Three Essays on Labor

Abstract

Chapter One: I contribute to the literature on the decline of the labor share in the United States by proposing a channel through which increasing household debt can lead to the decline of the labor share. Specifically, workers with lower net worth have lower reservation wages. Thus, workers in debt spend less time job-searching and accept lower-paying jobs. Focusing on the period between 1982 and 2016 - a time during which the labor share declined and household debt rose as a proportion of GDP - I describe a model which demonstrates that the lowering of household net worth may have caused a 12 percent decrease in mean wages, and caused the labor share to decline by 0.081 points. Since the labor share actually fell by 0.057 points in that period, the model ``over-explains'' the decline of the labor share. Chapter Two: What effect do labor-restricting policies have on how much people drive, and on carbon emissions? I model the effect of labor-restricting policies in the following way: I calibrate a model to match the United States in 2018, and also calibrate the model counterfactually to simulate what would have occurred had other policies been in effect. I compare the carbon emissions that result from the original calibration to the carbon emissions that result from the counterfactual-policy calibrations. The labor-restricting policies I consider are wage taxes, retirement mandates, and restrictions on time spent working. I find that, for all policies considered, reductions in work are associated with increases in driving but nonetheless lead to reductions in carbon emissions, due to overall declines in economic activity. Chapter Three: For the model introduced previously, I study transition paths for the following case: The model is originally in a steady-state and the agents expect the current policy regime to last forever; then they are surprised when the government announces and immediately enacts a policy change; they then expect the new policy regime to last forever. The policy changes I study are wage taxes and emissions taxes (either spent by the government or rebated). For each of these policy changes, the model economy begins in a baseline steady-state, then enters a transition lasting several periods, and eventually arrives at a new steady-state. During the transition, aggregate wealth gradually moves to its new steady-state value. Jump variables - such as aggregate consumption, driving, leisure, labor, and emissions - at first jump and then gradually move to their new steady-state values. Labor and emissions generally move in opposite directions, which apparently contradicts the idea that more work leads to more pollution. However, this contradiction is merely the temporary result of the fact that agents are spending down their aggregate wealth; thus they are consuming goods and services produced elsewhere, and are paying for labor to be done outside the model using wealth that was built up previously.