This dissertation studies the impacts of local labor market changes on the US family structures and disability benefit take-up. The dissertation uses unexpected time series changes in energy prices, together with the pre-existing county exposure to the unexpected time series changes, to identify causal links between the changes in county's economic conditions and changes in marriage outcomes, fertility outcomes, and disability benefit payments.

This thesis studies the economics of local labor markets. There are three chapters in the thesis, and each chapter studies how economic outcomes are affected by local labor market conditions. The first chapter studies the incidence of local labor demand shocks. This chapter starts from the observation that low-skill workers are comparatively immobile. When labor demand slumps in a city, college-educated workers tend to relocate whereas non college workers are disproportionately likely to remain to face declining wages and employment. A standard explanation of these facts is that mobility is more costly for low-skill workers. This chapter proposes and tests an alternative explanation, which is that the incidence of adverse shocks is borne in large part by (falling) real estate rental prices and (rising) social transfers. These factors reduce the real cost of living differentially for low-income workers and thus compensate them, in part or in full, for declining labor demand. I develop a spatial equilibrium model which, appropriately parameterized, identifies both the magnitude of unobserved mobility costs by skill and the shape of the local housing supply curve. Nonlinear reduced form estimates using U.S. Census data document that positive labor demand shocks increase population more than negative shocks reduce population, that this asymmetry is larger for lows kill workers, and that such an asymmetry is absent for wages, housing values, and rental prices. Estimates of the full model using a nonlinear, simultaneous equations GMM estimator suggest that (1) the asymmetric population response is primarily accounted for by an asymmetric housing supply curve, (2) the differential migration response by skill is primarily accounted for by transfer payments, and (3) estimated mobility costs are at most modest and are comparable for high-skill and low-skill workers, suggesting that the primary explanation for the comparative immobility of low-skilled workers is not higher mobility costs per se, but rather a lower incidence of adverse labor demand shocks. The second chapter, written jointly with Daron Acemoglu and Amy Finkelstein, studies how local area health spending responds to permanent changes in local area income. This chapter is motivated by the fact that health expenditures as a share of GDP have more than tripled over the last half century, and a common conjecture is that this is primarily a consequence of rising real per capita income, which more than doubled over the same period. We investigate this hypothesis empirically by instrumenting for local area income with time-series variation in global oil prices between 1970 and 1990 interacted with cross-sectional variation in the oil reserves across different areas of the Southern United States. This strategy enables us to capture both the partial equilibrium and the local general equilibrium effects of an increase in income on health expenditures. Our central estimate is an income elasticity of 0.7, with an elasticity of 1.1 as the upper end of the 95 percent confidence interval. Point estimates from alternative specifications fall on both sides of our central estimate, but are almost always less than 1. We also present evidence suggesting that there are unlikely to be substantial national or global general equilibrium effects of rising income on health spending, for example through induced innovation. Our overall reading of the evidence is that rising income is unlikely to be a major driver of the rising health share of GDP. The third chapter, written jointly with Kory Kroft, studies theoretically and empirically how optimal Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits vary with local labor market conditions. Theoretically, we derive the relationship between the moral hazard cost of UI and the unemployment rate in a standard search model. The model motivates our empirical strategy which tests whether the effect of UI benefits on unemployment durations varies with the local unemployment rate. In our preferred specification, a one standard deviation increase in the local unemployment rate reduces the magnitude of the duration elasticity by 32%. Using this estimate to calibrate the optimal level of UI benefits, we find that a one standard deviation increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 6.4 percentage point increase in the optimal replacement rate. JEL classification: J61, 110, J65.

