The purpose of this thesis is to examine hourly wage differences across different groups of Mexican-origin workers. First, I assess the cost of foreign-born status by comparing the hourly wages of Mexican immigrant workers with those of native-born Mexican American workers. Second, I assess the cost of non-citizenship status by comparing the hourly wages of non-citizens with those of Mexican-born U.S. naturalized citizens. I also seek to determine if these costs are greater in California than in Texas. The data are drawn from the 2000 5% Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) U.S. Census. The results from multiple linear regression analyses show that being an immigrant, particularly a non-citizen immigrant, is associated with lower hourly wages, especially in California. Thus, Mexicanorigin workers, especially those in California, bear dual costs for being foreign-born and not being naturalized citizens. Furthermore, I focus on length of U.S. residence to assess the social and economic impact of the different periods on the costs associated with foreign-born status. First, those who came to the United States before the IRCA of 1986 and a series of California propositions during the 1990s have higher hourly wages than those who arrived later, because of more stable labor market conditions and the effect of the duration of stay in the United States. Second, those who arrived during the last decade have much lower hourly wages because of their disadvantaged labor market contexts.

This study examines the matching of CEOs to firms and the compensation earned by such managers in a competitive labor market. I first develop a simple competitive equilibrium model and derive predictions regarding the change in wages when an inelastic supply of CEO labor cannot match an increase in demand. The model predicts that the CEO pay-size elasticity increases when more firms compete for a fixed supply of managers. I then empirically test this prediction using industry-level IPO waves as a proxy for increased competition among firms for CEOs. Consistent with the model, I find that pay-size elasticity increases with an increase in an industry's IPO activity. I also find that increased IPO activity leads to a greater likelihood of executive transitions between firms. Overall, the findings point to the substantial role market forces play in the determination of pay in the CEO labor market. I then use a structural model to examine the distortionary effects of frictions in the CEO labor market. I estimate the switching cost to be 20% of the median firm's annual earnings. While reduced-form estimates of the switching cost serve as a lower bound on the reduction in firm value, they underestimate the overall effect which also includes the resulting inefficient firm-CEO matches. Using counterfactual analysis, the switching cost is estimated to decrease the median firm's value by 4.8%, four times larger than the reduced-form estimate. / text

Between the 1970s and 2000, the U.S. imprisonment rate increased by 700% (e.g., Beck and Harrison 2001). During the same time period, technological advancements and the decline of manufacturing production in urban areas eliminated many of the higher-paying blue collar job opportunities previously available to workers without college educations (e.g., Morris and Western 1999). The simultaneous large changes in imprisonment and labor markets are striking and the co-occurrence of these events suggests a possible connection between increasingly insecure employment conditions and rising imprisonment rates. Further, policies targeting the poor population (including criminal justice) became more punitive since the 1970s. This co-occurred with a resurgence of Republican Party popularity and overall imprisonment rates subsequently increased (e.g., Beckett and Sasson 2004). Understanding the association between labor market conditions and imprisonment may be especially important for historically disadvantaged minority groups. Research has yet to consider how specific labor market shifts (e.g., restricted blue collar opportunities) may influence imprisonment rates. It is unknown whether such labor market dynamics may better explain the exposure of historically disadvantaged racial minorities to criminal justice system control. This project examines the issues raised in the foregoing discussion using a unique dataset created for this purpose. Data at the local-level are combined from two primary sources: the National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP) (U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics1989 and 1999), and Integrated Public Use Micro Sample (IPUMS) data (1990 and 2000) (Ruggles, Alexander, Genadek, Goeken, Schroeder, and Sobek 2010). This project also draws from two general election studies, "General Election Data for the United States" (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research 1995) and American University Federal Elections Project data (Lublin and Voss 2001), and controls for criminal justice system characteristics using the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) (U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation 1988, 1989, 1998, 1999) and The Book of the States (1990 and 2000). Findings suggest that the percentage of men without college education and restricted blue collar employment rates for unskilled workers are positively associated with prison admission rates within the corresponding local areas. In addition, the local percentage voting for Republican presidential candidates is positively associated with prison admission rates. Further, concentrated disadvantage among local African American populations is significantly and positively associated with prison admission rates for this group. Conversely, concentrated socioeconomic disadvantage among Whites is significantly and negatively associated with prison admission rates for African Americans. In addition, the local percentage of unskilled African Americans is significantly and positively associated with prison admission rates for African Americans and Whites. Finally, the percentage of unskilled workers employed in blue collar industries is significantly and negatively associated with African American and not significantly associated with White prison admission rates.

