<mods:mods xmlns:mods="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-7.xsd"><mods:titleInfo><mods:title>Essays in Labor Economics</mods:title></mods:titleInfo><mods:typeOfResource authority="primo">dissertations</mods:typeOfResource><mods:name type="personal"><mods:namePart>Babarcich, Nicola</mods:namePart><mods:role><mods:roleTerm type="text">creator</mods:roleTerm></mods:role></mods:name><mods:name type="personal"><mods:namePart>Oster, Emily</mods:namePart><mods:role><mods:roleTerm type="text">Advisor</mods:roleTerm></mods:role></mods:name><mods:name type="personal"><mods:namePart>Thakral, Neil</mods:namePart><mods:role><mods:roleTerm type="text">Reader</mods:roleTerm></mods:role></mods:name><mods:name type="personal"><mods:namePart>Lagos, Lorenzo</mods:namePart><mods:role><mods:roleTerm type="text">Reader</mods:roleTerm></mods:role></mods:name><mods:name type="corporate"><mods:namePart>Brown University. Department of Economics</mods:namePart><mods:role><mods:roleTerm type="text">sponsor</mods:roleTerm></mods:role></mods:name><mods:originInfo><mods:copyrightDate>2023</mods:copyrightDate></mods:originInfo><mods:physicalDescription><mods:extent>, None p.</mods:extent><mods:digitalOrigin>born digital</mods:digitalOrigin></mods:physicalDescription><mods:note type="thesis">Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2023</mods:note><mods:genre authority="aat">theses</mods:genre><mods:abstract>This dissertation is composed of two self-contained chapters, exploring topics in Labor Economics. Both papers broadly explore the question of how we define labor markets. &#13;
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The first chapter investigates a new mechanism through which differential competitive pressures faced by in-house and contract workers yield a contracting wage penalty. I study this issue in the context of private security guards, a low-wage and relatively homogeneous occupation where outsourcing is prevalent. I build a unique data set from the near-universe of job vacancy postings from Burning Glass Technologies, and identify jobs for security guards as in-house or contracted. I find that a 1\% increase in the Hirschman-Herfindahl index has a  differential impact on contract and in-house guards, with contract guards experiencing a relatively larger wage penalty of 9.6\%. I provide evidence that contract and in-house guards (1) represent the same occupation given a lack of heterogeneity in skill requirements and (2) operate in the same labor market for nominally different employers. What then explains the differential response to concentration? I propose that, conditional on in-house and contract guards having identical probabilities of transition in to outside occupations, any remaining variation must come from differences in how guards match to other firms within their own occupation. I find that the role of outside options can meaningfully explain why contract workers have a higher elasticity of wages to concentration, and show that outside options are a function of the relative market share of business service firms and private firms, and the average wages for each firm type.&#13;
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In the second chapter, I take a task-based approach to defining workers' outside options using job vacancy data, bringing together the literatures on job tasks and monopsony. I construct an index of outside options, which considers the skill overlap between two occupations; the more skill overlap between each occupation pair, the more viable the other occupation is as an alternative profession. For each occupation, I calculate the value of outside options as the sum over all occupations of pairwise similarity scores, weighted by the relative employment share of the the alternative occupation and their average wages in an MSA. I find that my outside option index is highly predictive of wages, and picks up an effect of monopsony that is independent from the HHI. I construct alternative versions of my index where I condition on posted education requirements asking for either a high school or college diploma. I find that outside options matter relatively more for low-skilled occupations than for high-skilled occupations, consistent with the idea that non-routine jobs are more likely to encounter monopsony power. Finally, I explore how predictive each skill category is of the value of outside options. I find that the value of outside options is increasing in social and cognitive skills, but that the return to social skills occurs only conditional on a college degree. This is consistent with a model where social skill intensity decreases in job routineness.</mods:abstract><mods:subject authority="fast" authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast" valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/00989943"><mods:topic>Labor economics</mods:topic></mods:subject><mods:language><mods:languageTerm authority="iso639-2b">English</mods:languageTerm></mods:language><mods:recordInfo><mods:recordContentSource authority="marcorg">RPB</mods:recordContentSource><mods:recordCreationDate encoding="iso8601">20230602</mods:recordCreationDate></mods:recordInfo></mods:mods>