Understanding Labor Markets from a Macroeconomics Perspective

智力优势：拟议研究的智力价值是开发严格的理论和定量模型，以揭示一些重要的社会经济/劳动力市场趋势背后的经济力量，以及它们对美国经济的影响。本提案包含三个子课题，第一个子课题的目的是：（1）为什么美国的税前工资差距比欧洲大陆国家大得多，（2）为什么从20世纪70年代开始，美国的税前工资差距不断扩大。本课题研究劳动所得税政策对理解这些事实的作用。本研究建构了一个人力资本累积的生命周期模型，在此模型中，个体决定每个阶段是上学、工作还是失业。个人可以在学校或工作中积累技能。工资不平等的原因是个人学习新技能的能力存在差异，以及特殊冲击。累进税压缩了（税后）工资结构，从而扭曲了积累人力资本的激励，反过来又减少了（税前）工资的横向分散。迄今为止的调查表明，这一框架在各国和一段时间内产生的工资不平等模式与数据一致。PI将对这一框架进行全面的定量评估，并研究不同的劳动力市场政策和制度对工资分散的影响。第二个子项目的目标是首次使用从行政（IRS）记录中获得的劳动力收入面板数据集，以揭示特殊收入风险，该数据集具有三个关键优势：（i）非常大的样本量（现有文献中使用的PSID样本量的7至20倍），（ii）最小的测量误差，以及（iii）无顶部编码。该数据集不公开，是通过PI与美国财政部研究人员的合作获得的。本项目的目标是估计劳动收入的几个计量经济学指标，从非常简单的到非常普遍的，包括那些在过去的工作中已经考虑过的，但后来被丢弃，由于难以获得精确的估计与小PSID样本。庞大而清晰的数据集可以提供精确识别的参数，帮助指导经济模型的校准。第三个分项目将调查教育对妇女在社会中，特别是在劳动力市场和婚姻市场中的作用演变的影响。特别是，它将试图了解自1950年代以来的一些社会经济趋势，如（一）结婚率下降和离婚率上升，（二）妇女的教育程度提高，现在超过了男子，（三）妇女相对于男子的平均收入增加（即，性别工资差距），以及（四）已婚妇女的劳动力参与率大幅上升。这些趋势对社会有潜在的深远影响，并提出了几个有趣的问题来研究。这个子项目的目的是建立一个合理的模型，教育，结婚/离婚，劳动力供应的决定，其中这些不同的趋势是密切相关的。该项目的重点是教育的作用，因为离婚法通常允许配偶在离婚时保留其人力资本回报的大部分，而不是他们的物质资本，使教育成为防止离婚风险的良好保险。拟议的框架产生了一些强大的放大机制，导致离婚率和女性大学入学率大幅上升，婚姻率下降，而这些因素来自相对温和的外生驱动力。拟议研究的更广泛影响也很重要。前两个子项目旨在开发工具和易于分析的模型，并公开提供PI将作为拟议项目的一部分收集的微观数据集。这些数据集可能有助于研究宏观经济学以外的各种问题，并最终帮助政策制定者做出更明智的决策。

Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit of the proposed research is the development of rigorous theoretical and quantitative models to shed light on the economic forces behind some important socio-economic/labor market trends as well as on their consequences for the U.S. economy more broadly. This proposal contains three sub-projects that share this common goal.The first sub-project attempts to understand (i) why (before-tax) wage inequality has been significantly higher in the United States than in continental European countries, and (ii) why this inequality gap has been widening since the 1970s. This sub-project studies the role of labor income tax policies for understanding these facts. This project constructs a life cycle model of human capital accumulation in which individuals decide each period whether to go to school, work, or be unemployed. Individuals can accumulate skills either in school or while working. Wage inequality arises from differences across individuals in their ability to learn new skills as well as from idiosyncratic shocks. Progressive taxation compresses the (after-tax) wage structure, thereby distorting the incentives to accumulate human capital, in turn reducing the cross-sectional dispersion of (before-tax) wages. Investigations so far suggests that this framework generates wage inequality patterns across countries and over time that are consistent with the data. The PI will conduct a comprehensive quantitative assessment of this framework and address the effects of different labor market policies and institutions on wage dispersion.The goal of the second sub-project is to shed new light on idiosyncratic income risk by using, for the first time, a panel dataset on labor earnings obtained from administrative (IRS) records that has three key advantages: (i) a very large sample size (7 to 20 times the size of PSID samples used in the existing literature), (ii) minimal measurement error, and (iii) no top-coding. This data set is not publicly available and is obtained through the PI's collaboration with a researcher in the US Department of Treasury. The goal of this project is to estimate several econometric specifications for labor income, ranging from very simple to very general ones, including those that have been considered in past work but have then been discarded due to the difficulty of obtaining precise estimates with the small PSID samples. The large and clean data set can deliver precisely identified parameters that can help guide calibration of economic models. The third sub-project will investigate the effects of education on the evolution of women's role in the society, specifically, in the labor market and in the marriage market. In particular, it will attempt to understand some socio-economic trends since the 1950s, such as (i) the falling marriage rate and the rising divorce rate, (ii) the rising educational attainment of women, which now exceeds that of men's (iii) the rising average earnings of women relative to men (i.e., the gender wage gap), and (iv) the substantial rise in the labor force participation of married women. These trends have potentially profound effects on the society and raise several interesting questions to study. This subproject aims to build a plausible model, with education, marriage/divorce, and labor supply decisions, in which these different trends are intimately related to each other. The project focuses on the role of education because divorce laws typically allow spouses to keep a much larger fraction of the returns from their human capital upon divorce compared to their physical capital, making education a good insurance against divorce risk. The proposed framework generates a number of powerful amplification mechanisms, which lead to large rises in divorce rates and college enrollment of women and a fall in marriage rates from relatively modest exogenous driving forces. The broader impacts of the proposed research are also central. The first two sub-projects aim to develop tools and analytically tractable models as well as make publicly available micro data sets that the PI will put together as part of the proposed project. These data sets could be useful to sudy a wide variety of questions beyond macroeconomics and can ultimately help policymakers make more informed decisions.