Dans les trois chapitres de cette thèse, j’étudie l’effet des préjugés et des préférences discriminatoires sur le marché du travail. Je m’intéresse aussi à l’efficacité de politiques publiques qui ont pour objectif d’atténuer les effets négatifs de ces préférences. Dans mon premier chapitre, je m’appuie sur un arrêt célèbre qui a changé le pouvoir de monopsone des entreprises pour voir si, comme l’avait prédit Becker, les défaillances du marché ont un impact sur la discrimination salariale. Mes résultats montrent que lorsque le pouvoir de monopsone diminue, la discrimination salariale disparaît. Ce résultat montre que les préjugés ne doivent pas nécessairement se traduire par une discrimination salariale. Dans le deuxième chapitre, j’analyse l’effet d’une autre politique publique, une réforme de 2015 qui a imposé des quotas de genre dans les comités de sélection académique en France. L’objectif de cette réforme était d’améliorer les classements des femmes en augmentant la part des celles-ci dans les comités. En évaluant la réforme, je trouve l’effet inverse ; les femmes sont moins bien classées par les comités de recrutement après la réforme. Cependant, ce résultat ne montre pas que les femmes ont une préférence pour les hommes. L’effet négatif de la réforme ne se trouve que dans les commissions dirigées par des présidents de jury masculins, ce qui suggère que le comportement des hommes a peut-être lui aussi changé suite à la réforme. Ce chapitre démontre qu’il est nécessaire d’évaluer les politiques publiques, afin d’éviter que des réformes bien intentionnées ne causent plus de mal que de bien. Dans le troisième et dernier chapitre, je m’intéresse aux choix de localisation des individus. Je m’intéresse tout particulièrement à la question suivante : Les travailleurs préfèrent-ils habiter dans une ville avec une proportion plus importante de résidents du même groupe ethnique qu’eux, ceteris paribus ? J’utilise un modèle d’équilibre spatial qui permet de répondre à cette question. En contrôlant pour les salaires, les loyers, les revenus de transfert et les réseaux des individus, ces préférences sont comparables aux salaires réels dans les choix de localisation des villes des individus. Je simule ensuite le modèle pour essayer de voir quel est l’impact de ces préférences sur les écarts de salaires entre travailleurs blancs et noirs aux États-Unis. / In all three chapters of this dissertation, I try to see whether discrimination and own-group preferences exist, in different contexts, and what kind of public policies could mitigate or balance the negative effect of these preferences. In my first chapter, I rely on a famous ruling that changed the monopsony power of firms to see whether, as predicted by Becker, market failures have an impact on wage discrimination. I find that as monopsony power decreases, firms are no longer able to act on their prejudice, and wage discrimination disappears. This result shows that labour market context is essential in evaluating public policies, and that prejudice need not necessarily translate into wage discrimination. In the second chapter, I analyse the effect of another public policy, a 2015 reform that imposed gender quotas in academic recruitment committees. The reasoning of the policymakers was that increasing the share of women evaluators would improve the outcomes for women. I find the opposite instead; women are ranked worse by hiring committees after the reform. However, this result does not show that women discriminate against women. There is some evidence that this result is caused by the reaction of male jurors to the reform, since the negative effect of the reform is found only in committees that are helmed by male jury presidents. This chapter shows that it is necessary to evaluate public policies, lest reforms that are well-meaning in intention turn out to cause more harm than good. In the third and final chapter, I show two stylised facts: When cities decline, they tend to become more black, and black residents are disproportionately located in cities that pay low wages. One explanation for this could be that living in cities with a larger share of black residents is a positive amenity for black workers. I try to see whether workers have preferences for living in cities that have a larger share of co-ethnic residents, when controlling for wages, rents, transfers and network amenities. I find that these preferences are significant, and then try to see what share of the wage gap these preferences, and the imperfect sorting they imply, could explain.

In 2007, the Swedish payroll tax was reduced for youths in an attempt to suppress the perceived high unemployment among Swedish youths. The reform was rolled back later in 2016. For this period there is a rich supply of publicly available aggregated (macro) data. This thesis aims to examine: first, if the aggregated data is suitable for policy evaluation of the reform, and second, the effects of the reform introduction and repeal. This has been done by using both a conventional fixed effects model and a more unorthodox synthetic control method. Neither of the two methods could show any unbiased and consistent significant result of the treatment effects of the reform. Instead, the results of this thesis suggest that the publicly available aggregated data doesn’t contain enough information to evaluate such reforms.

