The purpose of the study is to investigate whether it is economically profitable to implement a paid period leave for women with severe menstrual pain in Sweden. In order to evaluate the economic effect of such legislation, a cost benefit analysis is conducted where benefits are weighed against costs in monetary terms. This study will only concern employed women in Sweden of childbearing age between 20–54 years who theoretically could experience severe menstrual pain. The data has been taken from Socialstyrelsen, Statistiska centralbyrån, Försäkringskassan, Skatteverket, Statens beredning för medicinsk utvärdering, Tandvårds- och läkemedelsförmånsverket as well as from other relevant studies. In total, the net present value of a three-day paid menstrual leave amounted to approximately SEK 3,84 billion, and the benefit-cost ratio amounted to 1.10. As the benefit-cost ratio is close to one, it becomes difficult to make a recommendation for or against the implementation of a three-day paid period leave for employed women in Sweden.

<p>A common assumption of in literature regarding unemployment insurance (UI) take-up is unemployed individuals will claim UI benefits immediately after job loss. Using SIPP 2008 panel, I find that this assumption about immediate unemployment insurance take-up can not be supported in the data. I constructed a revised McCall search model to provide a mechanism to explain the delay of UI take-up found in the data. This dissertation contains three chapters. In Chapter 1, I provide evidence that UI application delay is significant. Many people delay at least one week -- 87\% of unemployed individuals delay at least one week, 37\% delay at least 4 weeks and 27\% individuals delay at least 12 weeks. The average delay is large -- unemployed individuals on average have 12.99 weeks of delay before claiming UI benefits after job loss. I also analyze factors that correlate with application delay. I find a lower age, being disabled, being female, facing good economic conditions and fewer experienced number of job separations make delay more likely and increase length of delay. In Chapter 2 , I provide a job search and separation model to explain the findings from the data in Chapter 1. I find that the application costs are large compared to benefits received. Counterfactual analysis show that reducing hassle of aplying for UI can have large impacts on delay of application. In Chapter 3 , I extend the methodology to study the effect of availability of other welfare programs such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI) on the application delay of UI for people who have reported disability. I find that the availability of other welfare programs such as SSI is a contributing factor that make delay more likely and longer for people with disability. </p>

We introduce signals to search models of two-sided matching markets and explore the implications for efficiency. In a labour market model in which firms can advertise wages and workers can choose effort, we find that advertisements can help overcome the Diamond paradox. Advertisements fix workers' beliefs, so that workers will react if firms renege on advertisements. Firms then prefer to advertise truthfully. Next, we consider a market with two-sided heterogeneity in which types are only privately observable. We identify a simple condition on the match output function for agents to signal their types truthfully and for the matching to exhibit positive assortative matching despite search frictions. While our theoretical work implies that the efficiency of matching increases as information technology spreads, empirical matching functions typically suggest that it declines. By estimating more general matching functions, we show that the result of declining efficiency can partly be attributed to omitted variable bias.

In this thesis I explore three topics in labour economics, using micro data from South Africa and Tanzania. South Africa suffers from extremely high income inequality, in part as a result of comprehensive Apartheid-era racial discrimination. The first topic explores possible explanations for the extremely large earnings differences across different types of employment for black South Africans, using the KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study data. I analyse the relative importance of individual ability and institutions, including public sector wage setting and trade unions, in determining earnings. My results suggest that human capital explains much of the earnings differentials within the private sector, including union premiums, but cannot explain the large premiums for public sector workers. Self-employment is very common in urban Tanzania but, unlike South Africa, survey data show that there are large overlaps in the distribution of earnings in private wage employment and self-employment. This suggests that self-employment represents a viable alternative to wage employment in small, low productivity firms for the majority of urban Tanzanians. In chapter three I build an equilibrium search model of the urban Tanzanian labour market to explain the choice of wage and self-employment and the variation in earnings across and within these sectors. In the final topic I explore the effect of education on earnings in Tanzania. Estimating the returns to education has stimulated much recent work in applied econometrics as researchers advance their understanding of the effect of individual heterogeneity on the possibility of estimating the returns to education. In my attempt to purge estimates of the return to education of the influence of individual heterogeneity, I use an education reform in Tanzania as a natural experiment that provides exogenous variation in education. When using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) I find high and strongly convex, increasing returns to education. My best attempt at separating out the effect of individual heterogeneity suggests that returns are still high but that they may actually be concave.

