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Recent theoretical work has shown that uninsurable labor income risk likely reduces the share of risky assets in an investor's portfolio. Little empirical work has been done to examine this effect. The first study of this dissertation fills the void by investigating the relationship between portfolio shares and labor income risk in the NLSY79 data. The work has three novel features. First, the long labor income history in NLSY79 is used to estimate the labor income risk. Second, the study distinguishes between permanent labor income risk and transitory labor income risk, and estimates them for each individual rather than for groups. Third, I explicitly consider human capital as a component of an individual's portfolio. Human capital is treated as a risk-free asset and estimated by applying signal extraction techniques to individual labor income data. The study finds strong empirical support for the theory that labor income risk indeed significantly reduces the share of risky assets in an investor's portfolio. Furthermore, as economic theory suggests, permanent income risk has a significant effect on portfolio choice while transitory income risk has little effect. By implication, empirical work that does not distinguish between permanent income risk and transitory income risk will underestimate the effect of labor income risk on portfolio choice.

The second part of the dissertation is to fill the gap in the empirical literature on banks' interest rate risk management. Using a rolling sample of bank holding companies from 1986 to 2002, the study investigates how banks adjust their balance sheet maturity structure according to their perception of current and future interest rate changes. Banks tend to lengthen the maturity of net assets when the yield curve is steeply sloped and shorten it when they expect the interest rate to increase in the future. To account for the off-balance-sheet activity effect on banks' interest rate risk exposure, the sample is divided into those with high and low interest rate derivative activities. For banks with little off-balance-sheet interest rate derivative activities, the cross-sectional variation in responsiveness of maturity structure to interest rate changes explains the stock market risk and returns of banks' common equities. The interest rate risk management strategies reflect the extent of risk taking and are priced in the stock market. This finding contributes to the asset pricing literature by linking banks' stock market characteristics to their interest rate risk management strategies.

The abstract of this paper is as follows:
This dissertation examines labor markets in Silicon Valley in order to contribute to our understanding of the transformation of work and employment in the information economy. The relative newness of the region's economic structure, the dominance of information technology industries in the regional economy, and its role as the global center of innovation and production in these industries, make especially visible patterns of work and employment associated with the rise of information technology. Silicon Valley labor markets are characterized by high levels of flexibility, which is best understood by making a distinction between flexible work and flexibleemployment. The activities that workers perform on the job, the skills required, and the relationships they enter into to perform those activities are changing rapidly in unpredictable ways. Contractual relationships between employer and employee are increasingly characterized by high levels of turnover, short periods of employment, and employment contracts mediated by a set of institutions external to the firm. These dynamics are integrally linked with the character of competition in industries with a high dependence on information and knowledge, in which rapid innovation is critical for competitive success. Firms also pursue flexible employment, however, in an effort to cut costs and shift economic risk. In this environment, employers and workers are turning to a variety of third party intermediaries to help them navigate through an increasingly complex and shifting labor market. Three types of intermediaries are identified and described: 1) private-s ector, including temporary agencies, contractor brokers, professional employer organizations and web-based job search sites; 2) membership-based, including professional associations and union-based initiatives; and 3) public-sector, including employment placement programs and education-based initiatives. These intermediaries have contradictory influences on the labor market, in some cases undermining career opportunities for workers, and in other cases building improved career outcomes. Regardless of their impact, intermediaries have now become integral components of the region's labor markets, shaping the structure and dynamics of work and employment in fundamental ways. The prevalence of intermediaries in Silicon Valley suggests that they will become increasingly central to the structure and dynamics of contemporary labor markets in many regions.

Study data sources. The data set for this study is the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 for Children and Young Adults (NLSY79-CHILDYA), which includes 8 biennial waves of data from children who were between the ages of 0 and 14 during the first interview in 1986. Data collected on the children's mothers collected in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) is also used.

