Essays On Labor Markets And Personal Finance PDF Download

"The first two chapters of this work examine the implications of labor market search models where workers are distinguished by skills that are non-neutral across firms, representing sector-specific abilities. Chapter one shows within a model of directed search, modelling that certain workers are better suited for employment in certain sectors of the economy can reconcile the fact that the hiring and vacancy posting behavior of firms comoves strongly between different industries, despite the observed layoff and separation behavior being much less correlated. Effectively, the heterogeneity in worker skill makes shocks to different parts of the economy (that drive the low correlation in layoff decisions across sectors) look much more like aggregate shocks. Intuitively, this occurs as skilled workers become somewhat reluctant to search for employment outside of their preferred line or work, keeping hiring costs lower than expected for depressed sectors. Chapter two examines the same worker heterogeneity issue, but moving to a model of random search in order to explicitly consider issues surrounding matching, particularly in the 2007-09 US recession and the debate concerning whether or not 'structural' changes to the labor market can be held responsible for the atypical labor market performance during the recession. I consider two potential ways to model these changes--shocks to matching efficiency and shocks to searching ability--and contrast them with the model predictions of a standard productivity shock. I show that, given the empirical evidence on the procyclicality of worker switching between sectors of the economy, mismatch-style shocks generate counterfactual results while productivity shocks fit the data well. The third chapter takes a macroeconomic approach to the observed evolution of credit card terms since 1991, based on a more realistic quantitative model of contracting than has previously been solved in the literature. During the data sample, we observe increasing cross-sectional heterogeneity in both the interest rates and credit limits that describe modern credit card contracts. We model the quantitative impact of a banking sector with increasing access to consumer information and find that such a change can explain the movements in both of these trends. This suggests that the increasing inequality in consumer credit is unlikely to reverse in the future"--Pages iii-iv.