Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston University

This dissertation consists of three essays on prices and frictions. The first chapter documents cyclical properties of distributions of labor factor prices, wages, in the United States from 1979 to 2016. The second chapter investigates which theory of nominal wage frictions in the existing literature has consistent implications with empirical regularities documented in the first chapter. The third chapter estimates the impact of e-commerce, a recent technology innovation reducing information frictions and trade costs, on prices and welfare in Japan. In Chapter 1, I construct distributions of individual workers’ year-over-year changes in nominal hourly wages across time and across US states from two nationally representative household surveys, the Current Population Survey (1979-2017) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (1984-2013). The novel result is that the share of workers with no wage changes, which accounts for the large spike at zero in nominal wage change distribution, is more countercyclical than the share of workers with wage cuts. A strand of related literature interpreted the empirical finding that US states with larger decreases in employment are also the states with lower average wage increases as a sign of wage flexibility. This paper overturns this interpretation by showing that the states with larger employment declines are also the states with greater increases in the share of workers with a zero wage change, suggesting wage rigidity instead. In Chapter 2, I ask which type of nominal wage rigidity model in the existing literature can match empirical regularities documented in Chapter 1. This chapter builds heterogeneous agent models with five alternative wage-setting schemes—perfectly flexible, Calvo, long-term contracts, menu costs, and downward nominal wage rigidity. The models feature not only idiosyncratic uncertainty but also aggregate uncertainty. Using a numerical method, I show among alternative wage setting schemes, the model with downward nominal wage rigidity has the most consistent implications with the empirical findings, regarding the shape and cyclicality of wage change distributions. In Chapter 3, joint work with Misaki Matsumura and David Weinstein, we estimate the impact of e-commerce on Japanese prices and welfare. We find that goods sold intensively online have always had lower relative rates of price increase than goods sold mainly in physical stores, but the gap in inflation rates rose after the advent of e-commerce. This happened in part because goods sold offline began experiencing faster rates of price increase. Second, we compute the welfare gains generated by e-commerce by reducing intercity price differentials and by increasing available varieties. While we show the national gains were substantial, we also find that welfare rose much more for residents of high-income cities with highly educated populations and may have fallen for residents of other cities.

The interest in the effects of immigration on the UK labour market has increased in the past decade. According to the ONS, the upsurge of non-EU citizens in the UK began in 1997 and peaked in 2004 before declining thereafter. Following the A8- accession in 2004, the migration of EU citizens has witnessed a cyclical pattern by increasing till the recession, declining, and then increasing again in recent years. Migration patterns have also changed regionally. For example, traditionally immigrant attracting regions such as London saw the lowest percentage increase in foreign born workers, whereas regions like the North east of England, Wales and Scotland gained popularity between 2005 and 2016. This thesis aims at understanding the impact of immigration on UK regional wages between 1991 and 2016. The analysis presented in this thesis is split by the pre-and post-recession periods using the BHPS and the UKHLS datasets. The instrument variable based estimation results suggest that at the regional level, immigration had an insignificant impact on native average wages in the pre-recession period (1999-2009) but had a negative impact in the postrecession period (2009-2016) in Great Britain. For England, the results were negative in the pre-recession period possibly indicating the importance of migration to the labour markets of Scotland and Wales. Allowing for imperfect substitution between natives and immigrants, at the wage distribution level of the natives, the results concluded that in the pre-recession period, immigrants had a negative impact on the 10th wage percentile. In the post-recession period, the impact was concluded to be positive at all percentiles and insignificant at the 10th wage percentile. The analysis was also extended by including the regional role of capital adjustment with imperfect substitution between immigrants and natives. The results indicated that immigrants had a negative impact on regional average wages of England from 2009-2016.

Este trabalho tem o objetivo de analisar o papel da ocupação no mercado de trabalho brasileiro, procurando identificar seus efeitos sobre o salário e o emprego dos indivíduos e a estrutura salarial da economia brasileira. Apesar de sua importância, esse assunto tem recebido pouca atenção na literatura sobre a desigualdade de renda no Brasil. Na primeira parte desse estudo, faz-se uma descrição dos dados para as seis ocupações que serão utilizadas - dirigentes, profissionais das ciências e das artes, técnicos de nível médio, trabalhadores de serviços administrativos, dos serviços e da produção. Percebe-se que a ocupação que mais emprega é a de trabalhadores dos serviços, porém, também é a que abriga maior quantidade de indivíduos com baixo nível de escolaridade e a que apresenta menor remuneração. Através de uma técnica de decomposição da desigualdade de renda, verifica-se que a ocupação tem um poder explicativo tão alto quanto o da escolaridade. A segunda parte do trabalho analisa o prêmio salarial associado a cada ocupação após controlar por efeitos fixos individuais dos trabalhadores, investigando o que acontece com a variação salarial do indivíduo na medida em que transita entre as ocupações. Os resultados mostram que a ocupação que mais atrai trabalhadores é a de dirigentes e as maiores perdas salariais ocorrem ao se transitar para a ocupação de trabalhadores dos serviços. Dado que a ocupação é importante para explicar a desigualdade, na última parte investiga-se como a estrutura ocupacional do mercado de trabalho brasileiro evolui ao longo do tempo, verificando em que medida a tecnologia pode afetar essa estrutura. Fica evidenciado o crescimento do emprego para ocupações que pagam salários intermediários ou altos. Com esses resultados, conclui-se que a ocupação tem efeitos importantes no mercado de trabalho no Brasil. / The aim of this dissertation is to analyze the role of the occupation in the Brazilian labor market, examining its effects on individuals\' wage and employment and on the wage structure of the Brazilian economy. Despite its importance, this subject has received little attention in the inequality literature in Brazil. In the first part of this study, the data are described for the six occupations that will be used - managers, professionals in sciences and arts, technicians, white collar workers, services workers and production workers. The occupation that employs most workers is services workers. But it is also the one that has the highest amount of low education individuals and with the lowest earnings. Through the use of an inequality decomposition technique, it is verified that occupation has as high explanatory power as education. The second part of the dissertation analyzes the wage premium associated to each occupation, after controlling for individual fixed effects, and investigates what happens with the wage variation of the individual when it transits among occupations. The results show that the occupation that attracts more workers is managers and the highest wage losses occur when a worker transits to the services workers occupation. Since occupation is important to explain inequality, in the last part it is investigated how the occupational structure of the Brazilian labor market evolves over time, verifying if technology can affect this structure. Evidence is produced showing employment growth for occupations that pay intermediate or high wages. With these results, it is concluded that occupation has important effects in the labor market in Brazil.

