Inequality, the Welfare State, and Demographic Change

This dissertation is a three-part analysis examining how the welfare state in advanced Western democracies has responded to recent demographic changes. Specifically, this dissertation investigates two primary relationships, beginning with the influence of government spending on poverty. I analyze two at-risk populations in particular: immigrants and children of single mothers. Next, attention is turned to the influence of individual and environmental traits on preferences for social spending. I focus specifically on religiosity, religious beliefs and religious identity. I pool data from a number of international macro- and micro-data sources including the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), International Social Survey Program (ISSP), the World Bank Databank, and the OECD Databank. Analyses highlight the power of the welfare state to reduce poverty, but also the effectiveness of specific areas of spending focused on addressing new social risks. While previous research has touted the strength of the welfare state, my analyses highlight the need to consider new social risks and encourage closer attention to how social position affects preferences for the welfare state.

Essays on Job Search and Labor Market Dynamics

This 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.

Small-scale Fisheries and the Global Economy: Understanding Common-pool Resource Governance in the Context of Market Pressures, Neoliberal Policies, and Transnational Institutions

The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to a better understanding of how global seafood trade interacts with the governance of small-scale fisheries (SSFs). As global seafood trade expands, SSFs have the potential to experience significant economic, social, and political benefits from participation in export markets. At the same time, market connections that place increasing pressures on resources pose risks to both the ecological and social integrity of SSFs. This dissertation seeks to explore the factors that mediate between the potential benefits and risks of global seafood markets for SSFs, with the goal of developing hypotheses regarding these relationships.

The empirical investigation consists of a series of case studies from the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. This is a particularly rich context in which to study global market connections with SSFs because the SSFs in this region engage in a variety of market-oriented harvests, most notably for octopus, groupers and snappers, lobster, and sea cucumber. Variation in market forms and the institutional diversity of local-level governance arrangements allows the dissertation to explore a number of examples.

The analysis is guided primarily by common-pool resource (CPR) theory because of the insights it provides regarding the conditions that facilitate collective action and the factors that promote long-lasting resource governance arrangements. Theory from institutional economics and political ecology contribute to the elaboration of a multi-faceted conceptualization of markets for CPR theory, with the aim of facilitating the identification of mechanisms through which markets and CPR governance actually interact. This dissertation conceptualizes markets as sets of institutions that structure the exchange of property rights over fisheries resources, affect the material incentives to harvest resources, and transmit ideas and values about fisheries resources and governance.

The case studies explore four different mechanisms through which markets potentially influence resource governance: 1) Markets can contribute to costly resource governance activities by offsetting costs through profits, 2) markets can undermine resource governance by generating incentives for noncompliance and lead to overharvesting resources, 3) markets can increase the costs of resource governance, for example by augmenting monitoring and enforcement burdens, and 4) markets can alter values and norms underpinning resource governance by transmitting ideas between local resource users and a variety of market actors.

Data collected using participant observation, survey, informal and structured interviews contributed to the elaboration of the following hypotheses relevant to interactions between global seafood trade and SSFs governance. 1) Roll-back neoliberalization of fisheries policies has undermined cooperatives’ ability to achieve financial success through engagement with markets and thus their potential role as key actors in resource governance (chapter two). 2) Different relations of production influence whether local governance institutions will erode or strengthen when faced with market pressures. In particular, relations of production in which fishers own their own means of production and share the collective costs of governance are more likely to strengthen resource governance while relations of production in which a single entrepreneur controls capital and access to the fishery are more likely to contribute to the erosion of resource governance institutions in the face of market pressures (chapter three). 3) By serving as a new discursive framework within which to conceive of and talk about fisheries resources, markets can influence norms and values that shape and constitute governance arrangements.

In sum, the dissertation demonstrates that global seafood trade manifests in a diversity of local forms and effects. Whether SSFs moderate risks and take advantage of benefits depends on a variety of factors, and resource users themselves have the potential to influence the outcomes of seafood market connections through local forms of collective action.

Essays in Macroeconomics

My dissertation consists of three self-contained essays on macroeconomics. Chapter 2 "Churning, firm inter-connectivity, and labor market fluctuations'' studies the implications of firm inter-connectivity and irreversibility of inter-firm cooperation relationships on the business cycle. Chapter 3 "Inter-sector matching efficiency and sectoral comovement'' examines the comovement of sectoral labor markets when there is search friction in the inter-firm matching market. Chapter 4 "Lumpy investment and endogenous investment price'' (Joint work with Linxi Chen) studies the endogenous fluctuation of investment price induced by search friction in the investment goods market and partial irreversibility of capital adjustment. Each of the essays investigates the implication of market frictions, such as search friction and partial irreversibility, to the business cycle from a different perspective.