Study methods. Static and dynamic empirical models are formulated and estimated. Several approaches to estimation of the static model are presented, including ordinary least squares, fixed effects, and random effects using traditional instrumental variables estimators and the Hausman and Taylor (1981) estimator. Consistent estimation of the dynamic panel data models involves first-differencing combined with instrumental variables methods. Results are shown from the estimation of a mental health production function for children using dynamic panel data modeling techniques including the Arellano and Bond (1991) first-differenced GMM estimator and the Blundell and Bond (1998) system GMM approach.

Results. Treatment variables are found to be endogenous in the mental health production function. Some dynamics are found to be significant and important to estimation. Evidence of treatment effectiveness of community mental health treatments is found in dynamic panel data estimation of antisocial problems. Results indicate that combining counseling or psychotherapy with psychopharmacological treatment may be effective, especially for children with mean antisocial scores in the normal range. Psychopharmacological treatment without counseling or psychotherapy appears to be an effective treatment for children with mean antisocial scores in the dysfunctional range. Conclusion. Dynamic panel data estimation techniques provide a useful new technique for estimating the effectiveness of children's mental health treatments in a community setting. Evidence is found that dynamics in the model are significant. Using the dynamic model with first-differenced GMM estimators, evidence is found that community mental health treatments are effective in reducing antisocial behaviors among youths.

This dissertation develops a testable hypothesis that isolates the reason for the estimated relationship. The competing explanations are an efficiency mechanism and future opportunity costs. The efficiency explanation is that the more educated will allocate resources away from unhealthy behaviors into healthier behaviors, and so are less likely to smoke (allocative efficiency), and/or they are better producers of health and so are less likely to smoke (productive efficiency). The alternative explanation of future opportunity costs asserts that the more educated have higher expected future income and so have more to lose from smoking. To develop a testable hypothesis, I make use of degree effects--the phenomenon of a discontinuous jump in earnings once a person gets a degree. Only future opportunity costs will lead to degree effects appearing in the health behavior equations. Neither efficiency mechanism could cause such degree effects.

Several simulations are run to examine the effects of policies that operate via future opportunity costs on the health behaviors. These simulations show that the policies considered here do little to deter binge drinking. Moreover, despite the evidence that future opportunity costs deter smoking, only the extreme policy of forcing high school completion seems to have any impact on smoking. By comparison, raising cigarette taxes seems to have a relatively large effect on deterring both smoking and binge drinking.

I answer this question with an analysis that links macro- and micro-level data to assess the effect of labor demand on women's movement into and out of poverty. Labor markets are highly segregated, and general measures of labor demand tend to obscure differential demands for specific race-gender groups. I create an annual measure of labor demand by standardizing the occupational distributions of counties by the national gender and racial-ethnic compositions of individual occupations. I use event history techniques and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979-1994, and the U.S. Census, 1980 and 1990, to conduct the analysis.

Comparing women by race-ethnicity, I demonstrate the prevalence of poverty entrance and exit among women aged 19 to 36 and the influence of local labor demand on changes in their poverty status. I find that the demand for labor affects women's movement into and out of poverty, although not always in expected directions nor for all women. In addition, labor demand influences women's poverty exit more than it influences their poverty entrance. These results maintain when controlling for family, individual, and background characteristics.

The findings shed light on factors that policy makers need to address to lower poverty among women. My focus on the demand for labor has special policy relevance in light of recent welfare reform, and I discuss implications of the results for research and public policy that relate to women's poverty.

Chapter 2 explores the long-term effects of job displacement on labor market outcomes and how these effects depend on post-displacement mobility across location, industry, and occupation. Chapter 3 explores the effects of displacement on marriage, divorce, and separation rates, along with fertility.

I use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a dataset rarely used in research on displacement, to construct a group of displaced workers and a comparison group containing non-displaced workers. Using a generalized difference-in-differences model that includes individual fixed effects, I estimate what displaced workers labor market outcomes and family structure would have been had they not been displaced.

