Understanding Labor Markets from a Macroeconomics Perspective

学术价值：本研究的学术价值在于发展了严谨的理论和定量模型，揭示了一些重要的社会经济/劳动力市场趋势背后的经济力量，以及它们对更广泛的美国经济的影响。该提案包含三个子项目，它们共享这一共同目标。第一个子项目试图理解(i)为什么（税前）工资不平等在美国明显高于欧洲大陆国家，以及（ii）为什么这种不平等差距自20世纪70年代以来一直在扩大。本子项目研究劳动所得税政策的作用，以了解这些事实。本项目构建了人力资本积累的生命周期模型，在该模型中，个人决定每个时期是上学、工作还是失业。个人可以在学校或工作中积累技能。工资不平等源于个体之间学习新技能的能力差异，以及特殊的冲击。累进税压缩了（税后）工资结构，从而扭曲了积累人力资本的动机，反过来又减少了（税前）工资的横断面分散。迄今为止的调查表明，这一框架在不同国家和不同时期产生的工资不平等模式与数据一致。PI将对该框架进行全面的定量评估，并解决不同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通过首次使用从行政（IRS）记录中获得的劳动收入面板数据集来揭示特殊收入风险，该数据集具有三个关键优势：(i)样本量非常大（是现有文献中使用的PSID样本量的7到20倍），（ii）测量误差最小，（iii）没有顶部编码。该数据集不是公开的，而是通过PI与美国财政部的一名研究人员合作获得的。这个项目的目标是估计劳动收入的几个计量经济学规范，从非常简单的到非常一般的，包括那些在过去的工作中被考虑过的，但由于难以获得精确的PSID样本而被丢弃的规范。庞大而清晰的数据集可以提供精确识别的参数，有助于指导经济模型的校准。第三个子项目将调查教育对妇女在社会上，特别是在劳动力市场和婚姻市场上的作用演变的影响。特别是，它将试图了解自1950年代以来的一些社会经济趋势，例如：(1)结婚率下降和离婚率上升；(2)妇女受教育程度的提高，现在超过了男子；(3)妇女相对于男子的平均收入的增加（即性别工资差距）；(4)已婚妇女参加劳动的人数大幅增加。这些趋势对社会产生了潜在的深远影响，并提出了一些值得研究的有趣问题。这个子项目旨在建立一个合理的模型，包括教育、结婚/离婚和劳动力供给决策，其中这些不同的趋势彼此密切相关。该项目重点关注教育的作用，因为离婚法通常允许配偶在离婚时从其人力资本中获得比物质资本更大的一部分回报，这使得教育成为抵御离婚风险的良好保险。拟议的框架产生了许多强大的放大机制，这些机制导致相对温和的外生驱动因素导致离婚率和女性大学入学率大幅上升，结婚率下降。拟议研究的更广泛影响也很重要。头两个子项目的目的是开发工具和可分析处理的模型，并使PI将作为拟议项目的一部分汇总的微观数据集公开可用。这些数据集可以用于研究宏观经济学以外的各种各样的问题，并最终帮助决策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.