<pre>This dissertation consists of three independent chapters at the intersection of macroeconomics and labor economics. The first chapter studies the job-search trade-offs between full-time employment, part-time employment, and multiple job holdings. The second chapter explores the macroeconomic relationship between property crime and output in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework. The third chapter studies the causal effect of property crime on output.</pre> <pre>The first chapter develops a search-matching model of the labor market with part-time employment and multiple job holdings. The model is calibrated to data from the CPS between 2001 and 2004. Workers are able to choose their search intensity and are allowed to hold two jobs while firms can choose what type of worker to recruit. When compared to the canonical Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model, this model performs quite well while capturing some empirical regularities. First, the model generates recruiting and vacancy posting rates that move in opposite directions. Second, part-time employment is up to 10 times more responsive than full-time employment. Third, the model suggests that multiple job holding rates are more flexible than observed in the data with the rate changing by as much as 4 percentage points compared to 0.1 percentage points in the data. Finally, the full model is able to capture compositional changes during recessions with the full-time rate declining and the part-time rate increasing. It also produces an empirically consistent increase in the unemployment rate as well as a decrease in output. The DMP model is more muted than in the data for both.</pre> <pre>The second chapter explores how property crime can affect static and dynamic general equilibrium behavior of households and firms. I calibrate a model with a representative firm and heterogeneous households where households have the choice to commit property crime. In contrast to previous literature, I treat crime as a transfer rather than home production. This creates a feedback loop wherein negative productivity shocks increase property crime which further depresses legitimate work and capital accumulation. These responses by households are particularly important when thinking about the effect of property crime on the economy. Household and firm losses account for 24% of compensating variation (CV) and 37% of lost production. This suggests that behavioral responses are quite important when calculating the cost of property crime. Finally, on the margin, decreasing property crime by 1% increases social welfare by 0.19%, but the effect is diminishing suggesting that reducing crime entirely may not be optimal from a policymakers perspective.</pre> <pre>The third chapter estimates the causal effect of property crime on real personal income per capita. Running system GMM on an unbalanced panel of MSA-year pairs suggests that property crime reduces real personal income per capita by a highly statistically significant 13.3%. This implies that the average person loses $4,869 (2009 dollars) per year with real annual personal income per capita totaling $36,615. The effect is driven primarily by larceny-theft and burglary with highly statistically significant coefficients of -0.179 and -0.110 respectively. Estimates for the effect of robbery are unstable, and the effect of motor vehicle theft is statistically significant, but smaller with a coefficient of -0.060.</pre>

Die vorliegende Dissertation setzt sich aus drei Aufsätzen zusammen: zwei im Bereich der Arbeitsmarktökonomie und einer im Bereich der politischen Ökonomie. Der erste Aufsatz untersucht die Rolle der zunehmenden Firmenheterogenität für die Stagnation des Gender Wage Gaps auf dem westdeutschen Arbeitsmarkt in den 1990er und 2000er Jahren. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die steigende Firmenheterogenität während dieses Zeitraums einen Rückgang des Gender Wage Gaps um 15% bzw. 3,6 Log-Prozentpunkte verhindert hat. Darüber hinaus zeigen die Analysen, dass eine zunehmende Lohnflexibilisierung, bedingt durch einen Rückgang der Tarifbindung und wachsende Dezentralisierungs- und Flexibilisierungstendenzen innerhalb der vorhandenen Tarifbindungsregime, den Anstieg der Lohnungleichheit zwischen Betrieben und folglich die Lohnungleichheit zwischen Männern und Frauen verstärkt hat. Der zweite Aufsatz untersucht die Auswirkungen des Anfang der 1990er Jahre von Flüchtlingsmigranten verursachten, plötzlichen Anstiegs des Arbeitskräfteangebots auf Löhne und Beschäftigung der einheimischen Arbeitnehmer. Die empirischen Analysen zeigen, dass ein 1%iger Zuwachs in der Beschäftigung von Migranten mit einer Reduzierung des lokalen Lohn- und Beschäftigungswachstums in den betroffenen Regionen um durchschnittlich etwa 0,68 bzw. 1,13% einhergeht; auf längere Sicht zeigen sich indes keine negativen Auswirkungen. Zwei Drittel des lokalen Beschäftigungsrückgangs werden durch entsprechende Beschäftigungsgewinne in solchen Regionen kompensiert, die von der Flüchtlingszuwanderung nicht betroffen sind. Die Unterschiede zwischen kurz- und langfristigen Konsequenzen sowie die Umverteilung der Beschäftigung zwischen Regionen sind für die politische Evaluation der Vor- und Nachteile von Migration von Bedeutung. Der dritte Aufsatz untersucht, ob die Parteienlandschaft im Gemeinderat einen Effekt auf die Struktur von Gemeindezusammenlegungen hat, indem sie die Wahrscheinlichkeit der Wiederwahl und folglich des Machterhalts der im Amt befindlichen politischen Entscheidungsträger beeinflusst. Die empirischen Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass die Parteienstruktur für die Realisierung von Gemeindezusammenlegungen von Bedeutung ist. / This dissertation is composed of three essays: two in the field of labour economics and