I find that displacement has a large, negative effect on employment, earnings, and hours worked even six years after displacement. Six years after displacement, nonemployment is 8 percent higher among displaced workers than among their non-displaced counterparts. Among individuals who return to work, displacement decreases long-term earnings and hours worked by 8 and 4 percent, respectively. The long-term earnings and hours worked reductions for displaced workers who had at least two years of tenure when they were displaced are 15 and 8 percent, respectively. Long-term earnings reductions are 8 percent for immobile workers but only 4 percent for workers who change locations. Displaced workers who switch either industry or occupation suffer larger short-term earnings losses from displacement, yet contrary to previous findings the switchers and stayers have similar long-term costs.

The effects of displacement on women's family structure are unclear. For men, however, displacement permanently decreases their flow into marriage, while largely increasing their flow out of marriage. Both the probabilities of divorce and separation double post-displacement, yet these effects appear to only be temporary. Displacement is estimated to permanently decrease male's probability of having a child by about 20 percent.

The second chapter evaluates a teacher incentives program conducted in Kenyan primary schools in 1998 and 1999. Out of 100 randomly selected schools, 50 were chosen to participate in the program, while the remaining 50 were treated as the control group. The impact of the program on various teacher and student outcomes is studied. We find a positive and significant effect of the program on extra (out of class) coaching by the teachers, but no effect on teacher attendance, homework assignment, and pedagogical practices. We also find a positive impact of the program on student test scores.

The third chapter uses a human capital approach to model juvenile participation in criminal activities and/or legitimate labor market activities. In a two-period setting, the individual decides how to allocate time to crime and labor market in each period. We endogenize skill formation by assuming that the time spent in criminal and labor market activities in the first period determines the investments in the corresponding stocks of human capital. The investments lead to a larger stock of human capital for these activities in the subsequent period, and therefore affect the second-period returns from these activities. The model is tested using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY 97). We implement the model using a multinomial logit framework and find that the data match the predictions fairly well.

Parental Expectations and Child Learning Performance. This essay estimates how parents affect their children's achievement by transmitting their preferences to their children. The model developed in the paper demonstrates that children whose parents have higher expectations for their achievement, spend more time studying conditional on their ability and previous achievement, and thus learn more. Using data from the NLSY79 Child & Young Adult, we construct a variable measuring parental expectations for children's educational attainment. These data are then linked to the summary tape files of 1990 Census and the Common Core of Data to obtain a unique data set on the characteristics of the neighborhoods and school districts where the NLSY children live. After controlling for a comprehensive set of characteristics of the children's mother, family, neighborhood, and school, we find a positive and significant effect of parental expectations on child learning performance.

A model is developed which shows that even if central city youths are exposed to middle class role models, if the observed role models are different from themselves with respect to such income-altering characteristics as race, these youths may have difficulty in isolating the earnings effects of education.

Three primary empirical questions raised by Wilson's hypothesis are addressed using the NLSY data: (1) Do youths in urban poverty neighborhoods (defined as urban ZIP Code areas with 1980 poverty rates above 30 percent) have less information about the labor market than youths from other areas? Simple analysis-of-variance procedures indicate that the answer to this question is yes, and that these differences are statistically significant. (2) Does residence within a concentrated urban poverty neighborhood per se depress labor market information, or are information differences due primarily to characteristics such as race and socioeconomic status? Results derived using both naive and two-stage estimation procedures suggest that neighborhoods do not appear to affect information for the NLSY sample as a whole. However, urban poverty area residence did seem to negatively influence the information of youths from families that had received welfare. These results may suggest that neighborhoods become more important as sources of labor market information for youths as their families becomes less so. (3) Does the information a youth has about the labor market influence educational outcomes? Both naive and two-stage estimation procedures suggest that the information which youths have about the labor market may influence their likelihood to graduate from high school and their eventual total years of school completed, even after controlling for individual, family, neighborhood and school characteristics.

