviors, but how these attitudes evolve after an event like a natural disaster remains unclear because past research has been confounded by issues of selective exposure, mortality, and migration. My study is the first to directly address these problems by utilizing exogenous variation in exposure to a disruptive event in a sample of individuals that is representative of the population as it existed at the time of the event. In addition, intensive efforts were made to track migrants in the sample population, which is important for this study because migration is common following events like natural disasters and is likely related to attitudes toward risk. I find that physical exposure to the tsunami (e.g., seeing or hearing the tsunami or being caught up in the tsunami) causes significant short-term decreases in observed aversion to risk, especially for the poor, but few longer-term differences. This finding has important implications for the design of effective post-disaster assistance policies. In particular, it implies that post-disaster assistance programs should include aid that is consistent with the observed risk attitudes of the survivors such as job training and capital to start-up businesses.</p><p>In the last chapter, Labor Market Outcomes following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, I investigate how labor market outcomes changed in coastal communities in Aceh and North Sumatra following the tsunami and the post-disaster recovery efforts. Although restoring the livelihoods of survivors of adverse events is critical for their long-term recovery, there is little evidence from developing countries of how labor market outcomes change after such events. Using the STAR data, I find a significant and persistent increase in paid employment for younger women in urban communities. The increase occurred in communities that were heavily damaged by the tsunami and those that were not, suggesting that the impacts of the disaster on livelihoods are likely long-lasting and extend beyond the communities that were directly stuck by the disaster.</p> / Dissertation

The objective of this thesis is to improve the understanding of how several individual characteristics, namely education (years of schooling), health indicators (height, weight, smoking, alcohol consumption, and exercise), criminal behavior, and crime victimization, influence labor market outcomes in the short and long run. The first part of the thesis consists of three studies in which I adopt a within-twin-pair difference approach to analyze how education, health indicators, and earnings are associated with each other over the life cycle. The second part of the thesis includes two studies in which I use field experiments in order to test the employability of exoffenders and crime victims. The first essay, Learning for life?, describes an analysis of the education premium in earnings and health-related behaviors throughout adulthood among twins. The results show that the education premium in earnings, net of genetic inheritance, is rather small over the life cycle but increases with the level of education. The results also show that the education premium in health-related behaviors is mainly concentrated on smoking habits. The influences of education on earnings and health-related behaviors seem to work independently of each other, and there are no signs that health-related behaviors influence the education premium in earnings or vice versa. The second essay, Blowing up money?, details an analysis of the association between smoking and earnings in two different historical social contexts in Sweden: the 1970s and the 2000s. I also consider possible differences in this association in the short and long run as well as between the sexes. The results show that the earnings penalty for smoking is much stronger in the 2000s as compared to the 1970s (for both sexes) and that it is larger in the long run as compared to the short run (for men). The third essay, Two by two, inch by inch, describes an analysis of the height premium among Swedish twins. The results show that the height premium is relatively constant over the life cycle and that it is larger below median height for men and above median height for young women. The estimates are similar for monozygotic and dizygotic twins, indicating that environmentally and genetically induced height differences are similarly associated with earnings over the life cycle. The fourth essay, The employability of ex-offenders, published in IZA Journal of Labor Policy (2017), 6:6, details an analysis of whether male and female exoffenders are discriminated against when applying for jobs in the Swedish labor market. The results show that employers do discriminate against exoffenders but that the degree of discrimination varies across occupations. Discrimination against ex-offenders is pronounced in female-dominated and high-skilled occupations. The magnitude of discrimination against exoffenders does not vary by applicants’ sex. The fifth essay, Victimized twice?, describes an analysis of whether male and female crime victims are discriminated against when applying for jobs in the Swedish labor market. This study is the first to consider potential hiring discrimination against crime victims. The results show that employers do discriminate against crime victims. The discrimination varies with the sex of the crime victim and occupational characteristics and is concentrated among high-skilled jobs for female crime victims and among femaledominated jobs for male crime victims.

