The Estimation of semi-structural dynamic models of the labor market : essays on schooling decisions, employment contracts and promotions.

Summary This thesis contains three essays in microeconometrics and applied labor economics. In the first two essays, we estimate dynamic models of schooling choices and employment contract outcomes of the French population. The first essay focuses on the comparison between second-generation immigrants from Africa and their French-natives counterparts. We show that the gap in higher education attainments between those two sub-populations is mainly explained by parents' background and that schooling investment is the main determinant of the gap in permanent employment. The second essay investigates the role played by educational attainments on the employment contract transitions in the early career. We find that a first fixed term contract has a positive impact on the probability of employment in a permanent contract, except for a limited set of the population endowed with particular schooling attainments and unobserved characteristics. Globally, schooling attainments account for around one third of the variance in the probability of permanent employment. The third essay is devoted to the analysis of intra-firm promotions of American executives. We estimate a dynamic model of promotions, in which we disentangle the spurious and the causal impacts of the speed of past advancement. We find that the principal determinant of promotions is unobserved heterogeneity and that the speed of past advancement in the firm's hierarchy (fast tracks) does not have a causal impact on promotions. Functional area has a high explanatory power in promotion outcomes.