Essays on the labor market and work schedule flexibility.
详细信息
文摘
The first two chapters in my dissertation examine work schedule flexibility flextime), a family-friendly job amenity that allows employees to choose start and end times around "core" work hours or days. I study its availability in the US labor market and its role in womens labor supply decisions. I conduct a detailed descriptive analysis of the characteristics of occupations in which flextime is prevalent and the time use of workers with flextime. The third paper forecasts US earnings inequality explicitly accounting for changes in the relative supply and demand for female versus male and skilled versus unskilled labor. In the first chapter I analyze the degree to which flextime reduces fertility-related career interruptions. In particular, I ask whether women with flextime return to work sooner and remain employed when they have young children. I quantify the resulting reduction in the earnings penalty from periods of non-employment due to child-care responsibilities. To answer this question, I develop a dynamic discrete choice model for the fertility and labor supply decisions of married and cohabiting women. The model allows flextime to directly affect preferences, the arrival rate of job offers and offered wages. I estimate the model using a sample drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. The estimates suggest a small positive willingness to pay for flextime in a full-time job among the majority of women with no children. Moreover, a woman values flextime more strongly as her number of children increases or if she has an infant. Her willingness to pay for flextime if she has one infant child rises to 8% of full-time earnings. If flextime were available to all women with infant children, on average fertility increases by 0.6 children. The number of quarters of full-time work with flextime increases yet participation falls and full-time work experience declines by roughly 1.5 years. As a result, potential wages at age 35 fall by 2.5%. The net effect is a modest welfare improvement of up to 1.3%. Chapter 2 presents a comprehensive descriptive analysis of flextime in the US labor market. I examine the characteristics of employees with flextime, their skills, their jobs and their work schedules. I explore the characteristics of the occupations in which flextime is most prevalent to provide insight into the production technologies that are most complementary to flextime. I find that more educated employees are more likely to have flextime. Employees working a 40-hour week are least likely to have flextime and flextime is also less prevalent for evening and night shift workers. Flextime is most prevalent in occupations with frequent phone and email usage and among female workers it is more likely in occupations with a heavier weight on abstract tasks. In addition, I study the time use of workers with and without flextime. In particular I focus on the time spent on childcare and related activities. I find that both men and women with young children spend more time in activities with household children if they have flextime. The third chapter, co-authored with Fabian Lange, forecasts the evolution of the returns to education and earnings inequality over the next 20 years. In choosing our approach we were guided by the two major trends that have shaped US labor markets over the last half-century: a secular increase in educational attainment as returns to education have increased, and the integration of large numbers of women into the workforce. We base our analysis on the Current Population Surveys from 1963-2011 and document increases in the labor supplied by highly educated men and women relative to the supply of labor by the less educated over the last 50 years. We adapt the Katz and Murphy 1992) framework to estimate the demand for skilled and unskilled labor and for male and female labor. Our estimates show long-run declines in the demand for male relative to female labor and, in line with the literature, a long-run demand trend towards more highly educated workers. We estimate elasticities of substitution between male and female, and between unskilled and skilled labor, ranging between about 1.7 and 4.1. We combine these estimates with a model of labor supply and projections of future trends in educational attainment, demographics, and human capital endowments. Our forecasts suggest that the percentage growth in the return to education over the next 20 years will continue to favor college educated workers and in particular college educated females.