one in political economics. The first essay studies the role of growing workplace heterogeneity for the stagnation of the gender pay gap on the West German labour market during the 1990s and 2000s. The analysis shows that the expansion of workplace-specific wage premiums over that time period prevented the gender wage gap from narrowing by around 15% or 3.6 log points. This effect is not driven by a relocation of men and women across high and low wage firms, but is entirely attributable to a widening in the distribution of wage premiums. The study further shows that rising wage flexibilisation, facilitated by deunionisation and decentralisation tendencies within unions, has led to higher rent-sharing elasticities, and thereby catalysed the role of workplace heterogeneity for overall inequality and the wage gap between genders. The second essay investigates the impact of a refugee-driven labour supply shock on native wages and employment. By exploiting a large and unexpected refugee wave hitting the West German labour market between 1988 and 1993, the analysis shows that an increase in local immigrant employment by 1% reduces native wages and employment by about 0.68 and 1.13%, respectively; in the longer perspective, however, these negative effects disappear. The study also shows that about two-thirds of the local employment decline is compensated by corresponding employment gains in regions not affected by immigration. Both findings—the difference between short and long run effects and the redistribution of native employment across regions — are important for the political evaluation of immigration. The third essay investigates the political determinants of municipality amalgamations. By exploiting a boundary reform in the state of Brandenburg, which reduced the number of municipalities by about 70%, the study asks whether party representation in the town council influences the structure of municipality mergers by affecting the political decision makers’ probability to remain in power. The empirical estimates suggest that political representation matters for the structure of mergers that materialise.

In recent years several municipalities in Sweden have merged their public secondary schools. This has been considered a type of initiative that intends to reduce youth segregation and discrepancies in school quality. This thesis examines in what ways the merging of all public secondary schools in a municipality affects the students’ academic performance and their choice to enroll in the publicschool sector. To do so I use municipality-level aggregate data from the Swedish National Agency for Education on 9th grade students’ academic outcomes and the share of 7th graders enrolled in the public schools. I employ a difference-in-difference approach to estimate the reduced form effect of the school mergers. The control group used in the baseline estimation includes all municipalities that had a constant number of public secondary schools during the time period of my study. I move on to use propensity score matching in order to create a more comparable control group. I then estimate a difference-in-difference regression with match-fixed effects. The results show that the mergers have a negative effect on the municipality-level average GPA. In addition, the municipalities where the mergers have been implemented experience a reduction in the share of students that pass all 9th grade subjects as well as an increase in the share of students who do not have sufficient grades to continue to upper secondary school. The school mergers caused the share of 7th graders enrolled in the publicschool sector to decrease by approximately 10 percentage points. These results indicate that the public secondary school merger is not a panacea for improving student outcomes.

A pervasive critique argues that the educational and social background of senior managers, determined largely by recruitment policies and practices, was an important contributor to the relative economic decline of Britain. The current thesis argues that this critique, even in nuanced form, suffers from serious flaws. For example, long term results of recruitment are confused with information on recruitment processes. In fact, corporate performance can only be judged by understanding the challenges that faced companies, and the limits of the options available to them. The objective of the work, then, is to outline the steps sensible recruiters should have taken to secure their needs for bright young entrants, and to describe and measure what in fact happened. Key findings are that: the criteria used by companies to define high-flier entrants – intelligence, certain personal skills, and signs of character - have remained fundamentally unchanged even if emphasis has moved. Business pursued these attributes through proxies, the most important of which was that of educational qualifications. Business was rightly slow, until the 1950s, to recruit graduate entrants because most bright young people did not attend university. Although British peculiarity in terms of non-vocationalism has been exaggerated, a lesser focus on ‘relevant’ qualifications for non-technical positions was not an economic disadvantage. Proxies for personal qualities were less robust but, over time, were replaced by better direct measurement of individual qualities. The solution found in Britain to bring educated young people together with employers through regional and national recruitment institutions, including the graduate milkround, has proven highly successful. The selection of entrants has been approached at least as well as abroad, and notably unreliable tools were avoided. Business obtained an ever growing proportion of young talent, and did so by integrating educated young people from new social strata to an extent unmatched abroad.

