Essays in intergenerational mobility and the marriage market

ABSTRACT

This thesis consists of three chapters. The first one contributes to the literature on intergenerational mobility. The second chapter relates the literature on effects of import competition on labor markets with the literature on who marries whom. Lastly, the third chapter relates to literature on female leadership.In the first chapter, I study the effects of assortative mating on intergenerational mobility. There is an extensive literature on early human capital development that highlights the importance of parents' early investment in their children, both in the form of time and money. If marriages are increasingly among spouses of the same education, the inequality on children's initial conditions worsens, suggesting that assortative mating increases income inequality and reduces intergenerational mobility. I extend the standard heterogeneous-agent life-cycle model with earnings risk and credit constraints to allow different degrees of assortative mating to quantitatively evaluate the importance of this mechanism. The estimated model implies that if sorting were as low as the least sorted marriage market within the US (at a commuting zone level), intergenerational mobility would increase by 11%.In the second chapter, I study how a labor market shock affects who marries whom. I first study how a trade-induced local labor market shock affected workers differently by educational level and gender. I find that high school-educated men and women are disproportionately affected. However, while high school men's unemployment increases, women reallocate to less affected sectors and compensate for the job losses in the manufacturing sector. I then study how the labor market shock affects the marriage market. As the trade shock reduces the economic stature of men relative to women and the men's skill gap, the incentives to marry and to whom to marry are affected. I show that the decrease in marriage prevalence is driven by college-educated women marrying less with high school-educated men, as the increase in men's skill gap increases the costs of marrying down for women. On the other hand, high school women marry more with college-educated men. This can be explained as the result of two forces. First, the cost of marrying down for men remains unchanged. Second, college men become less attractive to college women as the shock reduces their relative economic stature.In the third chapter, we study how employee satisfaction changes at the onset of the COVID pandemic using data from the website Glassdoor. The pandemic has not changed what workers care about the most in their jobs benefits, their team, the firm's culture, work-life balance, and flexibility. Consistent with working-from-home improving several of those dimensions, we find that employee satisfaction increases within weeks of the pandemic's start. Additionally, we find that with the pandemic, workers start also caring about the firm's leadership and if they feel supported and cared for. As research finds that men and women differ in their leadership styles, we further study how the change in satisfaction varies by the presence of women leaders in their firms. We find that workers from women-led companies fared better than workers from men-led companies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)