No description available.

This thesis assesses the efficiency wage hypothesis using Australian industry and macro economic time series data by focussing on two questions: whether paying an above market clearing wage called the efficiency wage raises industry output and productivity, and if such a payment causes unemployment at the macro economic level. The wageproductivity or wage-output nexus is investigated using three techniques; namely a decomposition procedure used by Huang, Halam, Orazem, and Paterno (1998), an instrumental variable estimation method, and the Solow residuals approach. Further, an examination of macro economic unemployment involves developing an aggregate unemployment equation, where the Solow (1979) model is used to derive a testable hypothesis. The Solow model argues that effort, which is a function of the wage, enters the production function when the real wage is rigid. By introducing profit maximising behaviour and making further economic assumptions, the Solow condition that the effort elasticity with respect to the wage is one can be derived. The theoretical framework of Solow is useful as specifying a production function allows the possibility of aggregate data being used to assess the wage-productivity prediction. The Solow condition is also useful because it provides the basis for constructing a testable hypothesis using an unemployment equation. Solow???s theoretical framework and the Solow condition does not rely on the economic assumptions of the shirking, labour turnover, sociological and adverse selection [micro economic] efficiency wage models. Therefore, the innovation of this thesis is to treat the efficiency wage hypothesis as an imperfectly competitive model of the labour market using applied macro economic methods. Previous Australian macro economic literature in the 1970s and 1980s have argued that the wage is either harmful to employment prospects (ie unemployment is classical), or that factors such as consumption and investment are more important (ie unemployment is Keynesian). One of the aims of the thesis is to use the empirical analysis to suggest that neither of these propositions is entirely correct. Rather, an intermediate position is arrived at by arguing that there is some empirical evidence in Australian industry and macro economic time series data to suggest that the wage plays a dual function: both as a small source of productivity and also a minor cause of involuntary unemployment.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

The thesis compares education attainment levels and the returns of education investments of three native-born ethnic groups, Mexican Americans, non-Hispanic whites, and African Americans. Using two ordinary least square (OLS) regression models and data from the 2000 5% Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS), the analysis determines if lower levels of earnings and occupation prestige status among native-born Mexican Americans are the result of low levels of education or are attributed to lower returns on their education. The first model compares income earned across the ethnic groups while the second model compares occupational prestige status across the three groups. The study shows that Mexican Americans continue to have the highest levels of high school dropouts and as a whole continue to lag behind whites in education attainment especially among the higher levels of education beginning at the college degree level. However, the results from the multiple linear regression analyses provide a positive outlook for Mexican Americans who attain higher levels of education receiving comparable or greater returns on their human capital investments. First, the results suggest that any additional year(s) of education attainment above a high school diploma provides greater returns for Mexican Americans given the anemic state of higher education levels for this ethnic group. Second, attaining a college degree has the greatest effect on labor market outcomes. Finally, the results do provide empirical evidence of structural discrimination especially in the case of African Americans with respect to income earned. In addition, at the professional degree attainment level whites receive greater returns in income despite having the same level of education and occupation prestige status when compared to Mexican Americans and African Americans.

This paper examines the relationship between immigrant-composition and wages of different occupations and different industries in Canada. It reports the effects of change in proportion of immigrants on the wage level in 1996 for both male and female Canadians and immigrants. First all immigrants are considered homogeneous and thereafter they are distinguished according to a wide array of criterion and a full spectrum of results are presented. These results suggest that for immigrants the aggregate relationship of income with immigrant composition is fairly small, unless they are subcategorised into specific groups (e.g. non-white immigrants, immigration after 1990). The corresponding wage penalties for Canadians are more uniform across the different subgroup specifications and decomposition of the data.

This paper examines the relationship between immigrant-composition and wages of different occupations and different industries in Canada. It reports the effects of change in proportion of immigrants on the wage level in 1996 for both male and female Canadians and immigrants. First all immigrants are considered homogeneous and thereafter they are distinguished according to a wide array of criterion and a full spectrum of results are presented. These results suggest that for immigrants the aggregate relationship of income with immigrant composition is fairly small, unless they are subcategorised into specific groups (e.g. non-white immigrants, immigration after 1990). The corresponding wage penalties for Canadians are more uniform across the different subgroup specifications and decomposition of the data.