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Essays on Public and Labor Economics
Get PDFThis dissertation studies different policies that affect labor markets and inequality. The first chapter studies whether minimum wages should be used for redistribution on top of taxes and transfers. Theoretical results show that a minimum wage can increase social welfare when it increases the average post-tax wages of low-skill labor market participants and when corporate profit incidence is large. When chosen together with taxes, the minimum wage can help the government redistribute efficiently to low-skill workers by preventing firms from capturing low-wage income subsidies and from enjoying high profits that cannot be redistributed via corporate taxes due to capital mobility. Empirically, the analysis shows that the average US state-level minimum wage reform over the last two decades increased average post-tax wages of low-skilled labor market participants and reduced corporate profits in affected industries, namely low-skill labor-intensive services. The second chapter, written jointly with Maximiliano Lauletta, empirically studies a reform to the workers' compensation system in Argentina that, after a workplace accident, mandated workers to go through a government medical commission that determines the degree of disability, whether the injury happened in the workplace, and the corresponding compensation, before additional legal actions can be taken. Leveraging the staggered implementation of the reform across provinces, the results show that the reform substantially reduced workplace lawsuits with no effects on reported accidents. Employment increased by more than 5% one year after the reform in highly exposed industries, with no effects on average earnings or the number of active firms. Finally, the third chapter empirically asks if policies and institutions matter for pre-tax income inequality. Based on an annual panel of 43 countries for the period 1980–2016, the analysis documents robust correlations between pre-tax income shares and economic policy—financial development, trade openness, government expenditure, and income taxation—even after controlling for economic development. I further find that proxies of institutional quality—e.g., state development, corruption, or political exclusion—mediate the relationship between top income shares and economic policy, in particular for trade openness and government expenditure
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Government Policy and Migration
Get PDFThis dissertation investigates three prominent local government policies related to (1) Medicaid expansion, (2) minimum wage laws, and (3) incarceration. It pays particular attention to migration because it is a potentially critical concern for both the real and measured consequences of these policies. Chapter 1 shows that Americans are more mobile than publicly available data suggests, but that this migration is unresponsive to the state-level expansion of Medicaid after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Chapter 2 begins with the straightforward evaluation of state-level increases in the minimum wage, showing that wages and prices increase, but disemployment effects are undetectable. It also shows suggestive evidence that minimum wages do impact migration. Chapter 3 shows that incarceration causes short-term decreases in wages and employment through incapacitation effects, but not long-term scarring. It also shows no differential impact on migration
Critical Theory and Dialectics of Contemporary Economics
No full textThe subject of this dissertation thesis is a confrontation of contemporary economic thought with critical theory. Based on the holistic critique of the production process, the author deals with elementary principles of wealth creation and allocation, mirroring themselves in the issue of economic inequality. An applied transdisciplinary approach leads to dialectical understanding of market mechanism which accentuates an antagonistic character of its actors´ aims and reveals its non-empirical causalities. These abstract connections then become a viable explanatory complement to already advanced empirical apparatus of economic inequality. The goal of the thesis is to formulate an economic model that takes into consideration both empirical findings of contemporary studies on economic inequality and reflection of the critical theory. The value added lies in the fact that the economic model presents an interaction of economic agents and through probabilistic drive towards deepening economic inequalities exposes market mechanism as the diverging factor of social reproduction. Further, the model shows that Pareto-optimization, a frequently used analytically-normative tool of contemporary economics, principally does not suffice in grasping market-based inequalities. The contribution of the thesis is researching particular economic phenomena from the unique perspective which has not been yet fully accomplished in the context of modern economics
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Essays in Public, Labor, and Financial Economics
