This paper examines if the labor markets in border municipalities in Sweden were affected by the COVID-19 border restrictions implemented by the Swedish and Norwegian governments. To do so, this paper uses unemployment and population data gathered from different sources to estimate results derived from using the synthetic control method. The results imply that imposing border restriction had a larger negative effect on the unemployment levels in the border municipalities, compared to non-border municipalities. Results also shows that males were more affected by this compared to females in terms of unemployment and that there is a positive trend in unemployment associated with increasing these restrictions.

In this thesis I analyze regional labor markets in the interwar period using a firm-level wagedatabase. Using wages for both men, women, and minors I show that previous studiesunderestimate regional inequalities. Wages for all workers converged slightly between 1922and 1930 but male wages diverged. The thesis also shows that wages were positively correlatedwith local union density levels and negatively correlated with unemployment. Wages weremore responsive towards unemployment in 1922 as compared to 1930. The findings in thisthesis point towards a new understanding of regional development during the interwar periodand sheds new light on the dawn of the Swedish model.

This paper uses individual data from a collected survey, performed in Sweden by the SOM institute, to study individuals with foreign backgrounds in the labor market. We use The Ordinary Least Squares model, where we control for age, education, and gender to explore the difference in incomes between immigrants, children of immigrants, and natives in wage-employment, unemployment, and self-employment. The contribution of this paper is the second generation immigrants, we will assess their performance on the labor market in order to evaluate if self-employment is a profitable alternative. The second generation immigrants act as a benchmark for a functioning integration policy, it is therefore crucial to examine if we can observe any labor market barriers for the second-generation immigrants. The result display that immigrants do perform worse in both wage-employment and self-employment compared to natives. By being self-employed, immigrants earn 25.9 percent less than if they would have been wage-employed. The situation for the children of immigrants is different. Children of immigrants seem to perform better than immigrants on the labor market, especially in wage-employment. One could therefore conclude that since immigrants struggle with finding wage-employment, self-employment may be an alternative. However, self-employment should not be an option for the children of immigrants. It seems that they succeed in finding wage-employment, and they do better in wage-employment compared to self-employment. So, the promotion of self-employment should be more cautiously made since it may not always have a good economic outcome for the individual.

For as long robotics has been a research topic, their impact on the traditional manufacturing industry have been discussed. Several theories have been presented through the years in how robotics will change the business climate. The Chinese labor market is facing big transitions and the question of what the effects on employment rate and economy will be remains uncertain.  In this thesis, the focus in this thesis is to present the positive and negative effects of robotics in manufacturing industry and how it will affect the labor market. This is conducted by analyzing empirical findings from interviews and second-hand interviews. The collected findings will be compared with previous research regarding digitalization and robotics in China.  The outcome of this thesis will show the positive and negative effects of robotics and manufacturing industry and its impact on the Chinese labor market. The thesis will show the correlation between robotics, education, quality, labor and the Chinese economy.

The goal of my diploma thesis is to analyze retraining as an effective way of fighting the unemployment. Retraining is one of the most common means of pro-active employment policy. In my research I have focused on the efficiency of retraining and long-term enhancement for the retrained individuals. The research has been conducted on a chosen fragment of those, who participated in educational project, which was carried out in 2006 - 2008. Based on personal questioning and questioners, too, I have come to the conclusion on long-term enhancement of retraining projects and set up recommendation to make the retraining courses more effective. Keywords: unemployment, labor market, employment policy, retraining

The master thesis The closure of the Austrian labour market for new members of the European Union adopted in 2004 is focused on the question of transitional arrangements for the European labour market for new EU members who joined the Community in 2004 and the positions of the various groups, such as political parties and social partners, and the application in the country. Its main thesis is that the closure of the labour market was continuing of selective migration policy of the Austrian Government, which was started back in 90th years of the 20th century. This brought the protection of the labour market with the partial opening for skilled workforce, which reflected the demands of political and interest groups in the country. Next thesis works with this premise in the description and analysis of this issue. In the first place, there is a definition of consociational democracy and social partnership and also outlined the normative order of migration policy in the country, focusing on the labour market. Following this section is also included discussion of transitional periods or shortage of skilled labour in the Austrian labour market. The conclusion summarizes the findings from the above alluded chapters.

