LEE, HAKKI
(2016)
ESSAYS ON LABOR AND PRODUCT MARKETS.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
This dissertation is a collection of three essays on labor economics and industrial organization. In the first essay, I study how and to what extent labor market frictions, which are defined as the inability to costlessly find jobs or move between jobs, affect workers' schooling decisions. In order to study this link, I use an on-the-job search model. Consistent with the data, the model economy predicts that a higher job-to-job transition rate increases the opportunity cost of a college education, reducing the incentives for schooling. Instead, a higher job separation rate decreases the opportunity cost, leading to more schooling. In addition, a higher job finding rate increases employment duration, which can help college educated workers enjoy higher skill prices for a longer time and lead to more investment in schooling.
In the second essay, I explore whether the number and types of people who attend college affect the college wage premium, which is defined as the wage of college graduates relative to high school graduates. I estimate the return to schooling by exploiting all of the variation or only the exogenous variation in educational attainment as the instrumental variable. The result reveals that composition effects account for nearly one half of the observed return to schooling. In addition, I find strong evidence that sudden short-run changes in educational attainment lowered education wage premiums for the affected cohorts, but only weak evidence that long-run trend changes in educational attainment lowered education wage premiums.
The third essay analyzes a monopolistic supplier's optimal decision of input prices when two downstream sellers simultaneously choose their advertisement efforts and their output levels. The independent advertisement decision by each seller causes the free-rider problem by its rivals. The supplier uses price-discrimination to alleviate the free-riding problem associated with the advertisement decision. Therefore, allowing price-discrimination may increase aggregate output-- and social surplus-- the reverse of the welfare implications in the previous literature.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
|
| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
|
| ETD Committee: |
|
| Date: |
30 September 2016 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
29 April 2016 |
| Approval Date: |
30 September 2016 |
| Submission Date: |
7 June 2016 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
101 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Economics |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
Labor Market Friction, Schooling Decision, College Wage Premium, Composition Effect, Price Discrimination, Advertisement |
| Date Deposited: |
30 Sep 2016 18:42 |
| Last Modified: |
15 Nov 2016 14:33 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/28132 |
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