<p>My three chapters are all related to the study of immigrants in how they impact the US</p> <p>economy. The first two chapters look at international students in particular and how they</p> <p>impact their domestic peers and the local college towns they reside in. The third chapter</p> <p>looks at immigrant workers and their effect on native workers’ propensity to consolidate to</p> <p>form labor unions.</p> <p>To be specific, the first chapter, titled How International students Affect Domestic Students’</p> <p>Achievement: evidence from the OPT STEM-extension, looks at the role of immigrants</p> <p>in shaping the educational outcome of domestic students pursuing STEM degrees</p> <p>in the United States. By utilizing the mass influx of international students after an immigration</p> <p>policy change (OPT-STEM-extension) in 2008, I investigate the peer effects that</p> <p>international students have on grades, attrition, and first-year salary of STEM graduates.</p> <p>I account for the common selection issues present in the peer-effects literature by looking</p> <p>at the yearly exogenous change in international student share in a specific course-instructor</p> <p>pair and controlling for rich individual ability and demographics. This was made possible</p> <p>by having access to administrative data of a land-grant university with one of the highest</p> <p>international student enrollments in the US. I find that international students tend to lower</p> <p>grades and persistence of domestic students in STEM. Still, this negative effect is more than</p> <p>compensated for in the increase in salary due to spill-over effects in learning for those who</p> <p>persist and graduate.</p> <p>My research aims to eventually aid policymakers in both the local educational institutions</p> <p>and the federal government. To this end, I have extended my analysis of international</p> <p>students by shifting my focus outside the classroom to the local economies of the college</p> <p>campuses. In my second chapter, titled International Students’ Effect on Local Businesses, I</p> <p>use the zip code-level Census data on small businesses to see how the influx of international</p> <p>students affected the regional college campuses. I find that international students have a</p> <p>significantly positive effect on job creation in the local economy. To my knowledge, this is</p> <p>the first data-driven-causal analysis of international students on local businesses in the US.</p> <p>12</p> <p>My third chapter is a co-authored work with Alex Nowrasteh and Artem Samiahulin</p> <p>titled Immigrants Reduce Unionization in the US. Here we attempt to relate immigrants to</p> <p>a more traditional labor economics topic: labor unions. Although there is a vast amount of</p> <p>literature on unions, we found that the literature that causally estimates immigrants’ effect</p> <p>on unions is severely lacking in the US setting. Using a combination of representative data</p> <p>such as the CPS, Census, and the ACS, we show that immigrants accounted for about onethird</p> <p>of the decline in unions since the 1980s. We based our paper on the theoretical model</p> <p>of Naylor and Cripps  1993  and borrowed George Borjas’s skill-cell method for our empirical</p> <p>method.(Borjas  2003 )</p>

<p>    </p> <p>I worked on two chapters studying the labor markets in Colombia and Iraq. My third chapter analyzed health outcomes in the US. </p> <p><br></p> <p>My first chapter examines whether the three-year gap between the announcement (in 2014) and the start (in 2017) of the Illicit Crop Substitution Program (ICSP) increased child labor in Colombia. My results from a difference-in-differences model using differences in historical coca production show that due to the ICSP announcement, children became four percentage points more likely to work in municipalities with historical coca production than in non–coca-growing areas. </p> <p><br></p> <p>My second chapter ran a randomized control trial and a double-incentivized resume rating to elicit the preferences of employers and job seekers for candidates and vacancies in Iraq. After revealing the ob offer rate for female job seekers, women applied for jobs by three more percentage points than the men in the control group. This paper highlights the value of revealing employers’ preferences to improve the match between female candidates and employers when women underestimate the chances of finding a job. </p> <p><br></p> <p>In my third paper, I study how removing the black box warning on Chantix, a prescription drug used to reduce nicotine consumption, affects veterans’ visits to smoking cessation therapy. Using a difference-in-differences model, I found that veterans schedule almost two more medical consultations in counties with high-quality hospitals than in places with low-quality medical care centers. </p>

<p>My dissertation consists of three chapters in the field of labor and education economics. The first chapter studies the impact of early morning classes on students’ educational trajectories. The second chapter explores how college course shutouts affects students’ educational outcomes. The third chapter investigates the impact of kindness on wage returns.</p>

