Two Essays on Labor Market Outcomes

• Main Authors: Chyi-Horng Lu, 盧其宏
• Other Authors: 劉錦添
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/28b974

博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 經濟學研究所 === 107 === This dissertation includes two essays. The first one is “Does Failure Tolerance Benefit People''s Labor Market Outcomes? Evidence from Taiwan Joint College Entrance Examination.” The second one is “Employment, Wage, and Inequality Effects from A Minimum Wage Increase: Evidence from Monthly Personnel Administrative Data of Taiwan.” The abstract of the first essay is as follows. Dealing with the difficulty of measuring non-cognitive skills, this study proposes a novel approach based on the particularity of the joint college entrance examination in Taiwan. Examinees who apply to a school but fail in their application need to take two tests, one is for the application and the other is for the final distribution. The performance difference between the two tests is proposed to be the measure of the tolerance for frustration, which is a skill related to examinees'' emotional management, motivation, and perseverance after they experience a big frustration. This approach is not only based on an observed behavior but also meets the need of a standardized task. By taking advantage of several administrative personnel data, this study takes into consideration of factors behind the skills and the mechanisms after the skills to estimate the influence from skills on the cohorts'' labor market outcome at ages 26 to 30. The results show that there is an increasing direct influence of frustration tolerance on employment in the private or public sector by age, but no direct effect on wages or being a minimum wage worker. While cognitive skills have a higher influence on wages, they have similar effects on being a civil servant, but no effect on employment in the private sector. The abstract of the second essay is as follows. Different from previous studies using the wage distribution, this study uses monthly personnel administrative data of Taiwan to provide the firm-level and individual-level evidences to pin down the minimum wage effect on the earning inequality. Considering all the controversial settings in the minimum wage literature, including the methodology and the studied target, this study proposes a novel approach that uses the regression discontinuity design to estimate both employment and wage effects on firms and specific workers of different wage groups. The results show that workers bound by the minimum wage have their employment and wages increased, while workers with slightly higher wages than the new minimum also have their employment increased but their wages are lowered than they could be if there was no policy change. As a combining result of the employment and wage effects, the bound workers have their real earnings increased, while the unbound workers have no significant change. Hence, it proves that the minimum wage effect has no spillovers on the earning inequality. Furthermore, the increased employment of the bound workers is not because of less employment flow, but more new hirings, which matches the expectation of the monopsony model rather than the search frictions. Finally, I also find a negative "spillover" due to the reduced workplace safety after the minimum wage increase.