Labor Economics
Labor related issues have been studied in the economics profession from a number of different angles. The BSE Labor Economics Summer School covers a wide range of topics in labor economics from a variety of perspectives.
Labor economics
In particular, this summer school offers courses that will cover recent developments within the macro-labor and micro-labor contexts. In each course, both theoretical and empirical aspects will be covered as well as economic policy. These courses should be of interest to graduate students or academics who want to expand their knowledge in the area and to practitioners interested in understanding the fundamentals of these issues. During the courses, faculty are available to discuss research ideas and projects with the program participants.
This course explores the determination of wages. It explores how and why wages evolve over the life-cycle of workers and also why wages vary among different types of workers who are in their prime working years. We begin by comparing models that describe how the process of finding good job matches influences life-cycle wage growth to models that attribute life-cycle wage growth to human capital accumulation. We then consider how public policy impacts the extent to which successful adults are able to impact the relative labor market success of their children by investing in their human capital, and we explore how race and gender impact labor market outcomes in different developed countries. We then examine the impacts of technology, firm characteristics, industry structure, and related factors on the distribution of wages. Finally, we examine how, within firms, employers may employ incentive systems that create ex post wage dispersion that exceeds the ex ante variation in worker skill.
This course uses economic analysis to explore gender differences in economic outcomes, in both the labor market and the household. Men earn on average higher wages than women. Men and women concentrate in different occupations, and women are under-represented in the political sphere and high-powered occupations. Women attain on average higher levels of schooling than men, and they take on a higher share of household chores and childcare.
Why these differences? Do they represent a problem? Should families, schools, firms, or governments do something about it? This course will provide you with an overview of a recent literature in economics that documents gender gaps in a range of domains, try to uncover the factors that drive them, and evaluates the effectiveness of different policies in mitigating them. Some of the main topics that we will cover include: gender gaps in wages and employment, gender and education, gender differences in psychological traits, the role of the family (fertility, marriage and divorce, household specialization), and gender and public policy.
Her research lies in the areas of Labor, Public, and Health Economics. She has worked on topics that include the economic effects of immigration, and the effects of public policy on fertility, female labor supply, and child health.
In the world, more than 220 million individuals live in a country different from that of birth. In developed countries, foreign born individuals represent 10.5% of the population. This important factor reallocation is the result of decades of increasing globalization of labor markets. Why people migrate, who migrates where, and what are the economic impacts for the receiving economy, are important questions that have motivated a huge body of research in Economics.
The main objective of this course is to explore the different answers provided in the literature to these questions. We will start focusing on migration decisions. Understanding the motivations to migrate is important to analyze who migrates to each location. Hence, we will explore the theoretical grounds for this type of decision starting from the Roy model, and its seminal implementation in the migration context by Borjas (1987), and then we will review some empirical literature. From a very different angle, recent work in the last few years has estimated structural models of internal migration (Gould, 2007; Kennan and Walker, 2011; Buchinsky et al, 2014 among others). Internal migration decisions have specific idiosyncrasies that make worthy their analysis in a separate way. We will devote important emphasis on migration costs, available information, and the effect of internal migration in shaping local labor markets.
The second part of the course will focus on labor market impacts of immigration. First we will explore the literature that has analyzed the impact of immigration across local labor markets. Later, we will review the literature that studies labor market impacts of immigration at the national level. All these approaches are well detailed in Borjas (2014). Two important difficulties to overcome in both cases are endogeneity of immigrant inflows and adjustments by natives, previous immigrants, and/or prospective migrants. Finally, we will study the assimilation process of immigrants in the labor market.
Professor Llull's research focuses on labor economics, and more specifically on immigration, internal migration, occupational mobility, inequality, human capital, family economics, and health. His main research typically estimates dynamic discrete choice models of equilibrium, but several of his papers also use more reduced form approaches. His work has been published in the Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Human Resources, and the European Economic Review, among others.
How does a large structural change to the labor market affect education investments made at young ages? Exploiting differential exposure to the national decline in routine-task intensity across local labor markets, we show that the secular decline in routine tasks causes major shifts in education investments of high school students, where they invest less in vocational-trades education and increasingly invest in college education. Our results highlight that labor demand changes impact inequality in the next generation. Low-ability and low-SES students are most responsive to task-biased demand changes and, as a result, intergenerational mobility in college education increases.
The conference will facilitate discussion of ongoing research which studies policy relevant questions related to labor economics. Reflecting the breath of modern labor economics, the scope of relevant topics is broad, ranging from employment and compensation, immigration and migration, family and gender issues, inequality and poverty, and health and crime. Submissions using high quality/innovative data and convincing econometric methods are especially encouraged.
The Center for Labor Economics (CLE) was established in July 1997 to promote research in labor market issues and policies. The CLE supports two weekly seminars: an informal Labor Lunch Series (held most Fridays for Fall and Spring from 12:00pm to 1:00 pm) and the Labor Seminar (held Thursdays during the school term from 2:00 to 4:00 pm). The CLE also sponsors graduate students and visiting research scholars, and publishes a working paper series for the early dissemination of faculty and graduate student research.
External Research Data Center (FDZ) Location at UC Berkeley's Center for Labor Economics.The Center for Labor Economics is pleased to announce the opening of an external Research Data Center (FDZ) of the German Federal Employment Agency (BA) at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). The FDZ facilitates access to micro data on the labor market for non-commercial empirical research. Originally located at the Institute of Employment Research in Nuremberg, Germany, an additional access point for FDZ data has been opened at the University of California at Berkeley. For more information on the kind of data available for research please refer here: Accessing German Social Security Records Through the Research Data Center (FDZ) of the BA at IAB. More information on how to apply for access to the data can be found here: Remote Data Access. The application form can be found here The application instruction can be found here Once approval is granted from the FDZ, please print out and sign the Confidentiality Agreement and return to Camille Fernandez at 523 Evans Hall to complete the process.
Frederico Finan joined the department in 2009 as an assistant professor. He received his PhD in Agriculture and Resource Economics from UC-Berkeley in 2006. Prior to joining the department, Professor Finan was an assistant professor of economics at UCLA. [Read More]
Michael Reich is Professor of the Graduate School and Co-Chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California at Berkeley. His research publications cover numerous areas of labor economics and political economy, including the economics of racial inequality, the analysis of labor market segmentation, historical stages in U.S. labor markets and social structures of accumulation, high performance workplaces, union-management cooperation and Japanese labor-management systems. His recent research focuses on minimum wages and pay in the gig economy. [Read More]
Stefano DellaVigna (2002 Ph.D., Harvard) is the Daniel Koshland, Sr. Distinguished Professor of Economics and Professor of Business Administration at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in Behavioral Economics, including work on behavioral labor economics, for example on job search and on effort at the workplace. He has been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (2008-10), a Distinguished Teaching Award winner (2008), and a co-editor of the American Economic Review (2017 to the present).
Christopher Walters joined the Berkeley faculty as an assistant professor in 2013 after completing a PhD in economics at MIT. Walters is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Faculty Affiliate at the MIT School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (SEII) and an affiliate of J-PAL North America. His research focuses on the topics in labor economics and the economics of education, including early childhood programs, school effectiveness, and labor market discrimination. 041b061a72