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Brain drain and brain circulation are forms of skilled labour migration which have a significant impact on New Zealand’s economic growth. Based on their importance, it is suggested that economies rethink how they compete for skilled labour in an international labour market. This research study reviews economic and non-economic factors that influence an individual’s decisions to stay or leave New Zealand. Data is collected from a survey sample of Lincoln University final year undergraduate and postgraduate students, who represent New Zealand’s future skilled labour. The research study employs a data reduction technique called factor analysis to collate large sets of variables into small sets for econometric analysis. The key econometric tool, logit analysis, provides probabilities of graduates leaving New Zealand and marginal effects of changes in key economic and non-economic variables. These key findings, providing new knowledge, are used to engage in a policy discussion in the last chapter. The research study importantly maintains focus on three key stakeholders, the government, the business community and the individual/student when addressing and analysing New Zealand’s brain drain and brain circulation issues.

Submitted by Maike Costa (maiksebas@gmail.com) on 2016-04-12T12:09:03Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 1482933 bytes, checksum: 31b679e69a379b97e881f8c54282460b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-12T12:09:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 1482933 bytes, checksum: 31b679e69a379b97e881f8c54282460b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-08-29 / Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico - CNPq / This dissertation sought to evaluate the impact of occupational experience among young Brazilians workers as determining the chances of insertion in the Brazilian labor market as well as on wage differentials. To achieve this goal were adopted models for Propensity Score Matching (PSM) proposed by Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983) and the Counterfactual Analysis by quantile regressions proposed by Chernozhukov, Fernández-Val and Melly (2013), based on the data to the Monthly Employment Survey (PME), 2003-2012. The dissertation is composed of two essays (chapters) whose independent hypothesis drawn is that the occupational experience, ie, the fact that it has exercised an earlier occupation, can be considered an important variable for distinguishing among young workers (16 to 24 years), both in the search for employment and in their salaries. The first essay analyzed the impact of occupational experience in the occupational chances of insertion in the labor market through the econometric methodology Propensity Score Matching while the second essay assessed the impact of occupational experience in the workers' wage differentiation (workers with occupational experience and without occupational experience) by Chernozhukov, Fernández-Val and Melly (2013) method. The results confirm that occupational experience has a positive impact on influences the chances of insertion in the labor market (on average workers with experience have 10% additional chances of being hired compared to those who don’t have occupational experience), as well indicated that workers who have already exercised a previous occupational activity (reemployed workers) have a higher wage income compared to workers without previous experience (workers who are employed at his first job) in all years of the sample, and that this difference is more significant when analyzed workers located in the lower quantiles of the income distribution. Although the methodological and sampling caveats cited throughout the dissertation, the test of sensitivity analysis rectified that occupational experience in the labor market is a criterion used by the employees both in hiring and in payment. / Esta dissertação procurou avaliar o impacto da experiência ocupacional entre os jovens brasileiros como determinante nas chances de inserção do mercado de trabalho brasileiro, bem como, sobre as diferenças de salários entre os indivíduos jovens. Para atingir este objetivo adotaram-se os modelos de pareamento por escore de propensão (PSM) proposto por Rosenbaum e Rubin (1983) e a Análise Contrafactual por Regressões Quantílicas proposto por Chernozhukov, Fernández-Val e Melly (2013), tendo como base de dados a Pesquisa Mensal de Emprego (PME), de 2003 a 2012. A dissertação foi composta de dois ensaios (capítulos) independentes cuja hipótese traçada é a de que a experiência ocupacional, ou seja, o fato de já ter exercido uma ocupação anterior, pode ser considerada uma variável determinante de distinção entre os trabalhadores jovens (16 a 24 anos), tanto na busca pelo emprego quanto na sua remuneração salarial. O primeiro ensaio analisou o impacto da experiência ocupacional nas chances de inserção ocupacional no mercado de trabalho através da metodologia econométrica Propensity Score Matching enquanto o segundo ensaio avaliou o impacto da experiência ocupacional na diferenciação salarial dos trabalhadores (com experiência e sem experiência ocupacional) através do método de Chernozhukov, Fernández-Val e Melly (2013). Os resultados confirmam a experiência ocupacional como um fator de impacto determinante que influencia positivamente as chances de inserção dos trabalhadores no mercado de trabalho (em média os trabalhadores com experiência têm 10% de chances adicionais de serem contratados comparativamente aos trabalhadores sem experiência), como também, indicaram que os trabalhadores que já exerceram uma atividade ocupacional anterior (trabalhadores de reemprego) possuem um rendimento salarial superior comparativamente aos trabalhadores sem experiência anterior (trabalhadores de primeiro emprego) em todos os anos da amostra, e que este diferencial é mais significativo quando analisamos os trabalhadores localizados nos quantis mais baixos da distribuição de rendimentos. Embora com as ressalvas metodológicas e amostrais citadas ao longo da dissertação, os testes de análise de sensibilidade ratificaram que a experiência ocupacional no mercado de trabalho é um critério utilizado pelos demandantes de mão de obra tanto na contratação quanto na remuneração do trabalhador.

