In this dissertation, I study the role of local markets and firms in explaining labor market inequality across genders, and across workers. My results show that local labor markets have a relevant role in accounting for differences in labor market outcomes across genders. The dissertation is structured in three chapters, each containing a stand-alone paper.
In the first chapter I show large and persistent differences exist in women’s labor force participation within multiple countries. These persistent differences in employment can arise if where women grow up shapes their work choices. However, they can also arise under endogenous sorting, so that women who want to work move to places where more women work. In this chapter, I use rich data from Indonesia to argue that the place women grow up in shapes their participation in the labor market as adults. To do so, I leverage variation coming from women moving across labor markets to estimate the effect on women’s labor force participation of spending more time in their birthplace. My strategy is similar to that of Chetty and Hendren (2018) and compares the labor supply choices of women who currently live in the same location, but who emigrated from their birthplace at different ages. My results indicate that birthplace has strong and persistent effects on adult women’s labor supply. By the time they turn sixteen, women born in a location at the 75th percentile of female employment will be 5 percentage points more likely to work than those born in a 25th percentile location. Place is particularly important during the formative period between 9 and 16 years old. These results suggest that between 23 percent of the current spatial inequality in women’s employment is transmitted to the next generation growing up in these locations.
The second chapter studies the relationship between city size and gender inequality in the United States. It is well known that living in a larger cities is associated with a wage premium, but there is growing evidence that this premium has declined since the 1980s. (Autor, 2019). In this paper, I use data from U.S. Commuting Zones for the period between 1970 and 2020 to document that the decline in the urban wage premium affected men and women differently. While women were relatively isolated from the premium decline, men with lower education experienced the brunt of the impact. This caused a large relative increase in the urban wage premium for women: it went from being on par with the urban premium for men to being 44% larger in 2016. I argue that these differential trends result from a combination of gender specialization and the evolution of urban skill premiums. Urban premiums declined the most in those skills men without a college degree use more intensively.
Finally, the third chapter I study the role of universities in explaining earnings inequality in U.S. academia. Previous applications from the Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1990) method –AKM– found that the best firms pay workers over and above their own productivity. These firm rents contribute to overall wage inequality. In this paper, we apply the AKM model to measure whether there are significant firm (university/college) effects on faculty earnings in academia. We apply the model to measure the pecuniary rents associated with working as tenure-track faculty at a more prestigious university or college in the United States. To do so, we take advantage of matched employer-employee data from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients. We find little evidence of pecuniary university premiums in the most prestigious US academic institutions. Once we control for urbanicity, the effect of university/college rankings on institutions’ fixed-effects on earnings is statistically insignificant and sufficiently precisely measured that we can rule out anything larger than modest effects.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/49383 |
| Date | 03 October 2024 |
| Creators | Garro Marín, César Luis |
| Contributors | Paserman, M. Daniele |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
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