Essays In Labor Economics PDF Download

The first chapter of the dissertation analyzes family long-term care for elderly in a three-generational setting when the adult children are the primary care providers. The effect of the care provider's own offspring on care arrangements for elderly parents is analyzed. Offsprings impose constraints on the care provider's resources and potentially affects the care provider's bargaining power over siblings on the sharing of parental care responsibilities. These novel perspectives are analyzed by exploiting exogenous variation in the number of births arising from China's One-Child Policy (1979) and empirical results are derived using novel Chinese household data. Having more offspring not only decreases the monetary transfer an adult child makes towards the elderly parent, but also decreases the adult child's share of the total monetary transfer made to elderly parents in the sibling bargaining game. These findings are significant for the rural sub-sample but not for the urban sub-sample, and may be generalized to other developing economies where, in the absence of formal long-term care schemes, the elderly population rely primarily on their adult children for financial support. The second chapter of the dissertation studies the impact of group diversity on classroom performance of college students using a novel dataset of 431 undergraduate students from a well-known private university in the US. The exogenous assignment of groups rules out the troublesome yet common self-selection issue in team literature. Gender and age diversities of a group were found to have significant influence over group and individual performance, while no evidence on racial diversity was established. The empirical results support the presence of knowledge spillover within a group that is composed of members with varying knowledge levels. In addition to diversity, organizational forms of groups were further examined - members of "autonomous" groups receive equal grades on group project while those in "democratic" groups can adopt differentiated point allocation through majority voting, therefore providing a proper mechanism to punish free riders. Using a maximum likelihood treatment effect model to address the endogeneity of group contract choice, a significant and positive correlation was established between the democratic organizational form and group performance.