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Title: Essays on Frictional Labor Markets and Measurement
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Braun, Christine |
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Essays on Frictional Labor Markets and Measurement Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2018 Cohort(s): NLSY97 Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Crime; Geocoded Data; Job Search; Labor Market Outcomes; Minimum Wage; State-Level Data/Policy; Unemployment Insurance Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. The first essay asks the question: How do changes in the minimum wage affect criminal activity? I answer this question by describing a frictional world in which a worker's criminal actions are linked to his labor market outcomes. The model is calibrated to match labor market outcomes and crime decisions of workers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, and shows that the relationship between the aggregate crime rate and the minimum wage is U-shaped. The results from the calibrated model as well as empirical evidence from county level crime data and state level minimum wage changes from 1995 to 2014 suggest that the crime minimizing minimum to median wage ratio for 16-19 year olds is 0.91. However, the welfare maximizing minimum to median wage ratio is 0.87, not equal to the crime minimizing value. The second essay, joint with Ben Griffy, Bryan Engelhardt and Peter Rupert, asks the question: Is the arrival rate of a job independent of the wage that it pays? We answer this question by testing how, and to what extent, unemployment insurance changes the hazard rate of leaving unemployment across the wage distribution using a Mixed Proportional Hazard Competing Risk Model and data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Controlling for worker characteristics we reject that job arrival rates are independent of the wages offered. We apply the results to several prominent job-search models and interpret how our findings are key to determining the efficacy of unemployment insurance. |
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Bibliography Citation
Braun, Christine. Essays on Frictional Labor Markets and Measurement. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2018. |