Essays on Labor and Personnel Economics

Abstract

This dissertation examines labor market inequality and factors that affect job satisfaction, productivity and skill requirements in firms. Chapter 1 provides evidence that gender differences in how individuals value activities performed at work, termed job tasks, can help explain gender differences in job choices. I conduct a hypothetical choice experiment to elicit workers’ willingness to pay for a set of tasks that are more frequently performed by one gender than the other. I find significant gender differences in willingness to pay for three of the five tasks that I examine, and document that these differences can account for a substantial portion of occupational segregation in the U.S. labor market. Chapter 2, which is co-authored work with John Horton, examines the relationship between wages and productivity and how firms make decisions about which workers to hire, using data from an online labor market. If workers are paid their marginal product, then a higher wage worker should be a more productive worker who finishes a discrete project more quickly, leaving the total wage bill unchanged. We find that higher-wage workers do work fewer hours, as expected, but increase the total wage bill, suggesting that employers may systematically overvalue these individuals. Chapter 3 explores how skill requirements in two cognitive occupations—marketing managers and financial analysts—change when employers adopt technology that facilitates data-driven decision-making, termed algorithmic technology. Using data from online job postings, I find that the mention of algorithmic technology is positively associated with complementary technical skills but negatively related to many frequently-listed non-routine cognitive skills in both occupations. In addition, algorithmic technology is positively correlated with wages across geographic area and year. These results suggest that data from online job postings can be valuable in understanding how technology use is related to skill requirements and wages.