Many children in developing countries forgo education due to the direct or opportunity costs of attending school. To help defray the direct costs of secondary schooling, the Ghanaian government launched its free secondary school initiative in 2017, which sought to make tuition and all educational-related expenses free for every Ghanaian child who passed the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE). The first objective of this study is to examine to what extent the association between household income and school enrollment decreased in strength over time due to Ghana’s 2017 policy reform using the Ghana socio-economic panel survey (GSPS) and difference-in-differences estimation technique. Our results show that household assets (a proxy for income) had a significant and positive association with school enrollment before the policy change; however, household assets have no significant association with enrollment after the policy change, thus suggesting that family resources do not matter for child enrollment after the policy change. Our results also imply that the 2017 policy reform effectively reduced the hurdles facing lower-income families in paying for secondary school education. The second objective of this study is to examine the effects of this government policy on household labor market outcomes in Ghana. Using the Ghana Socio-Economic Panel Survey (GSPS) and the difference-in-differences estimation technique, we found an increase in labor supply and wages for households with SHS kids before the policy change; however, after policy reform, both labor supply and wages of SHS households decreased suggesting that the free SHS policy did eliminates the direct cost of schooling. These results also indicate that the free SHS policy has significant implications for human capital development and household welfare and health since the policy eliminates the direct cost of schooling. The third chapter examines the impact of environmental tax revenues on domestic healthcare expenditures using panel data of 96 developing and developed countries from 2000 to 2018 and the fixed effect estimation technique. We find a positive and statistically significant association between total environmental tax revenue and government health expenditures; however, this finding is primarily driven by low-income countries. In addition, we find a positive effect of all kinds of environmental tax revenues on government health expenditures; however, the largest and strongest effect arises with pollution tax and transport tax respectively. Our empirical results confirm the validity of the double dividend hypothesis, thus suggesting that environmental tax revenues have significant implications for public health expenditures.

No description available.

Esta tese analisa 9.041 trajetórias ocupacionais de jovens engenheiros como empregados formais no Brasil entre 2003-2012, a partir da técnica de Optimal Matching Analysis (OMA). Estas trajetórias foram comparadas às de uma geração anterior de jovens engenheiros, tanto em seu período-base (1995-2002) como entre 2003-2012, a fim de identificar efeitos de idade e período. Os principais resultados são: (i) conforme esperado, trajetórias ocupacionais ligadas à gestão (em áreas correlatas à engenharia ou não) são as que oferecem remuneração mais alta em todos os períodos analisados; (ii) nos anos 2000, o terceiro padrão mais atrativo para os jovens daquela geração foi permanecer como engenheiro típico, caminho perseguido por praticamente metade deles, enquanto tal atratividade não foi verificada nos anos 1990; (iii) o salário de entrada dos jovens engenheiros subiu 24% em termos reais entre 1995 e 2003; (iv) há pouca mobilidade de trajetória ocupacional por parte da geração dos engenheiros de 1995 após 2003; (v) os jovens engenheiros de 1995 que permaneceram como engenheiros típicos durante os anos 2000 chegaram a 2012 ganhando apenas 14% a mais do que os jovens engenheiros de 2003 (com 8 anos a menos de experiência); para comparação, os gestores da geração 90 ganhavam em torno de 50% a mais do que os da geração 2000; (vi) há dois momentos de definição de trajetória ocupacional: um primeiro ocorre até 3 anos após o primeiro emprego, mas promoções a cargos de gestão podem ocorrer entre 8 e 10 anos. Estes resultados indicam que, se por um lado houve uma revalorização dos profissionais de engenharia na última década, por outro lado esta revalorização não trouxe engenheiros anteriormente formados a carreiras típicas em engenharia. Isto, aliado à baixa demanda pelos cursos de engenharia durante os anos 80 e 90, corrobora a hipótese de um hiato geracional entre os engenheiros, documentado em artigos anteriores. / This PhD dissertation analyzes 9,041 occupational trajectories of young engineers as formal employees in Brazil in 2003-2012, using Optimal Matching Analysis (OMA). These trajectories were compared to those of a previous generation of young engineers, both in its base period (1995-2002) and in 2003-2012, to identify age and period effects. The main results are: (i) as expected, management occupational trajectories (in areas related to engineering or not) pay higher wages, in all periods; (ii) in the 2000s, the third most attractive trajectory was to remain as typical engineer, path pursued by nearly half of young engineers, however, this was not verified in the 1990s; (iii) entry wages of young engineers rose 24% in real terms between 1995 and 2003; (iv) there is little occupational mobility by the generation of 1995 engineers after 2003; (v) young engineers of 1995 who remained as typical engineers during the 2000s earned only 14% more in 2012 than young engineers of 2003; for comparison, in 2012 managers from the 90s earned about 50% more those from the 2000s; (vi) there are two defining moments of occupational trajectory: a first occurs until three years after the first job, but promotions to management positions can take place between 8 and 10 years. These results indicate that, on the one hand, there was a revaluation of engineers over the past decade; on the other hand, this did not attracted former bachelors back to typical careers in Engineering. This, combined with low demand for engineering courses during the 80s and 90s, supports the hypothesis of a generational gap among engineers, documented in previous articles.