Thesis advisor: Theodore Papageorgiou / Thesis advisor: Robert Ulbricht / This thesis contains three independent essays on topics in macroeconomics and labor economics. In the first chapter, I investigate the implications of the increasing share of older businesses in the United States economy for labor market outcomes across workers in different age groups. I find that over the period 1994-2019, employment and wages fall by more for younger cohorts, driven by a ``firm competition” channel. Moreover, workers are better sorted, but receive a lower share of the match surplus, on average. In the second chapter, my co-author Div Bhagia and I ask whether broad sectoral shifts in labor demand account for the divergence of employment outcomes between Black and White men after 1970. We find that they explain no more than one-fifth of the increase in the employment-to-population ratio gap, and that the widening of this gap is primarily driven by differential responses to labor demand shocks across groups. In the third chapter, I quantify the roles of increases in job separations and decreases in job finding in recessionary increases in unemployment. I find that while job separations lead job finding, both margins contribute significantly to unemployment fluctuations. I conclude that future research should not ignore the interaction between unemployment inflows and unemployment outflows in explaining the cyclical behavior of the labor market. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Thesis advisor: Fabio Ghironi / This thesis studies the role of product and labor market frictions for the propagation of shocks in closed and open economy. The first chapters focuses on the consequences of relaxing product and labor regulation for macroeconomic outcomes. Specifically, we study long and short to medium run effects of deregulation by developing a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model featuring endogenous producer entry and search and matching frictions in the labor market. We calibrate the model to reproduce salient features of countries belonging to the Euro Area which are characterized by large barriers to entry, firing restrictions and unemployment benefits. We analyze the effects of single policy changes and a global reform in which product and labor market regulations are set at the current U.S. level. Three main results emerge. First, we show that deregulation -- either partial or global - would trigger adjustment costs in the short run, increasing unemployment and reducing consumption. Long run welfare gains would make up for short run costs. Second, reforms are interdependent as the effects of a policy change in one market depend upon the level of regulation prevailing in the other. Third, regulation has important consequences for the business cycle properties of the economy. After a full deregulation, the Euro Area would become more responsive to exogenous disturbances but the absorption of shocks would be quicker. Our findings suggest that concerns about the negative effect of strict regulation for the speed of recovery from downturns could be well placed. The second chapter studies how country-specific labor market frictions -- hiring and firing restrictions and protection of unemployed workers -- affect the consequences of trade integration. We address this question in a two-country model of trade and macroeconomic dynamics with heterogeneous firms, endogenous producer entry, and search and matching frictions in the labor market. We study the dynamic effects of trade integration on unemployment and economic activity and the business cycle implications of stronger trade linkages. The model introduces a novel source of amplification and propagation of domestic and international shocks, as fluctuations in job creation and destruction affect the profitability of producer entry into domestic and export markets. Structural differences in labor markets translate into asymmetric entry and export dynamics across countries. As trade barriers are reduced, unemployment initially rises (falls) in countries with more rigid (flexible) labor markets. In the long run, average productivity gains ensure positive employment effects in both countries. Trade is always beneficial for welfare, but the economy with a rigid labor market gains less. Integration has also important business cycle consequences. In contrast to benchmark international real business cycle models, but consistent with the data, the model predicts that trade integration leads to increased business cycle synchronization. Volatility increases in the country with a rigid labor market, but it falls for the flexible partner. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

