Three essays in labor economics in developing countries

Feld, Brian

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/108129 Copy

Description

Title

Three essays in labor economics in developing countries

Author(s)

Feld, Brian

Issue Date

2020-04-27

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Thornton, Rebecca

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Thornton, Rebecca

Committee Member(s)

• Powers, Elizabeth
• Kleemans, Marieke
• Osman, Adam

Department of Study

Economics

Discipline

Economics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

Labor economics Developing countries

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on three topics that pertain or are tightly related to the labor market in developing countries. After presenting an introduction to this dissertation, chapter 2 studies the way in which labor regulations and their enforcement by the government affects workers and their families, by taking advantage of a reform that took place in Argentina that reformed the labor regulations of domestic workers. The results of this study suggest that the analysis of labor regulations should also take into account how the affect other members of the worker's household to avoid underestimating their entire impact. In chapter 3 we study how workers value different job amenities and the most appropriate way to estimate these valuations using survey data. This was done by fielding a survey to job seekers in Egypt where respondents are randomly assigned to a different method to elicit their valuation for several non-wage job attributes. We find large difference across elicitation methods in the value assigned to the job attributes we consider. Moreover, some of these elicitation methods present various shortcomings that should be considered before being used in surveys, even leading to estimates for certain attributes having the opposite sign that would be expected by economic theory. Finally, in chapter 4 we focus on a topic that is directly connected to the labor market by studying how migration affects both the incidence of crime and its media coverage. We find that, even though the number of crimes covered by newspapers increase in areas that receive larger influxes of migrants, the likelihood that a person is victim of a crime actually decreases. This finding could provide an insight on why public perceptions of the effects of migration systematically differ from the empirical evidence.

Graduation Semester

2020-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/108129

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2020 Brian Feld

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