Thomas Lemieux

Education policy not only impacts the quality of education in the short term but also has long-term effects on the quality of the labour force, ultimately affecting the productivity of the economy. Through these three essays on the Economics of Education, I study how education policy and reforms shape the quality of education, school segregation, and labour market outcomes of students. Chapter 2 examines the effects of changes in school attendance boundaries on students' educational and labour market outcomes. Students attending high schools with expanding catchments show improved post-secondary and labour market outcomes, while those in shrinking catchments remain unaffected. These improvements are linked to increased course offerings and specialized elective teachers in expanding schools. The findings suggest that boundary adjustments, despite controversy, may provide long-term benefits. Chapter 3 investigates how boundary adjustments affect racial segregation. Our findings from the event study demonstrate that adjustments to school attendance boundaries may lead to a decrease in school segregation. To further investigate whether there exist patterns or systematic preferences that guide school districts in adjusting school attendance boundaries, we conduct simulations of alternative school boundary changes based on the past proposed plans. The findings suggest there are no systematic patterns in school districts' decisions for the school attendance boundary adjustment concerning racial segregation. Chapter 4 studies an education reform resulting in delayed ability tracking for South Korean students during the 1960s-70s. The reform ended a practice of sorting students into elite and non-elite middle schools via admission exams, postponing ability tracking until the high school level. We find that the reform increased both the incidence of private tutoring as well as hourly wages amongst students from wealthy households. A causal mediation analysis shows that private tutoring is an important pathway for the effect of the reform on university graduation and hourly wage. Our findings suggest that education reforms can interact with household behaviour to yield unintended policy outcomes, especially in countries with well-established private tutoring markets.

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Chapter 2 examines the impact of online-delivery platforms on the labor market. These platforms, emblematic of recent technological shifts, alter both workforce composition and product demand. While they can create new opportunities for workers with limited outside options, they may also displace “good jobs.” Using novel Brazilian data that link employer-employee records to both restaurants and a major delivery platform, and applying a matched event-study design, I estimate the effects of platform adoption on labor market outcomes. On average, adopting restaurants substitute in-house labor hours for outsourced platform worker hours nearly one-for-one. Workers at adopting restaurants see modest earnings losses, as most transition into new formal sector jobs. However, workers at non-adopting restaurants face higher risks of job loss and larger earnings declines, as these establishments are more likely to downsize or close. Despite these losses, the aggregate earnings gains for gig workers outweigh the losses among traditional restaurant employees, highlighting important distributional trade-offs.Chapter 3 studies rent-sharing between firms and outsourced workers. Using unique Argentinian administrative data that match temp agencies to user firms, we estimate how wage premia differ between regular and temp workers. Results show that high-wage user firms paying regular employees a 10% premium relative to low-wage firms, pay temp workers only a 4.9% premium. This is midway between full rent-sharing with insiders and a competitive spot-labor market, indicating partial but limited sharing of firm-specific wage premia with outsourced workers.Chapter 4 explores how institutional settings affect domestic outsourcing in Italy, exploiting a novel administrative identifier for outsourcing events. We estimate the impact of outsourcing across various occupations without restricting to continuously employed workers. Results show substantial earnings losses for outsourced workers, mostly due to increased non-employment shortly after outsourcing. The losses are largest for non-routine manual jobs, while workers in abstract, cognitive roles experience some earnings gains following an outsourcing event.Overall, the thesis provides new evidence on how technology and organizational change through platforms and outsourcing reshape labor market outcomes, highlighting trade-offs between flexibility, earnings, and job security.

