This dissertation includes three essays on labor market matching, labor mobility and educational mismatch.

This dissertation consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, I estimate wage effects of double majors and double degrees among a sample of college graduates in their early career, using the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). I rely on selection on observables and control for individuals’ test scores, family background, and school characteristics when estimating the wage effects. I further consider whether wage effects of a double major/degree can be explained by two mechanisms: the “skill-enhancing” effect (increase in the depth of knowledge accumulated in college) and the “job-matching” effect (increase in the chance of working in an occupation that is more closely related to one’s college major). I examine whether estimated wage effects associated with a double major/degree (after controlling for confounding factors) decrease as a result of controlling for the depth of knowledge accumulated in college and the relatedness between college major and occupation. I find that having a double major does not make a significant difference in one’s early-career post-college wages. A double degree is estimated to be associated with a 0.088 increase in log wages after controlling for confounding factors. About a third of this effect can be explained by a combination of both the “skill-enhancing” and “job-matching” effects. In the second chapter, I use the NLSY97 to study whether being mismatched in the first job (meaning the individual’s occupation is not among the common occupations to which his/her college major typically leads) has a long-lasting effect on wages. I also investigate wage growth and job change patterns for different types of mismatched workers. I distinguish between demand-side mismatch due to job dissatisfaction and supply-side mismatch due to reasons other than reported job dissatisfaction. I find that both types of mismatched workers have significantly lower wages compared to matched workers, but that demand-side mismatched workers face a larger wage penalty than do supply-side mismatched workers. However, the wage penalty associated with demand-side mismatch reduces about 1.6 times as fast as does the penalty of supply-side mismatch as labor market experience increases. The result is that the estimated log-wage effect of mismatch virtually disappears in six years for both demand-side and supply-side mismatched workers, even though the former face a large wage penalty at the outset. Further, I show that demand-side mismatched workers tend to have more between-job mobility and between-job wage growth than matched workers, whereas supply-side mismatched workers tend to have more within-job mobility and within-job wage growth than matched workers. Overall, job mobility and subsequent wage growth contribute to the closure of the wage gap between matched and mismatched workers. My findings support predictions stemming from the job match literature that wage effects of first-job mismatches are not long-lasting. In the last chapter, I use NLSY97 data to determine the extent to which detailed measures of college-related factors, based on course credits and grades earned in different fields of study, explain the gender wage gap among college graduates in their early career. I start with a standard set of controls and then add my detailed measures of college-related factors to identify the increase in the explained gender wage gap. A decomposition of the gender wage gap reveals that the inclusion of detailed measures of college-related factors along with the standard set of controls increases the explained part of the estimated gender wage gap from 65.6% to 69.1%-77.8%. Among all the pre-market factors, detailed measures of college-related factors have the most explanatory power to the estimated gender wage gap (28.5%-39.1%). My findings imply that gender differences in credits and grades earned in different fields of study capture additional gender differences in skills that cannot be fully represented by gender differences in other factors such as college major and occupation. Compared to gender differences in college major and general academic achievement, gender differences in credits and grades earned in different fields of study are better pre-market measures for differences in skills between college-educated men and women.

Analyzes the 1970s downturn in the labor market for college-educated manpower, considers consequences for educational institutions, and explores policies for alleviating the situation. Bibliogs

This volume is devoted to three key themes central to studies in regional science: the sub-national labor market, migration, and mobility, and their analysis. The book brings together essays that cover a wide range of topics including the development of uncertainty in national and subnational population projections; the impacts of widening and deepening human capital; the relationship between migration, neighborhood change, and area-based urban policy; the facilitating role played by outmigration and remittances in economic transition; and the contrasting importance of quality of life and quality of business for domestic and international migrants. All of the contributions here are by leading figures in their fields and employ state-of-the art methodologies. Given the variety of topics and themes covered this book, it will appeal to a broad range of readers interested in both regional science and related disciplines such as demography, population economics, and public policy.

This dissertation applies the tools of network analysis to study job mobility. Job mobility is a complex phenomenon, and network theory provides a novel and practical framework for dealing with this complexity in understanding how individuals move from job to job. My first essay measures the effect of job referral networks on search outcomes. The key contribution of this essay is providing evidence of one mechanism by which social interactions affect earnings. An on-the-job search model extended to include social transmission of job information yields an empirical specification in which ones current job offer depends on the average offer of his social contacts. Using block level variation in the quality of jobs held by ones residential neighbors, I find that when changing jobs an individual with better local network contacts will obtain a higher quality job. In addition to the main result, this paper provides new evidence on the spatial structure of the wage distribution within urban areas. In the second essay I apply network algorithms to detect groups of workers and employers with relatively homogeneous patterns of job mobility. Workers with interchangeable skills should have similar patterns of mobility across employers that use those skills in roughly the same way. Grouping workers and jobs solely on the basis of similar mobility patterns reveals labor market sectors with distinct compensation structures. My final essay, joint with John Abowd, uses network models to facilitate identification of employer-specific wage premia in a decomposition of log earnings from matched employer-employee data.

This publication gathers the papers presented at the “OECD-EU dialogue on mobility and international migration: matching economic migration with labour market needs” (Brussels, 24-25 February 2014), a conference jointly organised by the European Commission and the OECD.

The dissertation explores the inter-dependence between agents' educational choices and their labor market outcomes. This individual level of inter-relationship is aggregated under a search and matching framework to analyze the cyclical and long-run labor market behaviors. The dissertation argues that the high volatility of labor market can be attributed to complementarity between high-skill and low-skill workers, as well as the economies of scale of job training for high-skill labor. Then, the dissertation combines a search and matching model with a signaling game to explain agents' educational choices and the unemployment rate gap between educated and uneducated workers. It also discusses some indirect effects of education and labor market policies. The effect of skill-biased technological change is scrutinized as well. An extension of this model is then used to analyze the growing mismatch of skill in China.