Esta tese analisa 9.041 trajetórias ocupacionais de jovens engenheiros como empregados formais no Brasil entre 2003-2012, a partir da técnica de Optimal Matching Analysis (OMA). Estas trajetórias foram comparadas às de uma geração anterior de jovens engenheiros, tanto em seu período-base (1995-2002) como entre 2003-2012, a fim de identificar efeitos de idade e período. Os principais resultados são: (i) conforme esperado, trajetórias ocupacionais ligadas à gestão (em áreas correlatas à engenharia ou não) são as que oferecem remuneração mais alta em todos os períodos analisados; (ii) nos anos 2000, o terceiro padrão mais atrativo para os jovens daquela geração foi permanecer como engenheiro típico, caminho perseguido por praticamente metade deles, enquanto tal atratividade não foi verificada nos anos 1990; (iii) o salário de entrada dos jovens engenheiros subiu 24% em termos reais entre 1995 e 2003; (iv) há pouca mobilidade de trajetória ocupacional por parte da geração dos engenheiros de 1995 após 2003; (v) os jovens engenheiros de 1995 que permaneceram como engenheiros típicos durante os anos 2000 chegaram a 2012 ganhando apenas 14% a mais do que os jovens engenheiros de 2003 (com 8 anos a menos de experiência); para comparação, os gestores da geração 90 ganhavam em torno de 50% a mais do que os da geração 2000; (vi) há dois momentos de definição de trajetória ocupacional: um primeiro ocorre até 3 anos após o primeiro emprego, mas promoções a cargos de gestão podem ocorrer entre 8 e 10 anos. Estes resultados indicam que, se por um lado houve uma revalorização dos profissionais de engenharia na última década, por outro lado esta revalorização não trouxe engenheiros anteriormente formados a carreiras típicas em engenharia. Isto, aliado à baixa demanda pelos cursos de engenharia durante os anos 80 e 90, corrobora a hipótese de um hiato geracional entre os engenheiros, documentado em artigos anteriores. / This PhD dissertation analyzes 9,041 occupational trajectories of young engineers as formal employees in Brazil in 2003-2012, using Optimal Matching Analysis (OMA). These trajectories were compared to those of a previous generation of young engineers, both in its base period (1995-2002) and in 2003-2012, to identify age and period effects. The main results are: (i) as expected, management occupational trajectories (in areas related to engineering or not) pay higher wages, in all periods; (ii) in the 2000s, the third most attractive trajectory was to remain as typical engineer, path pursued by nearly half of young engineers, however, this was not verified in the 1990s; (iii) entry wages of young engineers rose 24% in real terms between 1995 and 2003; (iv) there is little occupational mobility by the generation of 1995 engineers after 2003; (v) young engineers of 1995 who remained as typical engineers during the 2000s earned only 14% more in 2012 than young engineers of 2003; for comparison, in 2012 managers from the 90s earned about 50% more those from the 2000s; (vi) there are two defining moments of occupational trajectory: a first occurs until three years after the first job, but promotions to management positions can take place between 8 and 10 years. These results indicate that, on the one hand, there was a revaluation of engineers over the past decade; on the other hand, this did not attracted former bachelors back to typical careers in Engineering. This, combined with low demand for engineering courses during the 80s and 90s, supports the hypothesis of a generational gap among engineers, documented in previous articles.

No description available.