This thesis consists of three chapters on labor market dynamics. In the first chapter, I show empirically that the unequal incidence of recessions is a core channel through which aggregate shocks are amplified. I show that the aggregate marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is larger when income shocks disproportionately hit high-MPC individuals, and I define the Matching Multiplier as the increase in the output multiplier originating from the matching of workers to jobs with different income elasticities - a greater matching multiplier translates into more powerful amplification in a range of business cycle models. Using administrative data from the United States, I document that the earnings of individuals with a higher marginal propensity to consume are more exposed to recessions. I show that this covariance between worker MPCs and the elasticity of their earnings to GDP is large enough to increase shock amplification by 40 percent over a benchmark in which all workers are equally exposed. Using local labor market variation, I validate this amplification mechanism by showing that areas with higher matching multipliers experience larger employment fluctuations over the business cycle. Lastly, I derive a generalization of the matching multiplier in an incomplete markets model and show numerically that this mechanism is quantitatively similar within this structural framework. In the second chapter, joint with David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence Katz, and John Van Reenen, we explore the well-documented fall of labor's share of GDP in the United States and many other countries. Existing empirical assessments typically rely on industry or macro data, obscuring heterogeneity among firms. In this paper, we analyze micro panel data from the U.S. Economic Census since 1982 and document empirical patterns to assess a new interpretation of the fall in the labor share based on the rise of "superstar firms." If globalization or technological changes advantage the most productive firms in each industry, product market concentration will rise as industries become increasingly dominated by superstar firms. Since these firms have high markups and a low labor share of firm value-added and sales, this depresses the aggregate labor share. We empirically assess seven predictions of this hypothesis: (i) industry sales will increasingly concentrate in a small number of firms; (ii) industries where concentration rises most will have the largest declines in the labor share; (iii) the fall in the labor share will be driven largely by reallocation rather than a fall in the unweighted mean labor share across all firms; (iv) the between-firm reallocation component of the fall in the labor share will be greatest in the sectors with the largest increases in market concentration; (v) the industries that are becoming more concentrated will exhibit faster growth of productivity and innovation; (vi) the aggregate markup will rise more than the unweighted firm markup; and (vii) these patterns should be observed not only in U.S. firms, but also internationally. We find support for all of these predictions. In the third chapter, I explore how the distribution of tasks across industries affects labor market responses to shocks. I present a model in which task-level wages connect industries employing the same tasks, meaning that the distribution of tasks across industries insures some workers against shocks and alters their labor market experiences. Workers trained in more dispersed tasks (e.g. accountants) face less unemployment risk from industry-specific shocks than workers who do tasks that are concentrated in few industries (e.g. petroleum engineers). Using industry and regional data, I show empirical evidence that supports the model's predictions - industries that employ more specialized labor contract less in response to demand shocks than industries with less specialized labor. JEL Classifications: E21, J23, D33

The first two chapters of the dissertation study how local labor market adjusts to trade shocks. The last chapter explores the relationship between economic condition change and health outcomes. In what follows, I describe my three essays. The first chapter proposes a mechanism through which local labor markets adjust to trade shocks: immigrants’ mobility. I find that immigrants are more responsive than natives to trade shocks. A $1000 increase in the import exposure leads to a 2.6 percent decline in the immigrant population but has little change in the native population. Additionally, immigrant mobility reduces the negative effects of trade shocks on native employment and wages. The study ultimately shows that natives in areas with more immigrants experience smaller declines in employment and wages. The second chapter studies the disparate impacts of trade liberalization on U.S. workers according to gender and age. Focusing on US-China trade shocks that occurred between 1990-2007, I show that these trade shocks generated larger declines in manufacturing employment and wages for older women than for older men. In contrast to prior studies, I find that discrimination and gender differences in industrial employment play relatively small roles in explaining this pattern. Instead, I present evidence that women's career interruptions from marriage and motherhood provide a more promising explanation. Within an age cohort, trade shocks depress labor market outcomes more strongly for married women with children than their male counterparts. The last chapter estimates the impact on infant birth outcomes of the farm credit crisis that hit the U.S. Midwest in the 1980s. Exploiting county-level variation in agricultural loans before the crisis, I use a difference-in-differences methodology to show that counties with more pre-existing farmland loans (per acre) experienced relatively worse infant health outcomes as the crisis unfolded. My estimates indicate that a $100 dollar increase in farmland loan (per acre) increased the incidence of low birth weight by around 0.4 percentage points and reduced the birth weight by 19 grams. Other findings show that the credit crisis intensified financial distress and tightened financial constraints for affected households, economic pressures that potentially provide a mechanism for the impact on birth outcomes. Counties that had purchased more farmland prior to the crisis suffered larger declines in their farm earnings, higher delinquency rates, and more bank failures