En république tchèque, les politiques de conciliation travail/famille ont été profondément remodelées à l’occasion de la transition systémique vers l’économie de marché : l’objectif de cette thèse est de décrire les récentes évolutions de politique familiale et d’estimer leurs effets sur l’emploi des mères. Malgré l’accession du pays à l’UE en 2004 et une disponibilité croissante de données, la littérature économique sur le régime d’Etat social, les politiques sociales et familiales et leur effet sur le marché du travail reste très rare. Je montre que l’orientation des politiques familiales après 1989 a induit un fort recul de garde publique d’enfants et creusé un très fort écart d’emploi entre les femmes avec et sans enfants en âge préscolaire. J’analyse les effets de deux réformes de congé parental : la réforme de 1955 qui a prolongé le paiement de l’allocation parental à 4 ans par enfant sans prolonger la durée de la protection d’emploi (3 ans), puis la réforme de 2008 qui a au contraire encouragé un retour en emploi plus rapide qu’auparavant. J’utilise l’Enquête Emploi et j’applique la méthode des Différences-de-différences pour estimer l’impact sur l’emploi des mères à court et moyen terme. Enfin, j’examine les déterminants culturels de long terme des préférences des ménages tchèques en termes de conciliation travail/famille, et je mets en évidence une évolution des valeurs de genre vers un modèle conservateur de la division des tâches. Cette évolution, qui court sur les années 2000, s’oppose à la tendance Européenne générale et est susceptible d’influencer l’orientation des politiques familiales ainsi que leurs effets sur les ménages. / Czech work-life conciliation policies and practices have gone through dramatic changes since the 1989 transition from centrally planned to market economy. The objective of this thesis is to describe the recent evolutions of family policies, and to assess their effects on maternal employment. Surprisingly, despite the country’s EU accession in 2004 and an increasing data availability, the economic literature on the Czech welfare state regime, its social and family policy and its effects on labour market outcomes is extremely scarce. I show that post-transitional policies differed from the former interventionist and paternalist orientation, and resulted in a sharp decrease in public childcare supply and the widest parenthood-related employment gaps among OECD countries (41 pp in 2011). I focus on two reforms of the parental leave system: the 1995 Parental Benefit reform which extended the payment of universal parental benefit to 4 years instead of 3 without an equivalent extension of the job protected parental leave; then the 2008 Multi-Speed Parental Benefit reform, which encouraged yet again a faster return to employment. I use the Labour Force Survey and rely on a difference-in-differences strategy to assess the net effect of these reforms on mother’s labour market participation, in both short and medium run. Last but not least, I investigate long-run cultural determinants of the observed work-life conciliation preferences and show that a significant evolution towards conservative gender roles has been taking place in the post-transitional decades. This opposes the general European trend, and is likely to influence family policy orientations as well as the reforms’ outcomes.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse empirically, proposing new methods to tackle disputed questions in the literature of political and labour economics, the Italian institutional setting both in a political competition context and in the occupational structure. The first paper explores the relationship between transfers from central state to political aligned municipalities and the effect of these transfers on local electoral consensus. This study contributes to the empirical literature of the political determinants of spikes in central transfers in pre-electoral periods and of the electoral benefits of pork barrel measures for incumbent politicians. Despite several findings of strong evidence that intergovernmental fiscal transfers rise during election years, in the Italian case researchers investigated little the political incentives that lay behind these increases or the success of these transfers in attracting votes. We focus on the so called swing municipalities, defined as those in which the probability of winning is close to one-half, analysing data of Italian comuni with more than 15 000 inhabitants, in the period 2007-2014. From an empirical perspective, every attempt to estimate the causal impact of political alignment on the amount of federal transfers is clearly complicated by endogeneity issues. Without a credible source of exogenous variation in political alignment, the empirical correlation between alignment and transfers (if any) can