Three essays in labor economics

Yu, Yueyuan

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120129 Copy

Description

Title

Three essays in labor economics

Author(s)

Yu, Yueyuan

Issue Date

2023-04-28

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

Forsythe, Eliza

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Forsythe, Eliza

Committee Member(s)

• Powers, Elizabeth T
• Weinstein, Russell Michael
• Marx, Benjamin M

Department of Study

Economics

Discipline

Economics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Beauty premium
• Online job board
• Two-Child policy
• Gender wage gap

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three chapters, which study topics related to labor economics. Each chapter explores an aspect of understanding the relationship between individuals' labor market outcomes and other individuals' attributes or choices, including physical appearance, childbirth, and gender. The first chapter studies beauty wage differentials in the labor market of China based on longitudinal survey data and online job-posting data. The main research question of this chapter is to measure the magnitude of the pay gap between attractive and less-attractive people and to explore its variation across occupations and industries. Besides, this paper documents the relationship between employers' beauty demands and other characteristics in job posts, such as preferences for gender and age, requirements for educational attainments and experience, which helps interpret the worker-side beauty wage premium. There are three main findings. Firstly, this paper discovers the positive association between beauty requests and employers' willingness-to-pay, and about three quarters of its variation can be explained by occupation-firm ("job") fixed effects. Secondly, workers with attractive appearances earn the beauty wage premium, which varies across genders and wage distribution. Male workers have a prominent and robust beauty wage premium, which would decrease if they move from low-paid to high-paid occupations. Comparatively, female workers benefit little from physical attractiveness conditional on education attainments and work experience. Lastly, occupation segregation is unable to explain the variation in the individual-level beauty wage premium. About 85 percent of the variance occurs within occupation-industry groups. The second chapter explores the relationship between childbirth and labor market outcomes by introducing an exogenous childbirth control policy reform in China. In late 2013, to alleviate the problem of the aging population, the Government of China introduced the Two-Child policy to encourage more children in each family. Using the survey data from the China Family Panel Studies conducted every two years from 2010 to 2019, I implement the difference-in-differences ("DID") framework to explore the policy impact on fertility behavior and labor market responses. Besides, I estimate the effect of childbirth on individuals' labor market outcomes across genders by applying an instrumental-variable (IV) estimation. This paper finds that the relaxed childbirth policy has significantly increased the average fertility rate of eligible couples by about 2.6 percent. Besides, I discover that both genders experienced a decline in annual wages when the fertility rate increased. But women were more affected in terms of the labor-force participation rate. It shows that the labor-force participation rate of women would decrease by about 3.4 percentage points if the fertility rate increased by ten percent. The third chapter measures and explains the gender wage differentials in the context of the labor market of China. In order to explore potential explanatory components of interpreting the gender wage gap, I apply the Oaxaca decomposition to both worker-side reported wages and employers' posted wages amongst gender-specific job posts. There are four main findings in this paper. First, there exists a gender wage gap of about thirty percent in the current labor market in China which varies across occupations and the wage distribution. Second, occupation segregation is of crucial importance in interpreting the gender wage gap based on reported wages but is unable to explain the wage difference between employers' willingness-to-pay for men and women. Third, work experience plays an essential role in understanding the gender wage gap of well-educated individuals. Fourth, female workers would earn 17 percent more if employers had the same requirement on education for women as they did for men.

Graduation Semester

2023-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Yueyuan Yu

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