There are four parts to this thesis: the first chapter analyses the structure of leisure in couples with particular emphasis on joint leisure. We take a structural approach and model the household as a two-stage decision making unit. The findings suggest that couples see joint leisure as a distinct good from private leisure. Specifically when a household decides to have more leisure, almost 40 percent of this increase is allocated to joint leisure as opposed to only 8 to 15 percent allocated to male private leisure. Furthermore, couples prefer to spend leisure together (synchronisation) relative to spending time independently, giving joint leisure the largest weight in the utility function. The findings further suggest that demographics can play a large role in determining the patterns of spousal leisure, with ethnicity and job characteristics being important factors. Finally, when analysing weekend time use patterns, there is evidence to suggest that Saturdays should be distinguished from Sundays as approximately 41 percent more joint leisure is observed on Sundays. The second chapter of the thesis begins our examination of the UK income taxation reform in 1990. The UK went from a system of joint taxation to independent taxation of couples and this reform may have had important implications for households. Across countries, there is a large variation in the income tax treatment of couples. Over the last three decades, many countries have undergone reforms in their tax systems, some have moved from joint to independent taxation, some from independent to joint, while others have begun the practice of allowing couples to choose the system they prefer. This chapter aims to give an overview of the tax treatment of couples and outlines the differences across countries, with particular emphasis on the tax reform in the UK. The third chapter investigates the UK income taxation reform in 1990 and examines how the change from a system of joint to independent taxation of couples has shifted women's relative earning potentials in the household, and how this in turn has led to changes in intra-household assignable clothing expenditures. I apply my method to a sample of UK couples with children and the findings of this chapter show that an exogenous increase in women's income relative to their spouse significantly and substantially increases female clothing expenditure and decreases male clothing expenditure ceteris paribus. However an increase in relative female earnings does not necessarily mean that children will do better relatively. The final outcome may depend on the type of transfer in question. In addition, there is evidence that the final allocations of expenditures on each partner and children may depend significantly on distribution factors such as spousal relative incomes, age gap and educational gap, despite the fact that these variables do not impact on preferences nor on budgets directly. This provides further evidence against the unitary framework in favour of the collective approach and the sharing rule interpretation of how households make decisions in practice. The final chapter of this thesis examines the effects of the tax reform in 1990 with particular emphasis on female labour supply. A method of clarifying the concept of a spouse's individual net income under a joint tax regime is proposed and following the methodology of Blundell et al (2007), the labour supply elasticities for both male and female are estimated. The analysis is extended further to include children in the model and the results show that both the number of children and their age are highly significant for women's labour supply and to a smaller extent also for men. Testing the income pooling hypothesis, the unitary model is not rejected. However, the results strongly reject the hypothesis that distribution factors have no effect on labour supply. The results also suggest that for the group of women affected, the reform generated two opposing effects on their labour supply: a positive effect from an increase in net wage and a negative effect from an increase in bargaining power. On balance, we find that a typical female decreased her labour supply by approximately 2.6 hours per week, yet she still experienced a 22 percent increase in her net income.

This thesis consists of five stand-alone chapters empirically evaluating questions relating to the life cycle of natural resource extraction. We use three different data sets to shed light on the local impacts of natural resource booms and busts. In chapter 2 to 4 we use the household budget survey of Kazakhstan to explore the impacts of the oil boom on the local population. In the second chapter, we explore the distributional effects of the oil boom and show that average household income increased and income inequality decreased. In the third chapter we study how the increase in average income was perceived by the local population and find that households' satisfaction with income decreased. In the fourth chapter we study how the boom affected households' expenditure and show that the likelihood that households pay tuition fees for tertiary education increased. In chapter 5, we explore the long-term impacts of a negative labour demand shock following the coal mine closures in the UK. To do this we construct a new data set containing the location of all active coal mines since 1981 and link it to the UK census. We find that the dramatic lay off of miners since 1981 was associated with a persistent reduction in female labour force participation in the affected districts. In chapter 6, we study the determinants of drilling costs and their impact on the real price of oil using a new global data set on the number of exploration wells drilled and costs of drilling. To do this, we propose a structural model of the upstream sector in the oil and gas industry. The model allows us to decompose the variation in the reduced form errors of the estimated VAR into three structural shocks, and estimate the dynamic responses of the variables in the system to these shocks. We confirm that the upstream sector of the oil and gas industry is subject to increasing costs. But we do not find that the real oil price is permanently affected by shocks to costs of drilling.