Decisions made by individuals planning for retirement may be myopic. One way of capturing this myopia is with quasi-hyperbolic discounting. It is well known that such preferences may explain why individuals fail to provide an adequate retirement income for themselves. In this thesis, the quasi-hyperbolic discounting model is applied to a number of other decisions and outcomes related to planning for retirement. There are three main focuses. Firstly, the thesis considers a model where individuals are quasi-hyperbolic discounters over both retirement and saving, and extends the results of Diamond and Köszegi (2003). It argues that mechanisms designed to overcome myopic saving decisions may lead to unplanned early retirement. This may depend on the form of income in retirement -- regular income options such as annuities offer commitment over overconsuming early in retirement, which makes early retirement less desirable to myopic retirees. Secondly, it tests these predictions using a new laboratory experiment. Over a two-month period, participants were asked to attend weekly sessions, and could leave the experiment (or "retire") in any week of their choosing. Part of their payment for attending these sessions was put aside and paid only after they had left. The results indicated that more impulsive individuals left the experiment earlier, both overall and relative to plans made in the first week of the experiment. Finally, this thesis presents a model of rising wages as a forced saving mechanism. Assuming individuals face some borrowing constraints, deferred wages implicitly place some earnings aside until much closer to retirement, when quasi-hyperbolic discounters save a greater fraction of their income, increasing total retirement wealth. It also shows that demand for rising wages should disappear for people with access to more direct saving commitment mechanisms, although when these schemes offer less commitment (due to early withdrawal or early retirement options), a combination of both mechanisms is preferred.

I examine the importance of human capital for economic development in Thailand during the period of high economic growth and structural transformation (1985-2000), using labour force survey data. The three main chapters attempt to estimate the effects of education, as a measure of human capital, on three major outcomes in the Thai labour market, namely (i) earnings; (ii) sector of employment; and (iii) earnings inequality. I address the endogeneity problem of education using an education policy shift—the change in the compulsory schooling law—that produces exogenous variation in education. The three main chapters adopt distinct modelling frameworks. The details of each of the main chapters are as follows. The third chapter investigates how education increases earnings and the probability of being in the non-agricultural sector. As the education policy shift influences educational attainment in a discontinuous way, a regression discontinuity (RD) framework is adopted to identify the average returns to education and the effect of education on the sector of employment. It is important to emphasise that the RD technique constrains the effects of education on the two outcomes to be linear and to be applicable only to sub-populations. My results confirm significant effects of education on both earnings and the sectoral sorting process. In addition, there are heterogeneous effects of education by gender. The fourth chapter is an extension of the previous chapter. I allow the returns to education to be heterogeneous across education levels and sectors of employment, while attempting to estimate the returns for the entire population. I use a control function (CF) approach and a double selection correction to estimate the sectoral earnings process, while jointly accounting for the choice of education and the selection into sectors and paid employment. I find that the returns to education are non-linear and higher in the non-agricultural sector especially for medium and highly educated workers. This suggests that human capital plays a crucial role in facilitating a structural transformation towards the non-agricultural sector. In the final chapter, I study how the increased primary education completion rate affects earnings inequality. While there exists a burgeoning literature on the average returns to education, less attention has been devoted to estimating the effects of education on the distribution of earnings. I identify the effects of primary education completion on earnings at different points of the distribution, and thus earnings inequality, using a recently developed approach, called regression discontinuity distributional treatment effects. My results suggest that the increased primary education completion rate reduces earnings inequality as the returns to primary education are larger for the poor than the rich.

Cette thèse examine l'impact des institutions sur le comportement des travailleurs et la qualité de l'emploi. Les deux premiers chapitres utilisent des données subjectives afin d’évaluer l'impact des politiques de l'emploi sur la qualité de l'emploi d'une manière qui prenne en compte un éventail plus large de conditions de travail pertinentes par rapport à la littérature existante. Le premier chapitre montre qu'une baisse de l'assurance-chômage diminue la satisfaction au travail des travailleurs en les amenant à accepter de moins bonnes conditions de travail. Le deuxième chapitre montre que les effets de la protection partielle de l'emploi sur les licenciements améliorent le sentiment de sécurité de l'emploi pour les travailleurs protégés, mais au prix d'externalités négatives pour les autres travailleurs. Le troisième chapitre apporte de nouveaux éléments sur la manière dont les institutions affectent les normes de genre en examinant les comportements des femmes sur le marché du travail et au sein de leur couple. En nous appuyant sur la période de 41 ans de division de l'Allemagne, nous montrons que les institutions de la RDA, favorable à l'égalité des sexes, ont créé une culture qui a défait la norme selon laquelle l’homme est le principal pourvoyeur du ménage. En revanche, cette norme est encore très répandue en ex-Allemagne de l’Ouest. / This dissertation examines the impact of institutions on workers' behavior and job quality. The first two chapters use subjective data to assess the impact of employment policies on job quality in a way that takes into account a broader range of relevant working conditions compared to existing papers. The first chapter shows that lower unemployment insurance decreases workers' job satisfaction by making them accept lower working conditions. The second chapter shows that the effects of partial employment protection on layoffs improve the feeling of job security for protected workers, but at the cost of a negative externality on other workers. The third chapter provides new evidence on the way institutions affect gender norms by looking at women's behaviors on the labour market and inside their couple. Using the 41-year division of Germany, we show that GDR’s gender equal institutions have created a culture that has undone the male breadwinner norm. By contrast, this norm is still prevalent in former West Germany.