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The first two chapters of this thesis study how worker sorting across firms shapes the wage effects of immigration using administrative data from Germany. The third chapter studies algorithmic and human discrimination in hiring. Chapter 1 documents how immigrant workers are sorted across firms in Germany over the period 1975-2018. The main findings are: (1) changes in firm sorting can explain nearly all of the increase in the native-migrant wage gap since the 1990s, (2) migrant workers are highly concentrated in low-paying firms, particular in the first 5-10 years after arrival, and the negative sorting is stronger for more recent cohorts, (3) migrant workers are highly segregated from native-born workers in the labor market, even within narrowly defined labour markets, and (4) immigrant workers--in particular Central and East Europeans--are more likely to find jobs at firms that previously employed workers from their country of origin. Chapter 2 investigates, both theoretically and empirically, how the sorting of migrant workers across firms documented in the first chapter shape the wage effects of immigration. The main theoretical result characterizes how the effect of an immigration shock on average native-born workers' wages depends on migrants' sorting across in a model of worker sorting across heterogeneous firms. Segregation reduces within-firm competition between immigrants and native-born workers, and when immigrants enter low-wage firms, workers exposed to competition reallocate to higher-wage firms. The empirical analysis tests and corroborates these theoretical predictions by estimating the effects of firm- and market-level immigration shocks on firms and workers. Chapter 3 introduces a new methodology to quantify degree of bias in the initial stages of the hiring process in both humans and Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. To do so, we reanalyze data from a previous resume audit study in which researchers submitted fictitious resumes with racially distinctive names to real job ads. We reconstruct each resume from the original study and conduct a synthetic experiment by asking LLMs who they would hire. Our results suggest that LLMs are less racially biased than their human counterparts. However, LLMs are not perfectly unbiased: they do use information contained in names.

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This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter studies the long-run effect of job displacement on workers' commuting costs to subsequent jobs. Using German employee-employer data, geo-coordinates of workers' residences and workplaces, and a matched event study design, we estimate the response of workers' commuting distances to job displacement in mass layoffs. Displaced workers take up new jobs requiring 21 percent longer commuting, and the effect persists in the subsequent 10 years. To quantify the monetary value of increased commuting, we develop and estimate an on-the-job search model for workers' willingness to pay to avoid commuting. The extra commuting cost amounts to one-fifth of the wage losses facing displaced workers, which exacerbates the total cost of job displacement.In the second chapter, we show that dockless bike sharing solves the "last-mile problem" in public transportation by reducing the commuting cost between home and subway stations. As such, shared bikes increase the attractiveness and prices of apartments distant from subways relative to those nearby. Using resale apartment data and the staggered entry of bike sharing in 10 Chinese cities, we find that bike sharing reduces the housing price premiums near the subway by 29 percent. The reduction is equivalent to 1,893-2,127 CYN (282-317 USD) of the commuting cost per household per year over 30 years of residence. It is driven by a relative increase in the listing prices of and the demand for apartments distant from vis-à-vis proximate to subways.The third chapter assesses the effects of a corporate income tax cut for small businesses on employee earnings. Following a 2014 reform in Quebec, Canada, firms receiving the tax cut significantly raised the earnings of their workers. The earnings growth is connected with firms’ increased profits, as the effects are larger in high-growth industries where firms invest more and enjoy greater productivity. We estimate that workers bear up to three-quarters of the tax burden, and 35 percent of the surplus from the tax cut is passed onto workers.

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The first chapter studies the distribution of economic activity across space and the effects of place-based policies. I develop a model of the location choice of new establishments incorporating taxes, monopsonistic labor markets, and spillovers. Estimates using administrative data from Germany indicate that establishments generally have a preference for lower taxes, as well a preference for lower worker outside options which enable establishments to pay lower wages. The degree to which various types of productivity spillovers matter in the location decision of establishments varies greatly between industrial sectors. I also quantify the effects of a counterfactual place-based policy and find that commuting zones display highly heterogeneous wage and economic activity responses to the same policy due to differing degrees of labor market power across space.In the second chapter, we study the extent to which persistent elevation in the involuntary part-time employment rate following the Great Recession indicated labor market slack in the United States. The fraction of the US workforce identified as involuntary part-time workers rose to new highs during the US Great Recession and came down only slowly in its aftermath. We assess the determinants of involuntary part-time work using an empirical framework that accounts for business cycle effects and persistent structural features of the labor market. We conduct regression analyses using state level panel data for the years 2003–16. The results indicate that structural factors, notably shifts in the industry composition of employment, have held the incidence of involuntary part-time work slightly more than 1 percentage point above its prerecession level.In the final chapter, I use the 1996, 2001, 2004, and 2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to investigate the influence earner status plays on the response to a spouse's job separation. I find that conditional on gender, there are still large remaining differences in behavior based on earner status. Conditional on earner status, there are few remaining gender differences on the intensive margin, but clear differences on the extensive margin. As the equivalence between gender and earner status continues to erode, examining earner status will become even more important.