The topic of this diploma thesis is the evaluation of the project of green cards which is a Czech version of the programme of advantageous employment for the foreigners. Green card represents a special type of visa authorization which the citizens from selected countries outside of EU and EEA can apply for. The project was supposed to attract the foreign workers to come and work in Czech Republic in the fields with high demand of labour force, and thus to meet the needs of employers and to stabilize the situation on the labour market. It was expected that it would raise the interest of tens of thousands of foreigners. However, in reality the program is used to the minimal extent and to these days (or so to say by the end of 2012) Czech Republic issued less than four hundred green cards. Therefore, the main aim of this thesis is to define the reasons behind the low and unsatisfactory use of this programme. The thesis is based on the theory of implementation. The main theoretical basis represents: top-down institutional framework of P. Sabatier and D. Mazmanian and an instrumental approach combining multiple perspectives of various authors. Hence the design of the research can be characterised as a case study in which both qualitative and quantitative research methods are applied. Specific data...

This dissertation studies the effects that government spending has on the well-being of individuals and on community-level economic outcomes. The first chapter examines federally funded disaster relief with the aim of explicitly quantifying the role that the government has in propping up labor markets after large storms that damage and destroy communities. The next two chapters are about welfare. The second chapter uses administrative data from the state of Michigan to study one of the largest, and most sudden, changes to a cash welfare program in the country's history. The aim of this piece is to quantify the holistic impact of losing welfare on the financial well-being of the affected mothers. The final chapter revisits one of the most consequential welfare-to-work experiments of the late 20th century with modern empirical tools to determine whether work-first retraining programs or remedial coursework benefit the marginal welfare participant more in the long-run. Together these essays highlight the role that the federal government plays in the lives of its citizens when they are at their most vulnerable. It is the hope of the author that economists and policymakers can use the conclusions herein when considering and drafting future programs that aim to assist those at the margin of society or those who will suffer the consequences of catastrophic climate disasters.

This dissertation consists of three quantitative studies analyzing educational policies and programs that help to improve college readiness, college success, as well as the transition from college to the labor market. The first chapter studies the impact of raising the bar for high school math on college readiness and success. The chapter examines the causal effects of recent state-level reforms increasing the high school graduation math requirement on high school graduation and college outcomes. Using nationally-representative survey data, the study exploits variation in the reform timing across states in a staggered difference-in-difference framework. Findings indicate that raising the high school graduation requirement in math coursework is a potentially effective policy tool to prepare students better for college, but highlight racial disparities in the effectiveness of the math reforms. The second chapter discusses experiential learning through work-based courses at 2-year and 4-year colleges. Experiential learning is a critical component for a smooth transition from higher education to the workforce. In this chapter, I apply an innovative text mining technique to identify and analyze work-based courses from transcript data. The study examines patterns and post-degree labor market outcomes of taking work-based courses at college, and has important implications for colleges and policymakers to better support students on gaining from the courses. The third chapter estimates heterogeneity in labor market returns to Master’s degrees. Using an individual fixed effects model with rich administrative data, the study provides up-to-date causal evidence on labor market returns to Master’s degrees, and examines heterogeneity in the returns by field area, student characteristics, and the macroeconomic condition in which students graduate and enter the labor market. Findings show that obtaining a Master’s degree increases quarterly earnings, but the return varies widely by field of study. And economic downturns appear to reduce but not eliminate the positive return to a Master’s degree.