When demographic, human capital, and labor market factors were compared, young adults who were in poverty at the beginning of the observation period (age 25) were different from those who experienced poverty later during the observation period. The poverty exit rate estimates using the data with poverty duration information only from age 25 were different from those using the data with poverty duration information from pre-young adulthood (for those who were in poverty at age 25). Young adults living in rural areas had lower poverty exit rates than those living in urban areas; however, when other factors (described above) were controlled for, this difference disappeared. Using a two-way transit model that simultaneously assesses poverty exit and reentry rates, it was found that having had a health problem in a given year was associated with lower poverty exit rates and lower poverty reentry rates in that year. Lastly, poverty spells that involved rural-to-urban migration had lower exit rates than those that were experienced only in rural areas. In addition, after relocating to an urban area, the longer young adults remained in poverty, the less likely they were to exit from poverty. Public policy implications are discussed.

In the second part of the dissertation, I create and employ a unique worker-firm matched dataset to investigate the effect of human capital externalities on productivity and technological change in manufacturing firms. The dataset is obtained by combining the Census of Manufacturers and the Census of Population. I start by documenting a positive correlation between the productivity of manufacturing establishments in a given city and the average level of education outside the establishment in the same city. I find little evidence that omitted variables play a major role. I investigate whether in cities with a better-educated labor force plants tend to be equi pped with better technology. I find that in plants that are situated in cities with higher average education, both investment in computers and the fraction of new machinery to the total stock of machinery are larger, after controlling for a plant's characteristics. Furthermore, within a given city, investment in computers in a particular plant is positively associated with the number of workers who use computers outside the plant.

The first essay addresses the estimation of wage discrimination. It considers the linkage of these estimates, using the "decompositions" introduced by Oaxaca (1973), to theoretical models of discriminatory behavior. A model of employer discrimination is used to derive conditions under which these widely used estimates are valid measures of discrimination. That this approach is more generally useful is demonstrated by showing that different assumptions about the nature of employers' discriminatory behavior lead to alternative estimates of wage discrimination.

The second essay studies the role of the family in determining earnings and various dimensions of human capital, focusing in particular on gender differences. The essay asks whether the finding of Bound, Griliches and Hall (1986), of "symmetric" treatment by the family of male and female offspring in determining ability and schooling, carries over when extended to the accumulation of labor force experience. Somewhat ambiguous findings emerge, due to the difficulty of identifying parameters capturing all of the possible channels of influence. In one version of the model, significant family effects on labor force experience for both men and women are found, and these effects are very dissimilar by gender. In a second version, the dissimilarity is attenuated.

The third essay studies the factor that is probably most responsible for male-female labor force differentials, the childbearing role of women. It focuses on the timing and spacing of fertility; the potential relationships between these variables and labor market outcomes are indicated in research by Bloom (1987). The broad issue it addresses is whether women choose birth intervals, or instead choose fertility control strategies entailing risks of a birth over time. The empirical results suggest that the first type of behavior is dominant. More strongly, the results show that much of the effects of demographic and other characteristics on the risk of a birth, found in "reduced form" hazard model estimates, are due to the relationship between these characteristics and expected duration.

Five specific experiences were examined, namely: program of study, high school graduation, dropout, transition to postsecondary, and transition to employment. The main research question that guided the study was: Among at-risk youth, do the academic and transitional experiences vary by race, race and gender, and race and residence?

Data for the study were drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). A sub-sample of 837 participants was used. At-risk youth were defined as those from families living below poverty level in the United States and who are at risk of experiencing academic and transitional difficulties as a result of their poor economic backgrounds. Descriptive and multivariate statistics were used to analyze the data. Frequency counts, percentages and Chi-square tests were used in the descriptive analysis and logistic regression and survival analysis were used in the multivariate analyses. Findings revealed that among at-risk youth there are no variations in high school graduation, dropout, and transition to postsecondary education. In general, at-risk white males are as likely as all other at-risk youth to experience the negative effects of poverty when faced with equal levels of economic hardships. Their patterns of enrollment in programs vary slightly, but overall all at-risk youth are more likely to follow a general curriculum. The one major exception is that blacks in rural America are significantly less likely to be employed than their white counterparts even when poverty levels are controlled.