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Chapters 2 and 3 analyze a place-based policy that reduced the effects of lowering lethal violence at the neighborhood level for several years in some of the most violent neighborhoods on earth. Chapter 2 discusses how this reduction affects short-run learning gains, employment, and incarceration for treated individuals in their early adulthood. The policy increases human capital for students in the short run. Fewer disruptions in the school routine, less student absenteeism, and a safer environment \textit{within} school drive these results. Moreover, younger individuals have a substantially lower likelihood of being incarcerated later. Chapter 3 evaluates the spatial spillover induced by the policy. I find that the program decreased homicides and police killings in treated areas and did not cause crime displacement to other places in Rio de Janeiro. There is suggestive evidence of crime migration to areas in Rio's metropolitan region and the state's countryside.In Chapter 4, I investigate how localized heat stress affects vulnerable populations \emph{within} the city of Rio de Janeiro. It is known that temperature shocks increase mortality, and the link is primarily via human physiology. However, most of this evidence comes from cross-city and epidemiological studies in developed countries. This chapter examines the heat-mortality relationship at a fine-grained level within Rio de Janeiro. We rely on novel satellite imagery sources on temperature and administrative health records at the individual level to build a neighborhood-by-month panel over 14 years. Heat stress increases all-cause mortality in individuals aged 60 years or older but does not affect other age groups. In particular, we find that hot days in a typical month in Rio account for 2\% of cardiovascular deaths in the population 60+. Access to preventive health care can attenuate the marginal effect of temperature on these deaths. We conclude that temperature shocks are localized within cities, implying that remedial policies should also be localized.

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Is government guiding the invisible hand at the top of the labor market? Chapter 2studies this question among physicians, the most common occupation among the top onepercent of income earners. A novel linkage of population-wide tax records with the administrative registry of all physicians in the U.S. is used to study the characteristics ofthese high earnings, and the influence of government payments in particular. A major roleis found for government on the margin, with half of direct changes to government reimbursement rates flowing directly into physicians’ incomes. These policies move physicians’relative and absolute incomes more than any reasonable changes to marginal tax rates. Atthe same time, the overall level of physician earnings can largely be explained by labormarket fundamentals of long work and training hours.Chapter 3 takes advantage of the sharp cutoff at age 26 in eligibility for medical insurance coverage on a parent’s plan under the Affordable Care Act’s dependent coveragemandate to identify the benefit of expanded coverage to individuals with health problems.Using a regression discontinuity design, Access to dependent coverage is shown to significantly reduce the subjective cost of ill-health for those under 26. The estimated effectsare found to be very large in income equivalent, though not outside the realm of previousrelated estimates, and pass a variety of standard robustness checks.Strong versions of the set-point hypothesis argue that subjective well-being measuresprimarily reflect each individual’s own personality and that deviations are temporary.Chapter 4 uses international migration as a test. With or without adjustments for selection effects, the levels and distributions of immigrant life satisfaction scores for immigrantsto the United Kingdom and Canada from up to 100 source countries mimic those in theirdestination countries, and even the destination regions within those countries, rather thanthose in their source countries, showing that subjective life evaluations are substantiallydriven by life circumstances, and respond when those circumstances change.