No full textThis dissertation comprises three chapters. The first chapter investigates the real effects of dividend taxation. "C"-corporations and "S"-corporations operate at the same scale and in the same narrow industries across the United States but only C-corps are subject to dividend taxation. Using hundreds of thousands of corporate tax returns and S-corps as a counterfactual, I show that (1) the 2003 dividend tax cut increased total C-corp payouts (dividends plus buybacks) by 45%, implying an elasticity with respect to one minus the tax rate of 1.4; (2) the payout response did not diminish after the 2004 reelection of President Bush and subsequent tax cut extension, undermining intertemporal tax arbitrage as a candidate explanation; and (3) the tax cut caused little or no increase in C-corp gross investment, net investment, total employee compensation, or number of employees. Unlike previous papers, these results reject both the "old" and "new" views of dividend taxation and instead point to some combination of the new view along with agency, tunneling, wealth reallocation, and tax avoidance effects. The second chapter uses the 1996 UC affirmative action ban to study whether and how nondiscrimination laws constrain decisions made behind closed doors. Seventeen years of law school applications reveal (1) pre-ban admissions offices used race, a novel conclusion from purely cross-sectional data; (2) the ban reduced observed black admissions advantages by two-thirds, implying under weak assumptions that the ban substantially reduced the use of race; (3) observed post-ban black advantages were nevertheless large; and (4) post-ban admissions offices used race in at least the first several years after the ban. These facts suggest that nondiscrimination laws can meaningfully constrain private selection decisions but that enforcement frictions may permit modest continued use of race. This paper's methods can improve civil rights litigation. The third chapter investigates why net flows into equity mutual funds are strongly procyclical. Investors' stated beliefs indicate they are trying to time short-run peaks and troughs, but I show they chase returns even with assets that are illiquid over a five-year or longer horizon. The time series of inflows suggests that individuals raise their expectations of the annualized long-run equity return by 10%, 6%, 5%, and 4% of the first-through-fourth annual S&P lags. Such beliefs imply frequent and dramatic revisions of the expected long-run equity return, including an 8-percentage-point reduction from 1999 to 2003.Economic
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The Enduring Employment Impact of Your Great Recession Location
Get PDFThis paper asks whether Americans were jobless in 2014 because of where they were living in 2007. In the cross section, employment rates diverged across U.S. local areas 2007-2009 and—in contrast to history—have barely converged. This “great divergence” could reflect spatial differences in human capital, rather than causal location effects. I therefore use administrative data to compare two million workers with very similar pre2007 human capital: those who in 2006 earned the same amount from the same retail firm, at establishments located in different local areas. I find that conditional on 2006 firm-x-wages fixed effects, living in 2007 in a below-median 2007-2009-fluctuation area caused those workers to have a 1.3%-lower 2014 employment rate. Hence, U.S. local labor markets are limitedly integrated: location has caused long-term joblessness and exacerbated within-skill inequality. The enduring impact is not explained by enduringly high unemployment, more layoffs, more disability enrollment, or reduced migration. Instead, the employment outcomes of cross-area movers are consistent with severe fluctuation areas continuing to depress residents’ labor force participation. Impacts are correlated with housing busts but not manufacturing busts, possibly reconciling current experience with history. If recent trends continue, employment rates are estimated to remain diverged into the 2020s—adding up to over a relative lost decade for half the country. Employment models should allow market-wide shocks to cause persistent labor force exit, leaving employment depressed even after unemployment recovers
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Is the Great Recession Really Over?
Get PDFMany have argued that the Great Recession is over and that the U.S. labor market is back to where it would have been in the absence of the recession and the shocks that gave rise to it. By the end of 2015, the U.S. unemployment rate had returned to its 2007 level, below 5 percent. Yet the U. S. labor force participation rate and thus the U.S. employment rate (employment-population ratio) remained three percentage points below their 2007 levels. Only half or less of the decline is explained by demographic change. What caused the remaining decline in labor force participation? I attempt to address this question in a recent paper, “Is the Great Recession Really Over? Longitudinal Evidence of Enduring Employment Impacts”. Using micro-data on two million retail workers, I show that local variation in the employment impact of the Great Recession had enduring effects across local areas. Workers in areas that were severely hit in 2007-09 were less likely to be employed in 2014 than similar workers from less affected areas, regardless of where they lived in 2014. This enduring employment impact of a worker’s location at the onset of the Recession cannot be fully explained by nationwide skill-biased technical or trade changes
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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