Chow Shing Yuk. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-66). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter Chapter 1: --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 2: --- Literature Review --- p.4 / Chapter 2.1 --- First-Generation Studies --- p.4 / Chapter 2.2 --- Second-Generation Studies --- p.5 / Chapter 2.3 --- Third-Generation Studies --- p.7 / Chapter Chapter 3: --- Empirical Methodology --- p.13 / Chapter 3.1 --- Fixed Effect Estimation --- p.13 / Chapter 3.2 --- Within-twin Differencing --- p.14 / Chapter 3.3 --- Adjustment for Measurement Errors --- p.15 / Chapter 3.4 --- Value of Within-twin Differencing --- p.16 / Chapter Chapter 4: --- Data Descriptions --- p.29 / Chapter 4.1 --- Twins Data --- p.29 / Chapter 4.2 --- Non-twins Data --- p.32 / Chapter Chapter 5: --- Empirical Results --- p.35 / Chapter 5.1 --- Cross Sectional Results: Twins Sample --- p.35 / Chapter 5.2 --- Within-twin Differencing --- p.42 / Chapter 5.3 --- Cross Sectional Results: Non-twins Sample --- p.45 / Chapter 5.4 --- Female Results --- p.48 / Chapter Chapter 6: --- Conclusion --- p.50 / Tables --- p.52 / Appendix l: Some Other Thoughts on Marriage Premium --- p.60 / References --- p.64

O objetivo desta dissertação é retomar a controvérsia em torno dos efeitos da liberalização comercial sobre o mercado de trabalho brasileiro, em especial os diferenciais de salários entre trabalhadores qualificados e não qualificados na indústria de transformação em 1995 e 1999. Após uma adaptação da decomposição de Oaxaca-Blinder (OB), encontramos evidências, para o Brasil como um todo e para a região metropolitana de São Paulo, de que o diferencial de salário aumentou, em benefício dos trabalhadores qualificados. Considerando a hipótese de que o Brasil é um país com abundância de trabalho não qualificado e intensivo neste fator, este resultado é oposto à premissa teórica do modelo Heckscher-Ohlin e Stolper-Samuelson (HOS) e suas variantes, de que a abertura de um país em desenvolvimento, ou intensivo em trabalho não qualificado, tende a diminuir a desigualdade. Do outro lado, encontramos evidências para a região metropolitana de Recife, de que o diferencial salarial entre trabalhadores qualificados e não qualificados diminuiu após a liberalização comercial, corroborando com a premissa teórica do modelo HOS e suas variantes. Entretanto, este resultado não deve, evidentemente, ser estendido para o Brasil, ilustrando assim diferenças regionais e estruturais não negligenciáveis do mercado de trabalho por região da Federação. / The objective of this MA Dissertation was to take up again the controversy of the effects of trade liberalization in Brazilian labor market, specially the wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers in the industry in 1995 and 1999. After an adaptation of Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition (OB), it was found evidence in Brazil as a whole and in Sao Paulo metropolitan area, that wage differential increased for the benefit of skilled workers. On one hand, supposing that Brazil is an economy characterized by unskilled workers abundance which are intensively used, this result is contrary to the premise theory of Heckscher-Ohlin and Stolper-Samuelson (HOS) model and their variants that defends that trade liberalization in developing country, or unskilled worker intensive countries, has a tendency to reduce inequality. On the other hand, it was found evidence in Recife metropolitan area that wage differential between skilled and unskilled workers has reduced after trade liberalization, corroborating with the theory premise of HOS model and their variants. However, this result cannot be extended to Brazil, illustrating, therefore, its labor markets regional and structural differences.

The aim of this study is to examine whether, and to what extent, the differences in wages between women and men can be explained by discrimination against women in the labour market.The first part of the analysis is a cross-sectional analysis. Firstly, a model is estimated with wages as the dependent variable and with sex, individuals' qualifications, personal characteristics, occupation and the branch of industry in which they are employed as the independent variables. The results of this regression reveal that the hourly wage for a woman is about nine SEK lower than for a man. Separate wage functions for women and men show that women obtain a lower return from both education and work experience. A breakdown of the difference in wages reveals that most of the dissimilarity is explained by discrimination against women and very little by differences in men's and women's productivity. In the absence of discrimination, women's relative pay would be between 16 and 25 percent higher. The stability of the findings is checked by means of reverse regression. This resulted in discrimination against men in some cases and against women in others. Thus, different conclusions can be drawn from the two methods. In certain special cases the results produced by reverse regression are correct, whereas, in more general cases, the direct method shows itself to be more satisfactory. The study ends with an analysis of the effects of various laws and agreements on the development of women's wages and employment in Swedish industry. The introduction of equal pay, the removal of the ban on night work for women in industry and the wage solidarity policy have had a positive influence on the relative demand for women workers. The study's conclusions are, firstly, that the differences in pay between the sexes can partly be explained by discrimination against women. Secondly, within industry, wage discrimination against women has declined as a result of changes leading in an anti-discrimination direction. / digitalisering@umu