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Chapter 2 demonstrates how individual income tax structures incentivize a more coordinatedlabour supply response to childbirth within married households: a joint selectionout of the wage-paying sector and into self-employment. In a parallel analysis of longitudinaladministrative and survey data from Canada, I show that the birth of a first childis associated with an increase in both maternal and paternal self-employment in marriedhouseholds; explained largely by an increase in co-employment. I develop a novel simulatedinstrument research design, which exploits exogenous tax variation, to show thatthis strategic re-organization of the household is partly incentivized by income splittingtax savings. Finding a reduced form elasticity of 0.5, these savings can account for halfthe increase in co-employment after childbirth. Beyond tax avoidance, this paper presentsincome splitting as a subsidy to the creation of flexible, tax-optimizing family firms thatprovide stable, long-run employment to households.Chapter 3 provides the first causal evidence on the impact of incorporation on the laboursupply and hiring practices of self-employed professionals. It exploits staggered reformsacross professions in each province to permit the registration of professional corporations inCanada. I found no evidence of a labour supply response to the significant tax implicationsof incorporation. However, for female professionals, incorporation increases the likelihoodof hiring at least one employee. This result is consistent with the cash flow benefits ofretained corporate earnings that enable to business owners to ensure against uncertainrevenue.Chapter 4 extends the DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux (1996) study of the links betweenlabour market institutions and wage inequality in the United States and updates the analysisto the 1979 to 2017 period. A notable extension quantifies the magnitude and distributionalimpact of spillover effects linked to minimum wages and the threat effects of unionization.A distribution regression framework is used to estimate both types of spillover effects.Accounting for spillover effects doubles the contribution of de-unionization to the increasein male wage inequality. It raises the explanatory power of declining minimum wages totwo-thirds of the increase in inequality at the bottom end of the female wage distribution.

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The first chapter provides the first consistent estimates of intergenerational earnings mobility in Chile, based on administrative records that link a child's and their parent's earnings from the formal private labour sector. We estimate that the intergenerational earnings elasticity is between 0.288 and 0.323, whereas the rank-rank slope is between 0.254 and 0.275. We find significant non-linearities in the intergenerational mobility measures, where intergenerational mobility is very high in the bottom 80\% of the parents' distribution but with extremely high intergenerational persistence in the upper part of the earnings distribution. In addition, we find remarkable heterogeneity in intergenerational mobility at the regional level, where Antofagasta, a mining region, is the most upwardly-mobile region. Finally, we estimate significant differences across municipalities in the Metropolitan Region, where our estimates suggest that the place of residence makes a significant difference in intergenerational mobility for children of upper-class families, while it is less relatively important for children of lower- and middle-class families.The second chapter proposes a new methodology to value retained earnings as income by transforming them into accrued capital gains and develops a parametric procedure to impute corporate retained earnings to households. We use this approach to estimate income inequality for Canada using household survey data, and aggregate retained earnings information from national accounts. We show that including retained earnings by transforming it into accrued capital gains increases income inequality in Canada and changes the trend in income inequality, exhibiting more consistency with the decline in capital income after the Great Recession. The third chapter investigates consequences of top-distribution undercoverage on the Gini coefficient. It shows that not correcting for underreporting and nonresponse at the top does not necessarily result in an underestimated Gini coefficient. In addition, this paper proposes a Gini approximation based on the Atkinson approximation to correct for underreporting at the top. Under plausible assumptions, the approximation proposed for correcting underreporting at the top is near exact. To evaluate this methodology, this paper uses Chile and Canada as examples where we include undistributed business profits to measure income inequality.

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This thesis examines the effects of labor regulation on formal (regulated) labor markets in Latin America. It is divided in three chapters, in which I analyze the effects of pension programs on formal-sector labor supply and the effects of payroll taxes on formal-sector labor demand. The first two chapters analyze how future pension benefits affect formal-sector labor supply. Since formal-sector jobs comply with labor regulation, including contributions to pension plans, formal-sector workers receive long-run benefits in the form of pensions. If workers account for such benefits when they search for formal-sector jobs, the pension system affects formal-sector labor supply before the retirement age. In Chapter 1, I estimate the causal link between future pension benefits and formal-sector labor supply by using a cohort-based reform undertaken in Colombia. I demonstrate that workers with higher pension gains are more willing to work in formal-sector jobs, rather than working in unregulated businesses or by themselves. The result is consistent with a life-cycle model of formal-sector labor supply presented in Chapter 2, where pension benefits are an amenity of working in the formal sector. The results suggest that pension reforms may have large effects on the labor market that should be taken into account in the design of pension programs. Chapter 3 analyzes the effect of payroll taxes on formal-sector labor demand in the presence of wage rigidity. In particular, I study the impact of a reduction of payroll taxes on the creation of formal-sector jobs in Colombia, where about 40 percent of formal-sector workers earn the minimum wage. Using a reform that granted tax credits to firms hiring workers younger than 28 years of age, I obtain estimates of the effect of payroll taxes on formal-sector employment and wages. I show that payroll tax incidence is borne by formal-sector employers. The reduction in payroll taxes increased formal-sector employment and had no effects on wages. Using the estimation results, I recover an estimate of the elasticity of the formal-sector labor demand of -0.44. This result implies that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage reduces formal-sector employment by 4.4 percent.

