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Dissertation
Essays on labor economics
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Drexel University
May 2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17918/00010940
Abstract
This thesis aims to study the labor market in the United States with a focus on gender differences. The first chapter investigates the effects of paid family leave (PFL) policies, focusing on the demand side of the labor market. Utilizing a dataset containing the near-universe of online job postings, I examine whether and to what extent PFL policies influence employers' hiring behaviors. Using a stacked Difference-in-Difference method, I find that PFL policies significantly affect employers' labor demand, and the impacts are different across full-time and part-time labor markets. First, PFL policies lead to lower wages posted in full-time job posts. Second, employers adjust the gendered language used in their job advertisements to become more masculine, especially for part-time jobs. Such language change suggests that PFL policies lead to gender discrimination, at least to the extent that employers use more masculine language to discourage female job applicants. Lastly, after the PFL benefit begins, the number of overall job ads and the number of part-time job ads decrease. The share of full-time job ads decreases in female-dominated occupations, while increases in male-dominated occupations. The second chapter, joint with Ricardo Serrano-Padial, studies whether changes in the menu of available labor contracts have a differential impact on male and female contract choices. To measure such differences in menu effects, we design a two-stage experiment with contracts involving real-effort tasks that vary in pay and duration. We control for heterogeneity in willingness to work by eliciting reservation pay levels as a function of task duration, and use them to create personalized contract menus for each participant. We focus on several well-documented menu effects and find major gender differences. Men tend to exhibit a stronger bias towards high-pay long-duration contracts than women, whereas women tend to exhibit a bigger tendency to choose a contract with average features (compromise effect) and their choices are more sensitive to the inclusion of inferior contracts (attraction effect).
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Details
- Title
- Essays on labor economics
- Creators
- Yin Zhang
- Contributors
- Ricardo Serrano-Padial (Advisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Drexel University
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
- Publisher
- Drexel University; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Number of pages
- xi, 113 pages
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Economics (School of Economics); Bennett S. LeBow College of Business; Drexel University
- Other Identifier
- 991022053435304721