I provide a descriptive overview of the employment and earning behavior of the NLSY97 youths and test for the effects of both family and individual characteristics and federal and state laws upon their behavior. Nearly half of all youths (47 percent) earned income in 1996. Results indicate that minimum wages reduce the probability of labor force participation for female youths aged 14-16, while subminimum wage certificate programs (allowing students to work at wages below the minimum wage) help mitigate the disemployment effects of minimum wages.

I describe and assess the quality of the parental transfer data from the NLSY97 and test for the determinants of parental allowances. The median annual allowance received by youths aged 12-16 in 1996 was $260, the equivalent of $5 per week. Surprisingly, black youths are more likely to receive allowances, and to receive higher allowances, than non-black, non-Hispanic youths. Reduced-form estimations also indicate that allowances depend upon parents' wherewithal, given the effects of parents' income and the number of siblings upon allowances.

Finally, I present an altruism model of youths' earnings and parental transfers where the parent does not directly control the child's earnings. Using a tobit two-stage procedure, I find that youths earn less the greater their allowances, and that parents decrease allowance amounts in response to youths' decisions to earn more. It is also important to allow earnings and allowances to be jointly determined in order to assess the effects of family and individual characteristics upon earnings and allowances. For example, allowances conditional upon earnings do not depend directly upon being black. Therefore, black parents apparently compensate their children for having a lower probability of labor force participation.

Reading ability did not grow at a constant rate; in fact it exhibited variable patterns that were influenced by verbal memory and text characteristics in different ways at different points in children's reading development. In general, short sentences, frequently used vocabulary, and high density facilitated reading comprehension, but the temporal influences of the patterns of three text characteristics differed.

The effect of age on children's reading comprehension was manifested differentially depending upon sentence characteristics. In the case of sentence length, the effect of age was manifested only with short sentences. The positive contribution that frequently used vocabulary made to reading comprehension increased over years, but the growth rates were also different. The effect of age on reading comprehension was greater with sentences written using high frequency vocabulary than with low frequency vocabulary. The effect of propositional density increases constantly. The effect of age on reading comprehension was manifested greatly with high density sentences, that is, coherent sentences, rather than with low density sentences.

In addition, verbal memory was statistically significant in predicting both the average effect of sentence length over time and the rate of growth of sentence length slope. There was an interaction effect between verbal memory and length of sentences over time. In the case of short sentences, the effect of verbal memory was practically as well as statistically significant. However, in the case of long sentences, the effect of verbal memory was almost absent. As verbal memory increased, vocabulary frequency had a greater effect on reading ability. However, verbal memory did not influence the effect of propositional density.

The differential contribution of each psycholinguistic variable over time implies that achievement, as measured by a reading comprehension test, is a complex entity that is greatly dependent on the nature of the text contained in the test.

The first chapter is an attempt to determine if more intensive computer use by women is an explanation for the decrease in the gender wage gap. It uses the Current Population Survey to investigate the relationship between the gender wage gap and computer-use at work. Since literature on the gender wage gap has shown that it is decreasing over the last two decades, this paper examines whether the computer-use wage premium is an explanation for the decreasing gender wage gap. The results suggest that less than ¼ of the wage gap is explained by differences in observable skills between men and women, and that the computer use differential does not substantially help to explain the gender wage gap.

The second chapter explores a new explanation for the unexplained gap: the gender composition of the individual's co-workers. This study is the first to focus on the relationship between the proportion of female co-workers and wages for both males and females. I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and personnel records from a single firm to investigate the relationship between the proportion of female co-workers and wages. I find that increasing the number of female co-workers lowers wages for both female and male workers. I also find that male wages are negatively related to having a female supervisor. A second part of the empirical research investigates non-linear effects in this relationship. The results suggest that the penalization for working with a higher proportion of females is non-linear.