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This thesis examines two topics in labor economics and policy evaluation. Chapter 1 provides an introduction.Chapter 2 addresses the estimation of the effects of the minimum wage on labor market outcomes in developing countries. The main finding is that, even in the absence of policy variation, that is, when the same level of the minimum wage holds for all the workers in the data, it is still possible to recover the effects of this policy under particular assumptions of a dual economy model. Using this result, the effects of the minimum wage in Brazil from 2001 to 2009 are estimated. It is shown that the minimum wage has considerably increased average wages and reduced wage inequality. However, these effects are accompanied by higher unemployment and an increase in the size of the informal sector. Overall, the loss of tax revenues from the outflow of workers to the informal sector and unemployment more than offsets the increase in wages. Thus, this minimum wage policy contributes to a decrease in the labor tax revenues collected by the government.Chapter 3 also considers estimation of the effects of the minimum wage on labor market outcomes in developing countries. However, this chapter explores the use of less restrictive assumptions regarding the joint distribution of sectors and wages. To ease the estimation of the model parameters, a parametric approach (maximum likelihood) is used. The results validate the conclusions obtained in the previous chapter.Chapter 4 investigates the estimation of policy effects in partially randomized designs. It is shown that when randomization is implemented in a stratified way, the usual tests of balance of characteristics between treatment and control groups can suffer from size distortions, lack of power, or both. A solution to this problem is proposed, and its performance is compared with the baseline estimators in a simulation. It is shown that the proposed test possesses the desirable characteristics of correct nominal size and consistency. Finally, to illustrate the use of these techniques, a stratified, randomized job training program is analyzed.

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Recent research has stressed the role of historical events on economic development. This thesis aims at understanding impacts of historical events on China's current economic outcomes. The second chapter analyzes the effect of the number of brothers an individual has on that individual's household savings rate under the current underdeveloped household financial market in urban China. I show that having an additional brother reduces an individual's household savings rate by at least five percentage points. Brothers help households by (1) sharing risks, providing a source of informal borrowing and (2) sharing the cost of supporting parents. In the third and fourth chapter I investigate the long-term impact of the send-down policy. Under the send-down policy (1968--1978) during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, more than 16 million youths were forced to move to rural areas and carry out hard manual labor. I find that the sent-down males were significantly more likely to have had education upgrading after the Cultural Revolution. Conditional on education upgrading, the sent-down males earn higher income than the non-sent-down males who also received education upgrading.

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This dissertation combines three contributions to the literature on the determinants of well-beingand the social nature of preferences. Departures from self-centred, consumption-oriented decision making are increasingly common in economic theory and are empirically well motivatedby a wide range of behavioural data from experiments, surveys, and econometric inference. Thefirst two contributions are focused on the idea that reference levels set by others’ consumptionmay figure prominently in both experienced well-being and in decision making. In the firstpaper, the well-being question is addressed empirically through the use of self-reported life satisfaction and high-resolution census and survey data in Canada. Strong income externalitiesare found at multiple spatial scales after controlling for various confounding factors. The second paper explores the general equilibrium consequences of a utility function having an explicitcomparison with neighbours’ consumption. The question is investigated in a model in whichdecision makers knowingly choose their neighbours — and hence their consumption referencelevel — as well as their own consumption expenditure, thereby helping to set the referencelevel for nearby others. For both discrete and continuous distributions of types in an economywith a heterogeneous population undergoing such endogenous formation of consumption reference groups, there exist general equilibria in which differentiation of neighbourhoods occursendogenously. The novel welfare implications of growth in such economies are described. Thefinal paper addresses econometric reservations about the use of subjective reports as dependentvariables. The date and location of survey interviews are combined with weather and climaterecords to construct the random component of weather conditions experienced by respondentson the day of their interview. Standard inferences about the determinants of life satisfactionremain robust after taking into account this significant source of affective bias.

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