Cette thèse s’inscrit dans la démarche de l’Économie du bien-être au sens où elle répond au double enjeu qui guide cette discipline, à savoir faire des mesures de bien-être subjectif des sujets d’analyse en soi et des outils visant à améliorer l’analyse économique. La première partie de cette thèse explore l’interaction existant entre temps de travail au sein des couples et le bien-être subjectif. Le Chapitre 1 démontre qu’être simultanément sur-employés peut avoir un effet positif sur le bien-être des deux membres du couple. Le Chapitre 2 démontre que les femmes travaillant plus que leurs maris subissent des baisses de bien-être. Ce Chapitre présente une posture nouvelle dans la littérature au sens où il prouve que cette baisse de bien-être ne semble pas imputable aux normes de genre mais à l’absence de justice dans la distribution des tâches au sein du ménage. La seconde partie de cette thèse adopte une posture différente au sens où le bien-être subjectif y devient un outil permettant l’évaluation de politiques du marché du travail. Le Chapitre 3 démontre que les réductions du temps de travail implantées en France et au Portugal à la fin des années 1990 ont amélioré en moyenne la satisfaction des travailleurs vis-à-vis de leur emploi et de leur temps de loisir. Le Chapitre 4 évalue l’effet direct et les externalités causés par la hausse de la contribution Delalande en France en 1999. Cette contribution visait à protéger l’emploi des seniors. Ainsi, l’augmentation de cette contribution a augmenté la perception de sécurité des seniors concernés mais ceci s’est fait aux détriments de leurs plus jeunes collègues, qui ont vu leur perception de sécurité de l’emploi diminuer. / The present thesis contributes to the literature by exploring how relative working time within households and changes in legal norms on the labour market are linked to subjective wellbeing. Bydoing so, this thesis matches the objectives of the Economics of Wellbeing in that it both considers subjective wellbeing as a subject of study per se and a tool for economic analyses. The first part ofthis thesis examines how relative working time in household affects subjective wellbeing. Chapter 1 demonstrates that being simultaneously overemployed may translate into higher wellbeing of both couple members. Chapter 2 shows that women working more than their husbands are likely to experience wellbeing losses. However, this Chapter is innovative in that it demonstrates that these losses in utility are not caused by violation of gender norms but because of the unfairness of the time allocation within household. The second part of this thesis adopts a different perspective sinceit takes subjective wellbeing as a tool to perform welfare analysis of labor market reforms. Chapter3 estimates the impact of working time reductions implemented in Portugal and France at the end ofthe 1990’s and concludes that workers experienced increases in job and leisure satisfaction. Chapter4 evaluates the impact of the increase in the Delalande tax in 1999. This tax aimed at keeping older workers in the labor force. Then, this Chapter shows that perceived job security of older workers increased thanks to the higher Delalande tax but this has been done at the cost of lower perceived job security of their younger colleagues.

<p>This dissertation is a collection of three papers. Each paper constitutes a chapter. Each chapter empirically examines an aspect of bias-motivated behavior in the United States. </p> <p>The first chapter studies the impact of penalty enhancement statutes by state legislatures on the incidence of hate crimes in the United States. Penalty enhancements may deter crime, however, the passing of such laws may also increase awareness among law enforcement officials and increase arrests. Using administrative data on hate crimes and a difference-in-differences method that leverages state-level variation in the introduction of legislation, this paper does not find a significant effect of the state enactment of penalty enhancement statutes on hate-crime incidence rates. </p> <p>The second chapter examines whether election timing and election outcomes affect the incidence of crimes motivated by hate and intolerance. Using administrative data and a difference-in-differences design that compares election with non-election years, I show that hate crimes increase by an average of 28 percent in the three weeks around a US presidential election. This effect is larger in recent presidential elections and when there is no incumbent candidate. Second, using a similar design and cross-state variation in the timing of gubernatorial elections, I find no evidence that these state-level elections affect hate-crime incidence. Third, using regression-discontinuity designs based on vote counts, I find that the number of hate crimes is not affected by presidential or gubernatorial election outcomes. </p> <p>The third chapter studies the impact of presidential and gubernatorial election timing on the level of toxicity present on social media platforms such as Twitter. Together with Sameer Borwankar, I empirically determine the extent to which the toxicity of Twitter content changes during election times as compared to non-election times. We randomly sample Twitter users and collect all tweets made by this sample around election time. We use a difference-in-differences identification leveraging election and non-election years. We further focus on toxic content that is motivated by political polarization and examine various bias-motivation categories that come up in this content as well as the variation in the intensity of toxicity between national and local election times.  </p> <p><br></p>