Studies in developed countries regularly observe a wage penalty for working mothers. The third chapter explores the effects of motherhood on wages and labor force participation for four Latin American countries. Conversely from the evidence found in the developed countries, Latin American results do not show a homogeneous impact of being a mother on wages. I find that wage penalties and premiums are not borne equally among all mothers.

Using Ordinary Least Squares earnings regressions, with controls for ability and attitude, the results show that women who work about 15 hours per week while in college are found to experience significantly higher wages five years after education completion than their counterparts. No such effect is found when income is measured two years after education completion. Women who were employed more than an average of five hours a week in college had a longer time to completion of their bachelor's degree, holding constant other factors.

A Tobit analysis of the determinants of hours worked indicates that the number of children have a positive but insignificant effect on hours worked. An increase in the number of children significantly lengthens the woman's time to degree completion, however, and decreases future earnings. The addition of attitude variables to the regressions has no significant effect.

In the first essay, I examined how technological change affects experience-earning profiles through a simultaneous estimation of industry choice and wage determination with correction for self-selection on industry. Using data from Current Population Survey, I found positive truncation effects and nonhierarchical sorting into industries. Experience-earning profiles turned out to be higher and flatter in low-tech industries than in high-tech industries. Earnings peaks occurred at similar experience levels for the two types of industries. Differences in the curvature of experience-earning profiles between high-tech and low-tech industries were substantially reduced after correcting for selection bias.

In the second essay, I made a distinction between human capital obtained from schooling and human capital obtained from training based on their different responses to technological change, and assessed how technological change affects these two types of human capital. Relying on National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 79 data, I estimated the parameters of a dynamic structural human capital investment model in an environment of rapid technological change using nonlinear least squares method. I found that the productivity of schooling human capital increased under rapid technological change in spite of the obsolescence while the net effect of technological change on training human capital was fast obsolescence. These findings suggest that individuals with more schooling enjoy an advantage in dealing with technological change over those with less schooling.

In the third essay, I analyzed empirically how technological change affects life-cycle human capital investment, in particular, schooling and training choices. Using the parameter estimates for the human capital investment model constructed in the second essay, I solved the value function and optimal decision rules for the dynamic programming problem numerically. I further simulated the life-cycle profiles of schooling and training under different rates of technological change for two ability groups respectively. I found that technological change tended to result in more schooling and training for the high-ability group while exerting little impact on human capital investment for the low-ability group.

Using seven waves of the child component of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (1986-98), I employ generalized linear mixed models to examine the effect of household income on child physical and mental health over the entire childhood period. The results of this dissertation support the hypothesis that household income influences the physical and mental health of children, both concurrently and over time. In generalized linear mixed models, the stable component of household income, that is, the average household income for a given child over the period in which he or she is observed, exerts a strong influence on risk for child chronic health limitation, child anxiety/depression and antisocial behaviour, and to a lesser extent, child medically attended accident or injury. However, the dynamic component of household income, defined as deviations in household income over time from the observed average of that household, is mostly unrelated to child health.

These findings have broader implications for life course theory and for the discipline of sociology as health inequalities researchers track the impact of socially significant events over time and reveal the long term processes underlying the social distribution of health.

The second chapter examines the effects of schooling on match quality. I characterize the distribution of employment for high school and college graduates. I find evidence that job mobility is considerably lower for college graduates. In addition, wage changes between jobs are correlated with the decision to move, and between-job wage changes are significantly higher for college graduates. Higher wages lead to a lower hazard out of employment and therefore longer employment durations. I take this as evidence that college graduates are making better quality matches and that there are positive returns to schooling on match quality.

The third chapter characterizes the ways in which age and worker mobility contribute to the quality of the employment match. As they age, workers experience a significant decline in mobility. Analyzing the determinants of workers' decisions to move, I find evidence that older workers make higher-quality matches.

