Essays in Labor Market Inequality

Abstract

The three chapters in this dissertation center on various types of inequality in the labor market. In Chapter 1, I show that sons crowd out the transmission of entrepreneurship from fathers to daughters. This appears to be driven by preferential treatment of sons in human capital building activities in the family business. In Chapter 2, I study how differences in earnings by college major relate to occupation-specific skill accumulation and utilization. I find that graduates with more specific majors experience a larger penalty to working in an unrelated occupation but are more likely than average to experience good major-job match quality, resulting in a small specificity premium. In Chapter 3, I examine the effects of a popular yet controversial tool for the reduction of inequality: the minimum wage. I find that increases in the minimum wage lower employee separations by reducing the rate at which low-wage workers quit to take a different job.