TY - THES T1 - Ranking Firms Using Revealed Preference and Other Essays About Labor Markets T2 - Department of Economics Y1 - 2015 A1 - Isaac Sorkin KW - economics KW - labor markets AB - This dissertation contains essays on three questions about the labor market. Chapter 1 considers the question: why do some firms pay so much and some so little? Firms account for a substantial portion of earnings inequality. Although the standard explanation is that there are search frictions that support an equilibrium with rents, this chapter finds that compensating differentials for nonpecuniary characteristics are at least as important. To reach this finding, this chapter develops a structural search model and estimates it on U.S. administrative data. The model analyzes the revealed preference information in the labor market: specifically, how workers move between the 1.5 million firms in the data. With on the order of 1.5 million parameters, standard estimation approaches are infeasible and so the chapter develops a new estimation approach that is feasible on such big data. Chapter 2 considers the question: why do men and women work at different firms? Men work for higher-paying firms than women. The chapter builds on chapter 1 to consider two explanations for why men and women work in different firms. First, men and women might search from different offer distributions. Second, men and women might have different rankings of firms. Estimation finds that the main explanation for why men and women are sorted is that women search from a lower-paying offer distribution than men. Indeed, men and women are estimated to have quite similar rankings of firms. Chapter 3 considers the question: what are there long-run effects of the minimum wage? An empirical consensus suggests that there are small employment effects of minimum wage increases. This chapter argues that these are short-run elasticities. Long-run elasticities, which may differ from short-run elasticities, are more policy relevant. This chapter develops a dynamic industry equilibrium model of labor demand. The model makes two points. First, long-run regressions have been misinterpreted because even if the short- and long-run employment elasticities differ, standard methods would not detect a difference using U.S. variation. Second, the model offers a reconciliation of the small estimated short-run employment effects with the commonly found pass-through of minimum wage increases to product prices. JF - Department of Economics PB - University of Michigan CY - Ann Arbor, MI UR - http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/116747 ER - TY - RPRT T1 - Reconsidering the Consequences of Worker Displacements: Survey versus Administrative Measurements Y1 - 2013 A1 - Flaaen, Aaron A1 - Shapiro, Matthew A1 - Isaac Sorkin AB - Displaced workers suffer persistent earnings losses. This stark finding has been established by following workers in administrative data after mass layoffs under the presumption that these are involuntary job losses owing to economic distress. Using linked survey and administrative data, this paper examines this presumption by matching worker-supplied reasons for separations with what is happening at the firm. The paper documents substantially different earnings dynamics in mass layoffs depending on the reason the worker gives for the separation. Using a new methodology for accounting for the increase in the probability of separation among all types of survey response during in a mass layoff, the paper finds earnings loss estimates that are surprisingly close to those using only administrative data. Finally, the survey-administrative link allows the decomposition of earnings losses due to subsequent nonemployment into non-participation and unemployment. Including the zero earnings of those identified as being unemployed substantially increases the estimate of earnings losses. PB - University of Michigan UR - http://www-personal.umich.edu/~shapiro/papers/ReconsideringDisplacements.pdf ER -