Essays on the wage dynamics of young workers.

摘要

This dissertation consists of three separate papers on topics in labor economics. The first chapter is "The Effects of Labor Supply Shocks on Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict." In September 2000, the supply of Palestinian workers in the West Bank increased by about forty percent. I take advantage of this unique natural experiment to study the effects of labor supply shocks on labor market outcomes. The environment I study does not suffer from the out-migration problem common in many related studies, and quarterly information on wages and employment allow me to analyze the short run adjustment of the labor market. The results suggest that a 10 percent increase in the supply of unskilled workers reduces their wages by about 2-5 percent but no effects on wages are found among skilled workers.;The second chapter is "Does Employer Learning Vary by Occupation?" Models in which employers learn about the productivity of young workers have two principal implications: First, the distribution of wages becomes more dispersed as a cohort of workers gains experience; second, the coefficient on a variable that employers initially do not observe, such as the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) score, grows with experience. If employers' learning technology varies significantly across occupations, these indicators of learning should covary positively across groups defined by a worker's first occupational assignment. The empirical results support this prediction and I find that the estimated amount of employer learning varies considerably across occupations.;The final chapter is "The Career Effects of Graduating from College in a Bad Economy: The Role of Workers' Ability." In this study I provide evidence that workers who start their career in a recession are positively selected from the ability distribution of all college graduates. The results using data from two different sources suggest that an increase of one percentage point in the unemployment rate induces 2 percent wage loss that fades after 5 years. However, once I control for the worker's AFQT score in the regression, the initial effect of graduating in a recession on wages doubles in size and remains large even after 15 years in the labor market.