CEO succession decisions are an important part of boards of directors’ responsibilities to shareholders. I study two aspects of these decisions. First, I examine whether or not forced CEO departure decisions are based on information that the board of directors has, but external investors do not. I find that the proxy for private information in the forced CEO departure decision is positively related to abnormal returns at the forced CEO departure announcement. This is consistent with the hypotheses that prior to the departure announcement, investors underestimate the probability of forced CEO departure, and that private information revealed in forced CEO departure announcements has positive implications for firm value. A second question related to boards of directors’ CEO succession decisions concerns their decisions to participate in the external market for CEO talent. I find evidence suggesting that board decisions to participate in the external market for CEO talent are influenced by the costs and benefits of doing so. Specifically, cross sectional analyses of a proxy for industry homogeneity shows that this variable is positively related to external labor market participation, more standardized search processes, and a higher likelihood that a newly appointed CEO will survive three years or more. These findings are generally consistent with prediction that when industries are more homogenous, external search costs are lower, and higher quality matches may be obtained. I also test hypotheses related to benefits of matching to individuals with industry specific skills versus general management skills. I find that for several alternative proxies for industry specific skill demand, there is a negative relation between demand for industry specific skills and the decision to hire externally outside the industry. This can be interpreted as support for hypotheses that cross sectional variation in benefits associated with industry specific skills leads to fewer CEO appointments outside the industry, while benefits of general management skills are associated with a higher likelihood of inter-industry CEO appointment.

Abstract: Black immigrants are a demographically and socially important group in the United States. Between 1960 and 2005 the foreign-born share of the entire black population increased twenty-two fold. Furthermore, this group also accounted for more than 20% of the growth in the black population in the 2000s. In spite of the rapid growth of the black immigrant population, few studies have evaluated their health and labor market outcomes. The existing literature on black immigrants demonstrates that this group has health outcomes that are substantially different from those of other immigrant populations. Research illustrates that most black immigrants arrive in the United States with better health than black Americans and maintain this health advantage after more than two decades in the United States. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced among African immigrants. Research in this area also demonstrates that certain subgroups of black immigrants, such as West Indians, have superior labor market outcomes compared to black Americans. Because of the phenotypic similarities between these two groups, these findings have led some scholars and policymakers to question the salience of discrimination and racism in determining the labor market outcomes of black Americans. This dissertation expands the literature on the health and labor market outcomes of black immigrants by evaluating the salience of the major sociological theories, including immigrant versus native culture, bias of whites toward black immigrants over black Americans, and selective migration in explaining differences in labor market outcomes between black immigrants and black Americans. In an effort to better understand the unique health patterns among black immigrants, this dissertation also advances and tests a conceptual model that evaluates whether social, economic, and health conditions within the sending countries of black immigrants explain variations in health and disability among these immigrants. This dissertation uses data on males from the 1980-2000 U.S. Censuses and the 2001-2007 American Community Survey to estimate wage, employment, and self-employment models to determine if black immigrants have outcomes that resemble those of native blacks (collectively) or native black internal migrants. The results suggest that migration selectivity is important in explaining wage and employment differences between black immigrants and black natives. However, migration selectivity plays a limited role in explaining self-employment differences between black immigrants and black natives. This general finding is produced when black immigrants are evaluated collectively and when they are separated by both region and country of birth. This result suggests that differences that exist between black immigrants and black natives are the result of selective migration rather than culture. This work is the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of the importance of selective migration in explaining labor market differences between black Americans and black immigrants from all the major sending regions and countries of the world. This work also uses data on black immigrants from the 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008 March Current Population Survey to evaluate the role that conditions in immigrants’ countries of origin play in explaining variation in health and disability among black immigrants in the United States. Estimates from reduced form health and disability models show that these outcomes are more favorable for immigrants who migrate from countries with high combined enrollment ratios, low income inequality, and high life expectancy. The results also demonstrate that country of origin conditions explain some portion of differences in health among immigrants. / text

