Browsing by Subject "Job search"
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Item Open Access Essays in Empirical Development Economics(2020) Subramanian, NivedhithaSocial norms can play an important role in economic decision-making. Individuals face costs if they deviate from cultural norms in their families or communities, and firms seek to preserve reputation in order to bolster their position in their market. In this dissertation, I explore the role of cultural norms and reputation in individual, household, and firm decision-making in developing countries. The first chapter is comprised of information and priming experiments on a job search platform in urban Pakistan identifying the role of social norms and workplace attributes on educated women's job search and occupational choice. The second chapter studies the relationship between gold price in year of birth and household decision-making at adulthood using nationally representative data in India. The third chapter combines a lab-in-field generosity game with field-based measures of healthcare provider effort to document that a sizable proportion of healthcare providers in this setting in rural India exert clinical effort with patients in ways consistent with maintaining reputation in their communities.
Item Open Access Essays on Job Search and Labor Market Dynamics(2016) Roshchina, EkaterinaThis dissertation consists of three separate essays on job search and labor market dynamics. In the first essay, “The Impact of Labor Market Conditions on Job Creation: Evidence from Firm Level Data”, I study how much changes in labor market conditions reduce employment fluctuations over the business cycle. Changes in labor market conditions make hiring more expensive during expansions and cheaper during recessions, creating counter-cyclical incentives for job creation. I estimate firm level elasticities of labor demand with respect to changes in labor market conditions, considering two margins: changes in labor market tightness and changes in wages. Using employer-employee matched data from Brazil, I find that all firms are more sensitive to changes in wages rather than labor market tightness, and there is substantial heterogeneity in labor demand elasticity across regions. Based on these results, I demonstrate that changes in labor market conditions reduce the variance of employment growth over the business cycle by 20% in a median region, and this effect is equally driven by changes along each margin. Moreover, I show that the magnitude of the effect of labor market conditions on employment growth can be significantly affected by economic policy. In particular, I document that the rapid growth of the national minimum wages in Brazil in 1997-2010 amplified the impact of the change in labor market conditions during local expansions and diminished this impact during local recessions.
In the second essay, “A Framework for Estimating Persistence of Local Labor
Demand Shocks”, I propose a decomposition which allows me to study the persistence of local labor demand shocks. Persistence of labor demand shocks varies across industries, and the incidence of shocks in a region depends on the regional industrial composition. As a result, less diverse regions are more likely to experience deeper shocks, but not necessarily more long lasting shocks. Building on this idea, I propose a decomposition of local labor demand shocks into idiosyncratic location shocks and nationwide industry shocks and estimate the variance and the persistence of these shocks using the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) in 1990-2013.
In the third essay, “Conditional Choice Probability Estimation of Continuous- Time Job Search Models”, co-authored with Peter Arcidiacono and Arnaud Maurel, we propose a novel, computationally feasible method of estimating non-stationary job search models. Non-stationary job search models arise in many applications, where policy change can be anticipated by the workers. The most prominent example of such policy is the expiration of unemployment benefits. However, estimating these models still poses a considerable computational challenge, because of the need to solve a differential equation numerically at each step of the optimization routine. We overcome this challenge by adopting conditional choice probability methods, widely used in dynamic discrete choice literature, to job search models and show how the hazard rate out of unemployment and the distribution of the accepted wages, which can be estimated in many datasets, can be used to infer the value of unemployment. We demonstrate how to apply our method by analyzing the effect of the unemployment benefit expiration on duration of unemployment using the data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) in 1996-2007.
Item Open Access Essays on Migration, Social Networks and Employment(2022) Le Barbenchon, ClaireImmigrants rely on social networks upon arrival to their country of destination to access resources, find a job, and begin the process of incorporation. However, the contours of how and under what circumstances networks support a job search or facilitate assimilation remain unexplored. In this dissertation, I look at the intersection of migration, social networks and employment to shed light on both the limitations and benefits of social networks for immigrant incorporation. In Chapter 1, I study whether return migrants use social networks to find a job when they return to their home country. In doing so, I contribute to the academic debate on whether immigrants lose or maintain their connections to friends and family when they leave. Using Colombia as a case study, I draw on data from two years of Colombian nationally representative household surveys conducted in 2016 and 2017. I use a Difference-in-Differences strategy and exploit a mass deportation event of Colombian migrants from Venezuela in 2015 which prompted a wave of return-migrants. This yields three main findings: (1) Return migrants are more likely to use networks in their search than never migrants; (2) social networks are a last resort in return migrants’ job search, and (3) jobs found through networks for return migrants may be lower quality than jobs found through other means. This paper contributes to the literature on return migrant integration, and speaks to an important question in the literature: Will friends and family still be there for you after you’ve left? In Chapter 2, co-authored with Giovanna Merli and Ted Mouw, we study how immigrants’ personal networks are related to their migration experience and key indicators of assimilation. We draw on novel data that includes network data for over 500 immigrants and use model-based clustering to understand the assimilation of a particular case of first-generation immigrants: Chinese immigrants in a sparsely dispersed in a mixed suburban/urban area (Raleigh-Durham). We identify four Chinese immigrant typologies, Chinese Friendship Networks, Socially Embedded, Undecided Newcomers, and Economically Integrated, which are distinguished simultaneously by their social networks and their demographic characteristics. In turn, we find different clusters show different patterns in assimilation indicators. These findings contribute to a growing literature that calls for more granular study of immigrant groups so we can better understand heterogeneity in their outcomes. In Chapter 3, I study the limits of social networks for the immigrant job search. The idea that migrants draw on their networks to obtain employment upon arrival at their destination is central to the immigrant integration literature. However, despite the wealth of evidence on migrants’ use of networks, little is known about when and why migrants are willing to help newcomers find work. To study this, I deploy an online vignette experiment among Latin American immigrants to the United States. I find that immigrants are more likely to provide job search support to other immigrants from their home country but are less likely to lend support to newcomers that pose a reputational risk. I also find that tie strength is important – respondents in our sample are more likely to help a close friend than a stranger, which can help immigrants overcome the difficulties associated with a competitive labor market.