This thesis employs two new approaches to explain some of the important debates in two key economic fields: labour market economics and macroeconomic studies related to current account imbalances. Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 begin a new strand of research by introducing the normal inverse Gaussian (NIG) distribution to describe unobserved heterogeneity in the labour market. The NIG distribution can be represented as a normal variance-mean mixture with the inverse Gaussian (IG) distribution as the mixing distribution. A 0.01% subsample of the 1980 US Census, comprising all men between 18 and 65 who are in the labour force, as well as a comparable sample from Ghana, is used to show that the NIG distribution provides a better fit of the log earnings function than the normal distribution. The prediction of right skewness of the log earnings distribution arising from the log normal skill Roy selection model is rejected in favour of left skewness. The thesis then extends the model to describe the distribution of log earnings conditioned on education. The same two datasets (US males and Ghanaian males) are used for the empirical analysis. We find that, once the unobserved heterogeneity is accounted for, the return to education is almost flat for lower levels of education in Ghana, and then increases for education levels greater than ten years. One of the key differences between the two datasets is that skewness and unobserved heterogeneity is a function of education for Ghana but not for the US. The NIG framework is found to be a useful tool to model this heterogeneity. Chapter 4 uses a model that allows for a rich structure of age effects similar to those predicted by the life cycle theories to argue that the demographic shifts are partly responsible for the sustained rise in the US current account deficit and the rapid increase in China's current account surplus in the last decade. However, demographics do not have an impact on the long run equilibrium or level of current accounts. Rather, they are important determinants of the short run adjustment of current accounts to their equilibrium levels. In the next twenty years, the demographic shifts are likely to push towards further current account positive adjustments in China and current account negative adjustments in the US. Developing the infrastructure, financial markets, policy tools and regulatory settings to be able to cope with the excess capital flow remains an urgent task.

Há algumas décadas as relações entre medidas de desigualdade e de segregação são conhecidas. Neste sentido, o objetivo principal desta dissertação é aprofundar a análise dessas relações. São descritas, pormenorizadamente, as medidas consagradas de desigualdade (índice de Gini e medida geral) e de segregação (índice de Gini para segregação e índice de Dissimilaridade). Como primeiro resultado, é demonstrado que algumas medidas de segregação conhecidas na literatura são casos particulares ou transformações da medida geral de segregação de Hutchens (2004). Advoga-se pelo uso da medida geral, em detrimento de uma transformação proposta por esse autor. Além disso, são demonstradas algumas propriedades sobre sua decomposição. Embora o efeito de transferências regressivas de renda sobre as medidas de desigualdade seja discutido há décadas, não existia análise correspondente para medidas de segregação. Para cobrir essa lacuna, são analisadas as sensibilidades da medida geral de segregação e dos índices de Gini e de Dissimilaridade a mudanças regressivas entre estratos. Para ilustrar os resultados encontrados, é analisada a evolução da segregação por gênero em grupamentos de atividade no Brasil de 1992 a 2014. Constatou-se que a segregação por gênero, conforme várias medidas, diminuiu. Além disso, de 2002 a 2014, é feita a análise da decomposição das medidas de segregação quando 53 ramos de atividade são classificados em seis grupamentos. Verifica-se que a redução da segregação por gênero entre os 53 ramos de atividade foi puxada pela segregação entre os seis grupamentos. Vários outros resultados sobre medidas de segregação são apresentados no final do trabalho. / For decades, the relations between inequality and segregation measures has been analyzed. This dissertation aims to deepen the analysis of these relations. The well known inequality (Gini index and general measure) and segregation (Gini index for segregation and Dissimilarity index) measures are described in detail. It is also demonstrated that some measures of segregation known in the literature are particular cases or transformations of Hutchens\' (2004) general measure of segregation. The use of the general measure is advocated, to the detriment of a transformation proposed by the author. In addition, some properties of its decomposition are demonstrated. Although the effect of regressive income transfers on inequality measures has been discussed for decades, there is no corresponding analysis for segregation measures. To cover this gap, we analyze the sensitivity of the segregation general measure and of the Gini and Dissimilarity indices to regressive movements between strata. To illustrate the results, the evolution of gender segregation between sectors of activity in Brazil, from 1992 to 2014, is analyzed. Gender segregation, according to several measures, has decreased. In addition, from 2002 to 2014, we analyze the decomposition of segregation when 53 branches of activity are classified into 6 sectors grouping. The results show that the decline of gender segregation between activities was driven by the segregation between groups. Several other results on segregation measures are found in the last chapter.

