Essays on the Labor Market

Abstract

This dissertation studies how firms set wages. The first essay, coauthored with Corey Allan, studies the restrictions that governments place on migrants' job options. We find that firms account for migrants' weaker job options when setting wages. However firms don't specifically discriminate against migrants, but rather pay lower wages to all their workers. As such, restrictions on migrants' job options also reduce the wages of many non-migrants. The second chapter, coauthored with Jesse Silbert, is theoretical. We study a labor market in which firms do not price discriminate among their workers. We characterize when and how such a labor market will allocate workers inefficiently, and we show who benefits from these inefficiencies. The third chapter, also coauthored with Jesse Silbert, studies wage inequality within occupations. Every occupation in our data exhibits substantial wage inequality. By studying how firm profits are affected by the separation of individual workers, we show that much of this inequality cannot be explained by productivity differences between workers.