Item Open Access Network Disadvantages of Immigrants: Social Capital as a Source of Immigrant Disadvantages in the Labor Market(2015) Lee, Hang YoungSocial capital has so far been suggested to enhance the career outcomes of disadvantaged immigrants by compensating for their lack of human capital. Contrastingly, by examining labor market outcomes by immigrant groups, my dissertation argues that social capital can actually serve as a source of disadvantages for immigrants in the labor market, especially for a socially disadvantaged immigrant group like Mexican immigrants. Specifically, the dissertation proposes three kinds of social capital processes through which social status and network processes interplay to disadvantage disproportionately a low-status immigrant group in the job attainment process: access, activation, and return deficit of social capital. Using data from the 2005 U.S. Social Capital-USA survey, I examine these three kinds of social capital deficit across three ethnic immigrant groups: Mexican, non-Mexican Hispanic, and non-Hispanic immigrants. The first chapter explores the inequality of social capital across immigrant groups. The result shows that among the three immigrant groups, Mexican immigrants are the only immigrant group who have smaller, less diverse networks than the native-born. This access deficit of social capital for Mexican immigrants is driven primarily by their relative lack of human capital compared with other immigrant groups. The second chapter investigates whether ethnic enclaves constrain the access to social capital of enclave immigrants. The result shows that the constraining effect of ethnic enclaves on the social capital building of enclave immigrants is found only for the ethnic enclave of Mexican immigrants. This is because the ethnic enclaves of disadvantaged immigrants facilitate social connections to other coethnic enclave immigrants with similar socioeconomic traits, while constraining them from extending their networks beyond the enclaves. The access deficit of social capital for Mexican immigrants will eventually aggravate their job prospects because they cannot mobilize social capital for their job finding as much as other immigrant groups do. The third chapter examines the activation and mobilization of social capital in the job attainment process across immigrant groups. The result shows that Mexican immigrants activate and reap the benefit from mobilizing social capital for their job finding in ways that are different from those of the native-born as well as the high-status immigrant group. Due to their access deficit of social capital and negative stereotypes about them, Mexican immigrants are obliged to use a less rewarding job search method (i.e., using information passed from job contacts) rather than use a more rewarding job search method (i.e., using invitations from job contacts). Although Mexican immigrants benefit to some degrees from using information passed from job contacts in getting low-tier occupations, their heavy reliance on such a job search method can also prevent them from attaining middle- or top-tier occupations. By illuminating these serial processes of social capital in the job attainment for disadvantaged immigrants, my dissertation, therefore, sheds light on a new role of social capital as a source of immigrant disadvantages in the labor market.
Item Open Access The Value of a College Degree in a Recession(2011-04-29) Tricoli, ChristenSituated within the realm of a prestigious American university, I sought to examine how the “Great Recession” is experienced by current Duke seniors and recent graduates, and how it can be contextualized within a debate about the value of a college degree during the job search. I also wondered how these experiences compare to Duke alumni from past years of recession, as well as the expectations of high school seniors planning to enter college in the fall of 2011. After conducting personal, conversational interviews with Duke University alumni who graduated between 1973-1975, 1981-1982, and 1990-1991, current and recent seniors from the class of 2010 and 2011, and high school students in an accelerated magnet program, I discovered that every single participant believed that a college education is the best means of finding a “successful” work position in America. Alumni, college seniors, and college-bound high school seniors alike fell along a continuum of enthusiasm for their education that was almost entirely positive. Though the uncertainty of unemployment during a recession might call into question the viability of a degree, there is still a strong belief in education as a means of secure social mobility.