The three chapters of my dissertation examine immigrant assimilation in the Canadian labour market. Through three levels of analysis, which are distinguished by the sample restrictions that are employed, I investigate immigrant labour force and job dynamics, immigrant propensity for self-employment, and immigrant wage assimilation, respectively. In the first chapter, I exploit recently-introduced immigrant identifiers in the Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the longitudinal dimension of these data to compare the labor force and job dynamics of Canada's native-born and immigrant populations. I am particularly interested in the role of job, as opposed to worker, heterogeneity in driving immigrant wage disparities and in how the paths into and out of jobs of varying quality compares between immigrants and the native-born. The main finding is that the disparity in immigrant job quality, which does not appear to diminish with years since arrival, reflects a combination of relatively low transitions into high-wage jobs and high transitions out of these jobs. The former result appears about equally due to difficulties obtaining high-wage jobs directly out of unemployment and in using low-wage jobs as stepping-stones. I find little or no evidence, however, that immigrant jobseekers face barriers to low-wage jobs. We interpret these findings as emphasizing the empirical importance of the quintessential immigrant anecdote of a low-quality "survival job" becoming a "dead-end job". The second chapter analyzes immigrant choice of self-employment versus paid employment. Using the Canadian Census public use microdata files from 1981 to 2006, I update the Canadian literature on immigrant self-employment by examining changes in the likelihood of self-employment across arrival cohorts of immigrants and how self-employment rates evolve in the years following migration to Canada. This study finds that new immigrants, who arrived between 1996 and 2005, turned to self-employment at a faster rate than the earlier cohorts and that immigrants become increasingly likely to be self-employed as they spend more time in Canada. More important, I examine immigrant earnings outcomes relative to the native-born, instead of within, sectors and thus explore the extent to which a comparative advantage in self-employment, captured by the difference in potential earnings between the self- and paid-employment sectors, can explain the tremendous shift toward self-employment in the immigrant population. The results show that the earnings advantage between the self- and the paid-employment sectors accounts for the higher likelihood of self-employment for traditional immigrants in the years following migration. However, the potential earnings difference cannot explain the reason that non-traditional immigrants are more likely to be self-employed as they consistently lose an earnings advantage in the self-employment sector relative to the paid-employment sector. My paper suggests that immigrants may face barriers to accessing paid-employment, or immigrants are attracted to self-employment by non-monetary benefits. Lastly, in the third chapter, studies which estimate separate returns to foreign and host-country sources of human capital have burgeoned in the immigration literature in recent years. In estimating separate returns, analysts are typically forced to make strong assumptions about the timing and exogeneity of human capital investments. Using a particularly rich longitudinal Canadian data source, I consider to what extent the findings of the Canadian literature may be driven by biases arising from errors in measuring foreign and host-country sources of human capital and the endogeneity of post-migration schooling and work experience. The main finding is that the results of the current literature by and large do not appear to be driven by the assumptions needed to estimate separate returns using the standard data sources available.

This thesis compares two datasets, the Science and Engineering Indicators 2006 (SEI) and the 1993 National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG), and looks at the impact of sex on full-time annual salary while controlling for different variables. The SEI provides a study based on data from 1999 about the sex effects on salary, adds controls, and records the changes in the effect of sex on salary. The SEI study finds after adding controls for worker heterogeneity and compensating wage differentials, women with bachelor's degrees earn 11.0% less, women with master's degrees earn 8.0% less, and women with doctoral degrees earn 8.4% less than their male counterparts. My analysis of the NSCG finds after adding controls, women with bachelor's degrees earn 18.5% less, women with master?s degrees earn 18.7% less, and women with doctoral degrees earn 15.3% less than their male counterparts. Additionally, in the NSCG and the SEI the field of degree impacted the sex effects the most for bachelor's and master's degree holders. This research is useful to study the difference between these datasets from different time periods. Specifically, the difference in the sex wage gap and in the changing importance of certain variables affecting the sex wage gap.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

