Date of Award

5-12-2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Economics

Advisor(s)

Hugo Jales

Subject Categories

Economics | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

This dissertation is comprised of three essays in labor economics. The first investigates a natural experiment in the internal labor market policies of the US Air Force. The second bounds the causal effects of attaining a college double major. The third studies the causes and consequences of queueing for government sector jobs in Brazil. The US Department of the Air Force, like many large organizations with rigid and central- ized internal labor markets, has recently introduced an algorithmically-assisted person-job matching system to replace their older, manual procedure. This change has been touted as a way to improve both organizational efficiency and to increase the satisfaction of its workforce. In this chapter, I leverage parallel trends and plausibly unexpected variation in the timing of the roll-out of this program in order to calculate its effect on one of the few margins of adjustment available in the military context: retention of personnel. I find that the system had meaningfully large effects on those who actively interacted with it: officers’ average quit rate fell by 37%. While still being introduced for enlisted members, the aver- age quit rate for the initial treatment group in the enlisted force has fallen by 76%. These improvements, comparable in effect to a $25,000 retention bonus, are especially notable for having essentially zero marginal cost to implement. Double majoring has become an increasingly salient phenomenon in recent years, as the returns to higher education have grown. Currently, over 15 percent of college graduates in the U.S. graduate with more than one major. While much research exists on the re- turns to different individual majors, less is known about the causal effects of double ma- joring. This chapter provides novel estimates on the returns to double majoring. We im- prove upon prior studies that rely on controls for observable characteristics by address- ing selection concerns in two notable ways. First, by including institution fixed effects, we control for institution-specific differences that may influence both the decision to double major and subsequent earnings. Second, we adopt a partial identification approach to ad- dress non-random selection into double majoring within institutions, providing informa- tive bounds on the returns to double majoring. Results broadly align with estimates from prior studies at the aggregate level but reveal notable gender differences. Women experi- ence an earnings return to double majoring of between 2 to 5 percent, while the return for men is statistically negligible. Our analysis suggests that this discrepancy is primarily at- tributable to signaling effects in the labor market, which may help to offset the gender pay gap. Finally, we show that public sector jobs in Brazil are characterized by price and quantity controls in the form of wages larger than those of private sector counterparts but with a limited number of employment contracts (analogous to a quota). Entrance to public sector jobs is decided according to the results of a double-blinded admission exam. The result- ing combination prevents the usual price mechanism from equating the value of supplying labor to private or public sector jobs. We show that the equilibrium mechanism operates through increases in the candidate-to-vacancy ratios that reduce the likelihood of success at any attempt to access a public sector job. In our empirical analysis, we look at exams administered between 2007 and 2017. We show that the value of time spent waiting actu- ally exceeds the average gain, dissipating all rents that would otherwise be generated by the public wage premium.

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