This DPhil thesis is a collection of three empirical papers that study the role of firms in the UK labour market. Each chapter focuses on firms at different points in their lifecycle. Young firms are an engine of job creation but little is known about the quality of the jobs that they offer. In Chapter 1, I use a matched employer-employee dataset to study how starting wages and lifecycle earnings of employees differ between young and mature firms. I find that young firms pay a small premium to new hires, but subsequent wage growth is better at mature firms, both within continuing job matches and when individuals change jobs. Crucially, highly-paid and stable jobs at young firms have become increasingly rare over time, as young firms themselves have become less likely to survive and attain high productivity levels - both in absolute terms and relative to mature firms over the same period. Policies that aim to stimulate job growth by encouraging the formation of new firms should therefore pay close attention to the types of firms that form. Chapter 2 asks what determines the proportion of a firm's income that workers receive as compensation. I use longitudinal firm data from a period of substantial labour share variation to understand the firm-level determinants of the labor share of income - a question that has typically only been addressed with country- and sector-level data. Estimating a dynamic model using GMM, I find that firms with greater market power and a higher ratio of capital to labour allocate a smaller proportion of their value added to workers. Testing the impact of tangible and intangible capital on low- and high-wage firms leads to conclusions consistent with the hypothesis of capital-skill complementarity. Overall, the results suggest that firm-level drivers play a key role in the evolution of the aggregate labour share, which has declined significantly since the 1970s. Chapter 3 co-authored with Brian Bell, focuses on mature firms and asks how wages at such firms respond to idiosyncratic firm-level cost shocks. We create a unique dataset that links longitudinal data on workers' compensation to the unexpected costs related to firms' legacy defined benefit pension plans. We show that firms are able to share the burden of such costs when a significant share of their workers are current or former members of the plan. We also find that firms that respond to deficits by closing down the pension plans effectively reduce the total compensation of plan members. These results point to significant frictions in the labour market, which we show are a direct result of the pension arrangement that workers have. Yet closing schemes has an implicit cost for firms, since it reduces the frictions that workers face, and increases mobility.

Há algumas décadas as relações entre medidas de desigualdade e de segregação são conhecidas. Neste sentido, o objetivo principal desta dissertação é aprofundar a análise dessas relações. São descritas, pormenorizadamente, as medidas consagradas de desigualdade (índice de Gini e medida geral) e de segregação (índice de Gini para segregação e índice de Dissimilaridade). Como primeiro resultado, é demonstrado que algumas medidas de segregação conhecidas na literatura são casos particulares ou transformações da medida geral de segregação de Hutchens (2004). Advoga-se pelo uso da medida geral, em detrimento de uma transformação proposta por esse autor. Além disso, são demonstradas algumas propriedades sobre sua decomposição. Embora o efeito de transferências regressivas de renda sobre as medidas de desigualdade seja discutido há décadas, não existia análise correspondente para medidas de segregação. Para cobrir essa lacuna, são analisadas as sensibilidades da medida geral de segregação e dos índices de Gini e de Dissimilaridade a mudanças regressivas entre estratos. Para ilustrar os resultados encontrados, é analisada a evolução da segregação por gênero em grupamentos de atividade no Brasil de 1992 a 2014. Constatou-se que a segregação por gênero, conforme várias medidas, diminuiu. Além disso, de 2002 a 2014, é feita a análise da decomposição das medidas de segregação quando 53 ramos de atividade são classificados em seis grupamentos. Verifica-se que a redução da segregação por gênero entre os 53 ramos de atividade foi puxada pela segregação entre os seis grupamentos. Vários outros resultados sobre medidas de segregação são apresentados no final do trabalho. / For decades, the relations between inequality and segregation measures has been analyzed. This dissertation aims to deepen the analysis of these relations. The well known inequality (Gini index and general measure) and segregation (Gini index for segregation and Dissimilarity index) measures are described in detail. It is also demonstrated that some measures of segregation known in the literature are particular cases or transformations of Hutchens\' (2004) general measure of segregation. The use of the general measure is advocated, to the detriment of a transformation proposed by the author. In addition, some properties of its decomposition are demonstrated. Although the effect of regressive income transfers on inequality measures has been discussed for decades, there is no corresponding analysis for segregation measures. To cover this gap, we analyze the sensitivity of the segregation general measure and of the Gini and Dissimilarity indices to regressive movements between strata. To illustrate the results, the evolution of gender segregation between sectors of activity in Brazil, from 1992 to 2014, is analyzed. Gender segregation, according to several measures, has decreased. In addition, from 2002 to 2014, we analyze the decomposition of segregation when 53 branches of activity are classified into 6 sectors grouping. The results show that the decline of gender segregation between activities was driven by the segregation between groups. Several other results on segregation measures are found in the last chapter.