Essays in labor economics
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation explores different topics in labor economics and household finance. The first chapter focuses on owners of privately-held firms, who typically invest a large amount of their personal wealth into their firm. In principle, the wealth not invested in the firm may be used as a buffer to smooth shocks to the firm. I use matched employer-employee data, together with information on the assets held by every shareholder of every Norwegian firm from 2004 to 2013 to document three facts: (1) Wealthy entrepreneurs start larger businesses and in sectors that require high initial capital investment. (2) Entrepreneur's private wealth improves firm performance, lowers the exit rate, and increases profitability. (3) Firms owned by wealthy shareholders are less sensitive to revenue and value added shocks in many dimensions. Specifically, at the top of the owner's wealth distribution, survival rate, employment growth and employees' wage growth react less to the shocks than at the bottom. I also discuss a model of the firm with costly external financing that rationalizes the results. The second chapter is co-authored with Andreas Fagereng, Luigi Guiso and Luigi Pistaferri. The chapter is related to recent work by Saez and Zucman (2016), who use US tax records to obtain estimates of wealth holdings by capitalizing asset income from tax returns. They document marked upward trends in wealth concentration. We use data on tax returns and actual wealth holdings from tax records for the whole Norwegian population to test the robustness of the methodology. We document that measures of wealth based on the capitalization approach can lead to misleading conclusions about the level and the dynamics of wealth inequality if returns are heterogeneous and even moderately correlated with wealth. The last chapter is coauthored with Eran Blass-Hoffmann. In this chapter, we study how the idiosyncratic earnings growth evolves over the business cycle in Italy. We distinguish between the two sources of variation of annual earnings growth: changes in employment time (number of weeks of employment within a year) and changes in weekly earnings. Changes in weeks of employment explain the tail events in earnings growth. Moreover, they account both for the increased dispersion and negative skewness in the distribution of earnings growth observed in recessions. In contrast, the cross-sectional distribution of weekly earnings growth is relatively stable over the business cycle and exhibits little skewness. Thus, models that rely on cyclical variations in idiosyncratic earnings growth, should focus on cyclical employment growth rather than on cyclical wage growth.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2017 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Malacrino, Davide |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Economics. |
| Primary advisor | Pistaferri, Luigi |
| Thesis advisor | Pistaferri, Luigi |
| Thesis advisor | Bloom, Nick, 1973- |
| Thesis advisor | Hoxby, Caroline Minter |
| Advisor | Bloom, Nick, 1973- |
| Advisor | Hoxby, Caroline Minter |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Davide Malacrino. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Economics. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2017 by Davide Malacrino
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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