This dissertation consists of a series of papers studying the effect that globalization in its multiple forms has had on Mexican local labor markets. In Chapter 1, 'Trade Shocks and Mexican Local Labor Markets in the Great Recession', I study the role that international trade played in the transmission of the U.S. credit crisis to Mexican local labor markets. The economic opening process that Mexico started by opening up to international trade in the mid-1980s when it became a member of the GATT, and then reinforced in 1994 when NAFTA was enacted, has created a strong link between the business cycles of Mexico and the United States (Robertson, 2000). This trade-driven phenomenon has had significant consequences for Mexico's economic geography (Hanson, 1996). In particular, easier access to the U.S. market increased the level of dependence on exports to the U.S. for some Mexican municipalities. This increase in dependence was not homogenous throughout the country, mostly due to differences by municipality in transportation costs and industry specialization. This heterogeneity, plus the evolution of U.S. trade during the Great Recession (2007-2009), which involved a $40 billion drop in U.S. imports from Mexico, allows me to identify the role that these trade linkages played in the transmission of the crisis to Mexican local labor markets. I show that differences in manufacturing industry structure caused by Mexico's opening process have made a subset of Mexican municipalities especially vulnerable to economic events in the U.S. I find that Mexican regions that exported relatively more to the U.S. experienced large and significant differential effects when compared to municipalities more focused on the domestic market. Mexican regions with significant ties to the U.S. market experienced, during the crisis, a significantly larger decrease in employment and wages, and greater within local labor market adjustments than their less open counterparts, mainly characterized by large drops in manufacturing employment and significant increases in employment in the service and agricultural industries. Pursuing the same line of research, the second chapter of my dissertation explores 'The Effect of Chinese Import Competition on Mexican Local Labor Markets'. Recent estimates of the effect of globalization on labor markets have found that trade is having an increasingly larger impact on wage inequality. Particularly relevant is the "China Syndrome" study by Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013a), which presents evidence on the disruptive effects that import competition can have on a developed economy by estimating the impact that Chinese import competition had on U.S. local labor markets. One would expect to find that Chinese exports also had a large and significant effect on developing economies, particularly on those specialized in the production of labor-intensive goods. My paper contributes to the study of this relationship by analyzing the Mexican case. Following the methodology introduced in Autor et al. (2013a), I exploit variation across Mexican regions in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization in order to estimate the effect Chinese competition had on local Mexican labor markets. Also, by taking advantage of the Mexican exports' high dependence on the U.S. market, I estimate the effect that China-caused trade diversion had on Mexican labor markets. I find that the increase in competition decreased the employment share in manufacturing for the average Mexican local labor market. This effect was found to be larger for regions with high exposure to Chinese competition in the U.S. market, showing that there was a significant, negative indirect effect from China's trade growth. Workers' mobility also increased due to this negative shock. I name the third chapter 'Mexican Migrants' Response to a Trade Shock'. This study exploits the variation created by Chinese import competition across Mexican states and combines it with variation across U.S. states in their likelihood of receiving Mexican migrants in order to yield a causal estimate of the variation in the Mexican share of the labor force across U.S. states. The purpose of this study is both to determine whether international migration can be affected by external trade shocks, a topic very scantily studied in the economic literature of both trade and migration, and to open the doors to a study of migration effects on the receiving economy by using a plausibly exogenous shock to migration, as is the increase in import competition by China. I find that the increase in Mexican imports from China had a significant effect on Mexican workers' mobility towards the U.S. labor markets.

The second chapter investigates local labor supply’s responses to demand shocks during the recession years in the context of China. Greater flexibility of the local labor market is an indicator of stronger local economies. The rationale is that states or regions within a country may receive asymmetric demand shocks, so that people from severely-hit regions may move towards less-affected regions, thus reducing the aggregate unemployment rate. It is convenient for economists to study the impacts of 2007 economic recession on countries other than the US, because this recession can be seen as an exogenous shock for other countries. I try to isolate the impacts of this demand shock on different local labor supply responses by examining pre- and post-recession effects. Specifically, the effects of employment changes on the unemployment rate, labor force participation rate, and migration are investigated. To deal with endogeneity, “Bartik-style” industrial mix and “Regress-M” are used as instrument variables to identify causal effects. Results show that the role of migration in alleviating negative demand shocks has decreased over time, which could be the consequence of government-led local development policy.