Essays on discrimination, immigration, and poverty.
详细信息
文摘
Labor market discrimination can be a very persistent phenomenon, where pre-market and on-the-market factors can lead to and preserve labor market disparities, which otherwise are not explained by human capital differences. I also find that not all workers of broadly the same skill group are affected equally by immigration. The effect of immigration depends on unobservable differences in characteristics of immigrants, which can be captured by their origin. Also, quite surprisingly, while some native workers may be harmed by immigration, workers of other segments of the labor market may benefit from immigration. This phenomenon can be the manifestation of unobservable or unmeasured complementarities, such as language and communication skills.;The last essay studies an important issue of poverty measurement. At present, the "money-metric" ($1 and $2-a-day) poverty line is the predominant method in use for poverty estimation and comparisons. Nonetheless, some have proposed more meaningful ways of measuring poverty based on the basic requirements (capabilities) of human beings, such as the minimum cost of food and shelter. While current household surveys are not designed with the purpose of supporting such estimation, we show that it is still possible, albeit not simple, to calculate more reliable, capability-based poverty lines from the existing surveys.;In Chapter 1 I use a panel of cross sections income data between 1991 and 2003 to measure wage differentials between Israeli-Arab and Jewish workers in Israel. The wage gap discovered is decomposed into components corresponding to human capital, occupational segregation, selectivity, and a residual, which may reflect discrimination. The unadjusted hourly wage gap between Arab and Jewish workers almost doubled from 40% in 1991 to 77% in 1999. By 2003, however, it had declined to 56%. The study shows large fluctuations in the wage gap. Human capital differences explain a major part of the wage gap, but its contribution is susceptible to the non-discriminatory norm adopted. Occupational segregation accounts for about a third of the wage gap. Because sudden changes in the underlying characteristics of the populations are not likely---these were actually slightly converging over the study period---large part of the changes in the wage gap are likely to be due to labor market discrimination.;Chapter 2 exploits the natural experiment, provided by the start of the second intifada, to measure the effect of immigration on labor market outcomes of Israeli-Arabs and Jews. It finds that Immigrants of different origins, Palestinians versus Foreigners, have different effects on the labor market, and these effects are experienced differently by different native groups, suggesting that the degree of substitution with native workers varies between groups. More specifically, a 10% foreign-worker-induced increase in the supply in a particular industry reduces the wage of Arabs by about 1%, while having no effect on Jewish wages. Palestinian-induced increase in the supply in a particular industry has the opposite effect: it reduces the wage of Jewish workers by about 1% but increases the wage of Arabs by 2.5%. Employment opportunities of either Arabs or Jews are not significantly affected by foreign workers, but are harmed by Palestinian influxes (in the scale of 1.5% for Arabs and 0.5% for Jews, for a 10% Palestinian-induced increase in the supply in a particular industry). Simulation analyses show that immigration of Palestinians and foreign workers together explain 7.6% of the increase in the wage gap between Israeli Arabs and Jews in the 1990s. They provide no explanation for changes in the employment gap.;In Chapter 3 we argue that inter-country comparisons of income poverty based on poverty lines uniformly reflecting the costs of the basic requirements of human beings are superior to the existing money-metric approaches. In this exercise, we implement a uniform approach to income poverty assessment based on basic human capabilities for three countries in three continents: Nicaragua, Tanzania, and Vietnam. We compute standard errors of the resulting poverty estimates and compare the incidence of income poverty across these three countries. The choice of approach affects both cardinal estimates and ordinal rankings of income poverty across countries and over time. We argue that meaningful and coherent inter-country poverty comparisons are best advanced through international co-ordination in survey design, and through the construction of income poverty lines that possess a meaningful and uniform interpretation (as the cost of achieving elementary income-dependent capabilities).