This study analyzes the wage and non-wage factors underlying non-metropolitan-to-metropolitan commuting decisions of households in five non-metropolitan counties in Northern Virginia. The potential fiscal and planning implications of these decisions are also discussed. Chapter one contains a description of the study area, problem statement and objectives. Chapter two reviews related literature on commuting, housing and job location, as well as rent and wage gradients. Chapter three provides a theoretical framework for analyzing household commuting decisions. Chapter four presents descriptive statistics, and introduces a switching regression system of equations to simultaneously estimate factors influencing commuting decisions and earnings in non-metropolitan and metropolitan labor markets. Chapter five reports the regression results, and simulates wage gaps and the distance of the metropolitan labor market draw for different groups of workers. Chapter six discusses potential fiscal implications of commuting and potential policies to manage growth in commuting. The empirical result shows that the major incentive for workers to commute is a large age gap between metropolitan and non-metropolitan labor market areas. Household responsibilities, housing preference and ability to find local jobs represent non-wage factors underlying commuting decisions. Two study findings suggest that the local fiscal implications of non-metropolitan-to-metropolitan commuting households may be limited. First, commuting households are found to have fewer school-aged children, and require less local expenditures on education. Second, commuting households are more likely to be homeowners, have more rooms in their homes, and provide a larger tax base. / Master of Science

The recent proliferation of administrative data sources has made it possible to examine numerous longstanding questions related to labor market functions. I make use of these data sources to provide new insights into three such questions; the extent of firms' market power in labor markets, the nature of gains from workers' skill specialization, and the role of job search networks in the locational choices of immigrants. In Chapter 1, I examine labor market monopsony, the extent to which markets deviate from perfect competition. Prior literature suggests two methods to estimate the extent of monopsony: studying the degree to which firms adjust wages in response to desired changes in employment growth, and measuring the degree to which workers' voluntary separations are sensitive to their own wages. Existing studies have found widely varying answers to these two questions in different contexts. I leverage unique features of Brazilian administrative data to demonstrate that these approaches provide very different results even on the same sample of employees, and I rule out a variety of alternative empirical explanations. These results suggest that labor market monopsony is primarily a function of workers' attachment to their current employers. In Chapter 2, I study the wage premium associated with skill specialization. While standard models predict that more technologically-advanced firms will hire more specialized workers, I show that higher-ability individuals may actually sort into less specialized occupations within firms. I test these predictions by constructing occupation-level measures of skill specialization from the U.S. O*NET database, matched to Brazilian administrative data. While I find that specialization among production skills is associated both with higher wages and with employment at higher-wage firms, I find no evidence of specialization premia in cognitive skills. Finally, in Chapter 3 I study the extent to which job search networks influence new immigrants' decisions to locate in ethnic enclaves. Using detailed data from the New Immigrant Survey, I show that immigrants to the U.S. who arrive without job offers are significantly more likely to locate in enclaves, even after accounting for a wide range of pre-migration and time-invariant characteristics.

O objetivo desta dissertação consiste sobretudo em estabelecer as conexões entre o recente aumento no uso relativo de trabalhadores qualificados (em comparação aos não qualificados) e medidas de tecnologia, capital físico e tarifas, com especial enfoque para a manufatura brasileira nas últimas duas décadas. Para tanto, faz-se uso da metodologia de Berman, Bound & Griliches (1994), tendo a intensidade de P&D como proxy para progresso técnico. A evidência de complementaridade entre tecnologia e trabalho qualificado aparece mais robusta e fortemente entre 1994 e 1997, enquanto que o capital físico mostrou-se bastante correlacionado com o emprego de qualificados em todo o período considerado (1989-97). Já os impactos do comércio internacional mostraram-se limitados e pouco robustos. / The main goal of this dissertation is to investigate the relationship between skill upgrading and measures of technology, physical capital and tariffs, with emphasis on Brazilian manufacturing for the last two decades. We use Berman, Bound & Griliches’s (1994) methodology, with R&D intensity as a proxy for technological change. We found robust evidence of technology-skill complementarity for 1994-97, and positive correlation between physical capital and use of skilled labor for 1989-97. The impacts of international trade were weaker and less robust.