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Title: Essays in Labor and Trade
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Lewis, Ethan Gatewood
Essays in Labor and Trade
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California - Berkeley, 2003. DAI-A 64/09, p. 3417, Mar 2004
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning
Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Census of Population; Labor Market Surveys; Modeling; Schooling; Skills; Tests and Testing

This volume contains two essays. The first evaluates models of the labor market consistent with the fact that relative wages and employment rates are unresponsive to local factor supplies in comparisons across US local labor markets. Whether relative supply changes are exported from local markets embodied in goods or adapted to through changes in production technology is evaluated by estimating the effect of the growth of different types of labor on the growth of different industries, and on the relative utilization of the types within industries. Exogenous changes in worker mix are identified from the historical regional settlement patterns of immigrants from different countries, and from the Mariel boatlift. Using output data from Annual Surveys of Manufacturers, augmented with employment and labor force data from Censuses of Population, changes in local labor mix during the 1980s are shown to have had little influence on local industry mix. Instead, consistent with models of directed technical change (Acemoglu (1998)) increases in the local relative supply of a skill group leads to an increase in its employment intensity within industries, with little or no effect on its relative wages. The second essay investigates the extent schooling enhances labor market skills. Controlling for performance on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT)--available for most respondents to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY)--reduces estimates of the return to schooling in wage regressions, leading some to argue it measures a fixed e age and arguably innate ability. The discontinuity of grade level in birthday is used to show that a year of schooling improves AFQT performance of the youngest NLSY respondents by 0.1 standard deviations.
Bibliography Citation
Lewis, Ethan Gatewood. Essays in Labor and Trade. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California - Berkeley, 2003. DAI-A 64/09, p. 3417, Mar 2004.