be completely driven by socio-economic factors influencing both dimensions. We propose a new model specification to account for the endogeneity issue arising when estimating the causal impact of political alignment on transfers: the unpredicted change in the government occurred in 2011 after the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi and the following appointment of Mario Monti as prime minister. We perform our empirical estimation in two steps: first, we apply the close-race RDD setup (Lee 2008) to assess the impact of political alignment on transfers. Results from the close-race RDD show that aligned municipalities receive more grants, with this effect being stronger before elections. At a second empirical stage, we perform a local linear regression of the re-election probability of the local incumbent on transfers, including the first stage error term to have our coefficient of interest measuring only the effect of politically-driven transfers on electoral outcomes, and we conclude that this probability increases as grants increase. The second paper stems from the observation of the most recent phenomena in the domestic and foreign labour market: technological progress has been associated to a crowding-out of cognitive-skill intensive jobs in favour of jobs requiring soft skills, such as social intelligence, flexibility and creativity. Soft skills can be defined as interpersonal, human, people or behavioural skills necessary for applying technical skills and knowledge in the workplace. The nature of the soft skills make them hardly replaceable by machine work, and Among soft skills, creativity is one of the hardest to define and to codify, therefore, creativity-intensive occupations have been shielded from automation. In our work, we focus on creativity, starting from its definition in order to get significant insights on which occupational profiles in Italy can be considered creative and to explore their dynamics in the labour market. A possible analytical definition of creativity comes from the seminal work of Edward De Bono. According to his pioneering research in the field, lateral thinking is strictly related to creativity and it can be described along four dimensions: 1) fluidity, as the ability of a subject to give the highest possible number of answers to a certain question; 2) flexibility, as the number of categories to which we can bring back these questions; 3) originality: ability of expressing new and innovative ideas; 4) processing: ability of realizing concretely one’s ideas. We apply this definition to a uniquely detailed occupational dataset on tasks, skills, work attitudes, and working conditions regarding all Italian occupations: the Inapp-Istat Survey on Occupations (Indagine Campionaria sulle Professioni, ICP hereafter), an O*NET-type dataset developed by the Italian National Institute for Public Policy Analysis. The Survey on Occupations, in fact, presents a list of skills and competences and workers are asked to identify those they make use of in performing their job. Inside this list, we identify 25 skills associated to creativity and we formulate a Matrix Completion (MC) optimization problem, as discussed theoretically in Mazumder (2010). Matrix Completion is the task of filling in the missing entries of a partially observed matrix, which we generate by obscuring randomly 10%, 25% and 50% of the entries in the columns associated with the creative skills, given a fixed row (occupation). In our analysis, we use a formulation of the problem known as Nuclear Norm Minimization and we solve it with the Soft Impute Algorithm. We conclude our analysis on social skills in our third paper where we analyse the effects of Covid-19 pandemic on soft skills in the context of Italian occupations, operating in about 100 economic sectors. We leverage detailed information from ICP, the Italian O*Net, and we simulate the impact of Covid-19 on those workplace characteristics and working style that were more seriously hit by the lockdown measures and the new sanitary dispositions (physical proximity, face-to-face discussions, working remotely, ecc.). We simulate three possible scenarios based on the intensity of the effects of COVID-19 on some working conditions, such as working from home, keeping physical distance and so on. We then apply matrix completion, a machine learning technique used in recommendation systems, in order to predict the levels of soft skills required for each occupation when working conditions change, as these changes might be persistent in the near future. Professions showing a lower intensity in the use of soft skills, with respect to the predicted one, are exposed to a deficit in their soft-skill endowment, which might ultimately lead to lower productivity or higher unemployment, thus enhancing the negative effects of the pandemic.