The three chapters of my dissertation examine immigrant assimilation in the Canadian labour market. Through three levels of analysis, which are distinguished by the sample restrictions that are employed, I investigate immigrant labour force and job dynamics, immigrant propensity for self-employment, and immigrant wage assimilation, respectively. In the first chapter, I exploit recently-introduced immigrant identifiers in the Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the longitudinal dimension of these data to compare the labor force and job dynamics of Canada's native-born and immigrant populations. I am particularly interested in the role of job, as opposed to worker, heterogeneity in driving immigrant wage disparities and in how the paths into and out of jobs of varying quality compares between immigrants and the native-born. The main finding is that the disparity in immigrant job quality, which does not appear to diminish with years since arrival, reflects a combination of relatively low transitions into high-wage jobs and high transitions out of these jobs. The former result appears about equally due to difficulties obtaining high-wage jobs directly out of unemployment and in using low-wage jobs as stepping-stones. I find little or no evidence, however, that immigrant jobseekers face barriers to low-wage jobs. We interpret these findings as emphasizing the empirical importance of the quintessential immigrant anecdote of a low-quality "survival job" becoming a "dead-end job". The second chapter analyzes immigrant choice of self-employment versus paid employment. Using the Canadian Census public use microdata files from 1981 to 2006, I update the Canadian literature on immigrant self-employment by examining changes in the likelihood of self-employment across arrival cohorts of immigrants and how self-employment rates evolve in the years following migration to Canada. This study finds that new immigrants, who arrived between 1996 and 2005, turned to self-employment at a faster rate than the earlier cohorts and that immigrants become increasingly likely to be self-employed as they spend more time in Canada. More important, I examine immigrant earnings outcomes relative to the native-born, instead of within, sectors and thus explore the extent to which a comparative advantage in self-employment, captured by the difference in potential earnings between the self- and paid-employment sectors, can explain the tremendous shift toward self-employment in the immigrant population. The results show that the earnings advantage between the self- and the paid-employment sectors accounts for the higher likelihood of self-employment for traditional immigrants in the years following migration. However, the potential earnings difference cannot explain the reason that non-traditional immigrants are more likely to be self-employed as they consistently lose an earnings advantage in the self-employment sector relative to the paid-employment sector. My paper suggests that immigrants may face barriers to accessing paid-employment, or immigrants are attracted to self-employment by non-monetary benefits. Lastly, in the third chapter, studies which estimate separate returns to foreign and host-country sources of human capital have burgeoned in the immigration literature in recent years. In estimating separate returns, analysts are typically forced to make strong assumptions about the timing and exogeneity of human capital investments. Using a particularly rich longitudinal Canadian data source, I consider to what extent the findings of the Canadian literature may be driven by biases arising from errors in measuring foreign and host-country sources of human capital and the endogeneity of post-migration schooling and work experience. The main finding is that the results of the current literature by and large do not appear to be driven by the assumptions needed to estimate separate returns using the standard data sources available.

La informalidad laboral y la pobreza tienen altos niveles de incidencia en América Latina. Lo anterior se explica porque en países de ingreso medio y bajo como los latinoamericanos, el vínculo entre la pobreza y el mercado laboral no se presenta a través de la problemática del desempleo, sino principalmente por la situación en el empleo. El objetivo de la tesis es explorar el vínculo entre informalidad laboral y pobreza en Colombia. Para ello, a través de diferentes metodologías, se estimarán las diferencias en remuneración asociadas a informalidad, y luego con ejercicios de microsimulación se estima el potencial efecto de la formalización sobre la pobreza, así como la influencia que ha tenido la informalidad sobre la reducción de la pobreza presentada entre 2002 y 2013 en Colombia. Se encuentra que los informales tienen remuneraciones inferiores entre 37 y 44% respecto a los formales, la eliminación de esas brechas reduciría la pobreza entre 40 y 44%, sin embargo, la informalidad ha tenido poca influencia en la reducción efectiva de la pobreza en el periodo analizado. / Labor informality and poverty have high levels in Latin America. The link between poverty and labor market in developing countries is not through unemployment but with employment situation. The purpose of this thesis is to analysis the hookup between labor informality and poverty in Colombia. In order to do that, wage differentials by informality are estimated, afterwards the effect of formalization on poverty will be calculated, as well as the influence of changes in labor informality on Colombia’s poverty reduction from 2002 until 2013. It is found that wage differentials between formal and informal workers are from 37 to 44%, and if informality was eliminated, poverty would go down from 40 to 44%. However, informality has had low influence in Colombia’s poverty reduction in last decade.

Regional economic disparities are a widely noted characteristic of the Canadian economy. This thesis examines regional disparities in terms of wages and labour productivity in the manufacturing sector. Regional disparities are analysed along three dimensions: provinces, rural/urban areas and industrial structure. Various competing theories are discussed and compared to the findings. Shift-share based decomposition analyses the magnitude and pattern of disparity and controls for industrial structure. Weighted regression is used to combine provincial and rural/urban effects. The findings support theories that emphasize provinces as units of analysis. The rural/urban results gave qualified support to urban theory. Accounting for industrial structure impacted both the rural/urban and provincial results. The regression analysis found the rural/urban dimension was significant; however, industrial structure and provincial effects were more significant. These results suggest industrial location and provincial economic policies can influence regional economic disparities in Canada.

This thesis aims to provide evidence on the relations between productivity, industrial structure, and labour markets for countries with different characteristics from 1965 to 1999. In order to do so, we first examine manufacturing industry production and trade with respect to both technology orientation and intensity, the impact of structural change on productivity growth, and the existence of convergence in industrial structures. Second, this study investigates the impact of labour market and industrial structures on aggregate productivity in manufacturing. While descriptive analysis of manufacturing industry with regard to technological orientation and intensity shows changing industrial structures in favour of relatively more technology intensive production and exports especially in fast growing countries, decomposition analysis suggests that the impact of structural change on productivity growth is negligible for most of the countries. The factor analysis revealed that although a general structural convergence tendency among countries is not observed, fast growing countries have converged their industrial structure towards those of industrialised countries. Finally, econometric estimation results also showed that while wage flexibility is detrimental to productivity in manufacturing, regulations in labour markets may foster productivity growth.