This dissertation contains three essays in microeconomics. Using descriptive analyses andcausal inference techniques, it examines the role that institutions play in determining children’s human capital investments, adults’ wages, and whether older workers are independent contractors. Chapter 1 explores how children’s human capital development is affected by the interactions between automatic grade promotion, tuition reduction, and rainfall. An important feature of rural life is that children participate in farming. One consequence of this fact is that when there is increased demand for agricultural labor children are more likely to be kept out of school, lowering their human capital. When policymakers implement reforms an important consideration should be whether children’s labor supply elasticity can be affected—will increased labor demand result in them being more likely to stay out of school. Estimating these interactive effects is generally difficult because of the need for several sources of exogenous variation. This paper interacts quasi-random rainfall shocks as a shifter to the demand for child labor and two education reforms in India—automatic promotion of children to grade 8, and a large reduction in fees at government-run schools—to examine whether the policy changes interact with the demand for child labor and whether the two policy reforms interact with one another. I find that tuition reduction increases children’s elasticity of labor supply. Higher rainfall reduces test scores, but when tuition is lowered, the effect of rainfall on test scores is more negative. There are also interactive effects between social promotion and tuition elimination. For children with the average level of treatment, tuition reduction increases test scores by 7% of a standard deviation. The effect of tuition reduction is lower for children who receive an additional year of automatic promotion, only 4.7% of a standard deviation. These results demonstrate that there are interactions between child labor and education policy, which can potentially undermine any beneficial impact of reforms. Future work should examine the mechanisms behind these findings, to better understand families’ decision-making in response to changing education policy. Chapter 2 studies how firms share rents with workers, and the role of labor market institutionsin determining which workers receive rents. Firms can decide whether to produce some goods and services in-house or purchase them from the market. Increasingly, they are purchasing from the market—using subcontractors, temp agencies, and other outsourced labor. Low-wage workers’ wages decline when they are outsourced, but little is known about how outsourcing affects remaining workers. If firms are rent sharing, outsourcing might increase remaining workers’ earnings because there are more rents or fewer workers to share them with. This paper measures the impact of occupational layoff (OL) outsourcing, where firms outsource some occupations, on the earnings and separations of workers who remain employed by those firms. Using employer-employee data based on German social security records in a dynamic difference-in-differences design, outsourcing increases remaining workers’ long-run earnings by 6% in a sample of 260 OL outsourcing events. Remainers are also more likely to stay at the outsourcing firm—outsourcing decreases the probability of remainers switching firms by 7.5 percentage points. Higher earnings and fewer separations are consistent with remainers receiving additional rents. Earnings gains are larger for workers in the bottom-half of the within-firm earnings distribution. Outsourcing only increases remainers’ earnings in firms with collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). In firms with CBAs, outsourcing increases remainers’ long-term earnings by 6%. In firms without CBAs, outsourcing lowers shortterm earnings by 3%. The results are consistent with a model of wage setting where outsourcing firms with CBAs need to compensate remainers. When there is no CBA, firms do not compensate remainers and can lower their wages. Analyzing the impact of outsourcing on within-firm and overall wage inequality, a typical outsourcing event in the sample lowers the within-firm Gini index by 2.5% as low-wage workers leave the firm and low-wage remainers are compensated. Using Recentered Influence Functions, increasing the share of workers part of an outsourcing event by 10 percentage points (from a baseline of 11.7%) increases the top of the earnings distribution by approximately 1-1.5%, and the overall Gini index by 1%. Remainers are relatively high-wage, and outsourcing increases their earnings. By not accounting for this effect, prior studies likely underestimate the total impact of outsourcing on earnings inequality in Germany. Chapter 3 studies the role that labor market demand shocks play in no just whether workersare employed, but the types of contracts they are employed in, especially as they age. Independent Contracting is an employment relationship where workers have fewer legal protections relative to traditional employment. At the same time, workers in these contracts are generally hired to provide defined tasks, and cannot be controlled by their employer to the same degree as regular employees. However, little is known about why firms decide to use contractors as opposed to regular employees. In a simple framework with uncertainty and fixed costs, contracting occurs when there is a mismatch between worker and firm type—either the worker or firm can do better in the next period, so they agree to a short-term contract. Under this framework, contracting can be driven by market factors. Negative labor demand shocks have an ambiguous predicted effect on the use of contractors as (1) employees become contractors and (2) contractors become unemployed. Which effect dominates is tested using data on two negative labor demand shocks—the China Shock and the Housing Wealth Shock from the Great Recession. In both instances, negative labor demand reduces the probability that workers are independent contractors, conditional on being employed in a given industry and occupation. From a baseline of 6.9% of 18-65 year olds employed as contractors, moving from the 25th to 75th percentile of the China Shock reduces contractor probability by 0.8 percentage points, while moving from the 25th to 75th percentile of the Housing Wealth Shock reduces the probability that a worker is an independent contractor by 3.75 percentage points. These demonstrate that economic downturns reduce the overall share of contractors, suggesting that contracting is mostly used on the margin as a supplement to regular employer-employee relationships, rather than as a replacement for those relationships.