Resumen de Essays in labor economics
The present thesis consists of three research articles on labor markets.
In the first chapter, I exploit a natural experiment to assess how removing barriers to worker mobility impacts the local labor market. Such barriers are widespread. For instance, non-compete agreements prevent workers from changing employers. The difficulty of transferring pension rights across employers makes it harder for workers to change jobs. The chapter studies the integration of local labor markets between France and Switzerland in the late 1990s. The integration made it easier for residents in French border regions to commute to the Swiss labor market, where wages were around twice as high. The research design exploits variation in the timing and the exposure to the reform. Using a difference-in-differences strategy coupled with matching, I document that the labor market integration improves labor market outcomes among French workers that remain employed in France. The gains are concentrated among low-skill workers, as both their wages and employment increase in the years following the reform. I interpret the findings through the lens of a framework of imperfect competition in the labor market. The results indicate that the labor market integration decreased employers' wage-setting power because workers gained access to a larger number of high-wage employers. Various alternative explanations, such as higher demand for local non-tradable services, cannot explain the results.
In the second chapter, I build a discrete choice model of the labor market to estimate the labor supply elasticity to individual firms. Workers have heterogeneous preferences over firms and choose to work at the firm which gives them the highest utility. I extend existing models by allowing workers' taste shocks to be correlated across employers. For instance, workers who prefer working part-time see two firms as closer substitutes when the two firms offer similar amounts of part-time work. To estimate the model, I use survey data on the Swiss labor market. To identify the structural parameters of interest, I build an instrument that measures how differentiated a firm is compared to its competitors. The idea is that when a firm offers a more unique bundle of non-pay characteristics, it faces fewer competitors for workers that like this characteristic. The firm's differentiation therefore allows it to pay lower wages. The average labor supply elasticity to individual firms implied by the model is around 4.6, which is 50 percent higher than when not allowing for correlated tastes across employers. Moreover, the model gives rise to cross-wage supply elasticities that are twice as high, and that are larger in magnitude for firms that offer more similar non-pay amenities. In the last part of the chapter, I study the effects of the labor market integration on the wages of Swiss workers in Swiss firms. I find evidence consistent with strategic interactions in wage-setting since the results indicate that the reform increases the wages of Swiss workers.
In the third chapter, Christoph Hedtrich and I study the careers of female and male PhD graduates in the Unitd States. Gender differences in earnings and performance among scientists are well documented, but their reasons are not well understood. We use survey data and bibliometric data to explore the dynamics of the gender career gap among scientists. In the first part, we assess the role of childbearing for gender differences in labor market outcomes. We compare men and women who have children and who do not have children. The cohort analysis flexibly accounts for compositional differences across cohorts and disciplines. It also accounts for a differential impact of childbearing on the career across disciplines. The results indicate that the presence of children can account for gender differences in labor force pariticipation, but at most for two-thirds of gender differences in scientists' earnings. In particular, we find that women's earnings grow slower, also among graduates that do not have children. In the second part, build a dataset that links graduates from their PhD institution to their publication careers and we document that women start to publish fewer research articles than men two years after graduating. This also holds when comparing peers that graduate from the same institution at the same time as well as when conditioning on graduates that remain active in research.
