Hartmann, Anna, Föll, Tobias and Bredemeier, Christian
(2021).
Essays on Macroeconomics and Labor Markets.
PhD thesis, Universität zu Köln.
Abstract
Over the last decades, the U.S. labor market has changed significantly. These developments can not only be attributed to cyclical components influencing labor market conditions during economic downturns but also partly to important and slow moving structural factors. How do changing labor markets affect workers? Discussing and answering this question is an important task for researchers, not only because labor earnings are a major source of income, making up around 60 percent of household income, but also because workers spent a large part of their lifetime at work, on average 34 hours a week for 38 years of their lives. I contribute to the understanding of changing labor markets by focusing on three specific aspects: technical change, selective hiring, and judicial ideology. While this thesis consists of three independent research papers, they are connected by an overarching focus on firms’ hiring behavior and associated consequences for workers’ employment conditions and opportunities. Chapter 2, which is joint work with Tobias Föll, explores the effect of routine-biased technical change on both the occupational and the union-membership choice of workers and thus analyses the connection between polarization and deunionization. In Chapter 3, I study the connection between involuntary part-time employment, workers’ job mobility, and the role of firms’ hiring behaviour. In Chapter 4, which is joint work with Christian Bredemeier and Tobias Föll, we examine how the ideological composition of the Supreme Court affects labor market conditions for workers in the U.S.
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