A number of methodological innovations are incorporated into this dissertation. First, multilevel modeling is used in conjunction with the partial adjustment model to estimate career dynamics. Unlike cross-sectional analyses that simply compare individuals' achievement at a given point in time, this dissertation illustrates career trajectories by gender and race, and also demonstrates how career dynamics differ across demographic groups. Next, instead of studying a general mobility process, this dissertation decomposes job mobility by distinguishing types of mobility. Two sets of distinctions were made: the direction of job mobility (i.e., upward, downward, or horizontal) and the reasons for job mobility (i.e., voluntary or involuntary).

The results, in general, were consistent with my hypotheses. Whites still have better opportunities to advance in their careers compared to Hispanics and blacks. Blacks have the weakest momentum in terms of building their careers; moreover, they are also at the bottom of the occupational prestige hierarchy. Also, job mobility was triggered by individual characteristics, job characteristics, and macroeconomic factors. The effects of job characteristics and macroeconomic indicators are further differentiated after the types of mobility and the reasons for leaving jobs are specified. The impact of mergers and acquisitions on job mobility is rarely evaluated in the job mobility literature. The results in this research, though, show that mergers and acquisition do increase workers' risks of being fired or experiencing "programs end" because of the disappearance of jobs. Overall, the findings support the general impression that American business are downsizing.

The first essay studies the determinants of wage differences between predominantly female jobs and predominantly male jobs. In particular, I estimate the effects of the changes in proportion of men in an occupation on wage growth for workers who quit jobs and for those laid off. These estimates account for the fixed individual heterogeneity and job match specific error component, and they provide either an upper or lower bound on the true wage premium associated with working in predominantly male jobs. The estimated wage premium is in the range of 16-19 percent for women and 12-16 percent for men. The proportion male effect for quits is smaller than that for layoffs for both women and men, which implies that the wage premium overcompensates for the non-wage characteristics.

In the second essay, I analyze equilibrium search models in which jobs vary in terms of salary and hours of work. Jobs are heterogeneous in productivity, and the model is set up so that jobs with larger marginal productivity of an additional hour require more hours. In one version of the model, an employer offers two packages to workers. Simulated data match the empirical results in the first essay when: (1) women are more averse to work hours than men and (2) the likelihood of receiving an offer that workers cannot refuse to accept is higher for women than men. In the other version of the model, an employer offers a single package that accounts for the gender differences in preference. I develop an algorithm which solves for the equilibrium job distribution and show that employers raise the hour requirements when they discriminate against women.

The third essay uses an insider model of equilibrium unemployment to show that severance pay affects the jointly rational separation decisions of an employer and a worker. In particular, severance pay raises the equilibrium market tightness which is documented in a number of empirical studies.

The results from my analysis indicate that race/ethnicity, cognitive ability, educational attainment, and years of work experience are all salient factors in predicting the likelihood of receiving employment offers. In addition, the results indicate that hourly rate of pay is a salient factor in predicting the likelihood of accepting an employment offer in a particular occupational category.

However, the coefficients corresponding to the preferences of employers for characteristics of individuals are not shown to be uniform across the occupational distribution. Rather, they are shown to differ across the occupational categories, suggesting the existence of differential employer preferences and differential demands for certain types of labor across the occupational structure. Such findings and interpretations are consistent with common sense and are hardly surprising. However, status attainment and earnings attainment models are usually constructed in such a way that a single uniform labor market process is implicitly assumed to operate across the entire occupational structure. The results indicate that this is not the case.

I also consider the role that family background variables may play in predicting the likelihood of receiving offers of employment in various occupational categories. However, these variables are not shown to provide much additional explanatory power in terms of predicting occupational outcomes.

My findings seem to indicate that employers are primarily concerned with the characteristics of individuals. An individual's socioeconomic background is not extremely relevant to employersand to their hiring decisions, ostensibly because (unlike cognitive ability, educational attainment, and work experience) it has little bearing on an individual's capacity to perform a job. However, this is not to say that socioeconomic origins have no bearing on occupational outcomes. My findings also suggest that background variables may exert important indirect effects through the other variables included in the model.