Gerard MAIDEU MORERA will defend his thesis on June 19th at 10:45 AM (lecture by zoom and on site Auditorium 6, building TSE)
« Essays on Macroeconomics »
Supervisor: Professor Christian HELLWIG
To attend the lecture, please contact the doctoral school.
Memberships are:
- Christian Hellwig : Professor in Economics, TSE-R Supervisor
- Arpad Abraham : Professor in Economics, University of Bristol, School of Economics Rapporteur
- Timo Boppart : Associate Professor in Economics,, Institute for International Economic Studies Rapporteur
- Thierry Magnac : Professor in Economics, Université Toulouse Capitole Examinateur
Abstract :
This thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter 1, aims to understand the importance of non-wage job amenities for measuring economic growth and the distributional effects of technical change. Chapters 2 and 3 use dynamic contracting methods to study the gender wage gap and the motherhood penalty, and entrepreneurship and financing constraints.
Smith (1776) already introduced the idea of compensating differentials—i.e., that wages vary with non-wage job amenities. Since then, the theory and empirical evidence of compensating differentials have become well-established. Amenities are essentially goods in that they enter workers’ utility functions and are part of the production process. Yet, traditional growth, distributional, or welfare accounting abstract from non-pecuniary job characteristics. Chapter 1 aims to bridge this gap.
I begin by estimating shadow prices for a range of job amenities that I can measure with occupation-level survey data. I document an amenity-biased shift in labor demand in the US from 1980 to 2015, which reallocated workers from low- to high-amenity occupations. In the remainder of the paper, I argue that accounting for this amenity-biased reallocation significantly alters our understanding of major macroeconomic changes. First, I show that the shadow value of amenities should be included in output to measure productivity growth. Otherwise, conventional measures can underestimate it. More formally, Hulten’s (1978) theorem only holds when output includes the shadow value of amenities. Quantitatively, I find that total compensation (wage plus the value of amenities) grew 40% more than wages from 1980 to 2015, implying 25% higher productivity growth than conventional TFP estimates but a larger slowdown since the mid-2000s. Second, I measuring job amenities is also important to understand the distributional effects of technical change. Despite the well-studied polarization along the wage distribution, I find no labor market polarization along the total compensation distribution.
Chapter 2, together with Maria Frech, is motivated by extensive empirical work that highlights women’s demand for flexible working hours as a critical cause of gender disparities in the labor market. We propose a theory of how hidden demand for flexibility drives gendered employment dynamics. We develop a dynamic contracting model between an employer and an employee whose time availability is stochastic and unverifiable. In our framework, men and women only to differ in their
probability of hav-ing low time availability, which we measure in the ATUS. We explore contracts designed specifically for each gender (gender-tailored) and the polar case where a male-tailored contract is given to both men and women. For the latter, contracting frictions endogenously give rise to well-documented gendered labor market outcomes: (i) the divergence and non-convergence of gender earnings differentials over the life-cycle, and (ii) women’s shorter job duration and weaker labor force attachment.
Chapter 3 builds on a large literature that uses dynamic contracting methods to un-derstand how agency frictions create financing constraints and drive firm lifecycle dynamics. Previous work has typically assumed a risk-neutral entrepreneur and i.i.d productivity shocks. Using recent advances from the dynamic taxation literature, I study a canonical dynamic cash flow diversion model as Clementi and Hopenhayn (2006), but with a risk-averse entrepreneur and persistent productivity shocks. Risk aversion fundamentally changes the properties of the optimal contract. The firm’s size is always distorted downwards, and its distortions inherit the autoregressive properties of the type process. The entrepreneur’s compensation is smoothed and decoupled from the firm size dynamics. Finally, I study a quasi-implementation with simpler contracts which highlights that this class of models is unable to generate realistic firm size and equity share dynamics simultaneously.
