Essays on imperfect competition in the labor market

This thesis consists of three chapters on imperfect competition in the labor market. The first chapter (joint with Nikolaj Harmon) explores the relationship between an individual's wages and the quality of her opportunities at other firms (her outside options). To overcome the fact that many factors that shift an individual's outside opportunities also impact her productivity at her current job, we develop a novel identification strategy that generates within-individual (and within-firm-by-occupation) variation in workers' information about their outside options. This strategy, which we implement using linked employer-employee data from Denmark, exploits the fact that individuals often learn about labor market opportunities through their social networks. We find that increases in labor demand at former coworkers' current firms increases an incumbent worker's job-to-job mobility and wage growth.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Caldwell, Sydnee Christian.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Daron Acemoglu, Joshua Angrist and David Autor.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122228

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122228