Essays on labor economics : sorting, inequality and technological change.

Summary This thesis examines the themes of matching, inequality and the impact of technological change on the labor market. In particular, it addresses questions about matching between employees and firms and how this influences inequality in the labor market, both within the entire population, as well as between demographic and skill groups. It also examines how technological change affects the labor market conditions faced by workers and firms. These issues are addressed over three chapters. The first chapter, entitled "Multidimensional Heterogeneity and Matching in a Frictional Labor Market - An Application to Polarization" discusses the matching of workers to firms along multidimensional characteristics and quantifies the impact of technological change on the matching, wage, and employment patterns of different demographic groups. I construct a directed search model with multidimensional heterogeneity and estimate the model on U.S. data. I find that production complementarities between cognitive and interpersonal skills and tasks have increased, compared to those between manual skills and tasks. This shift in production technology explains much of the wage and job polarization in the United States. Moreover, although it does not control for gender differences, the model can explain a substantial fraction of the narrowing of gender gaps in wages and jobs. Co-authored with Nicolo Dalvit and Aseem Patel, the second chapter, "Intra-firm Hierarchies and Gender Disparity," examines the ranking of women in hierarchies within firms. It uses French administrative data and examines the impact of wage and employment gaps across hierarchies over time. In addition, by exploiting a corporate board quota policy in France, it assesses the impact of increased female leadership on wages and employment outcomes within firms. We find that hierarchies matter in gender wage and employment gaps. Gender wage and employment gaps increase with each level of corporate hierarchy, although these gaps narrow more over time at higher levels. Moreover, improving female leadership has different impacts across hierarchies. While a higher proportion of female board members reduces the gender pay gap at the top of the hierarchy, it does not have such an impact at the bottom. Instead, it increases the proportion of women in the lower levels working part-time, at the expense of full-time employment. The opposite is true for women in the upper levels. The third chapter, "Labor Shortages and Labor Market Adjustments: An Island Theory," co-authored with Riccardo Zago, discusses the impact of labor shortages and whether they lead to wage and salary adjustments. Using unique data on vacancies reported by firms to be difficult to fill, we document the impact of shortages across regions, industries, and occupational groups. We find that shortages lead only to wage and employment adjustments in non-routine occupations, but not in routine occupations. We show how the secular decline in routine occupations, caused by technological change, can explain the persistence of shortages in this sector and its inability to adjust.