Author: Joanne Song

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 9781303641954

My dissertation is composed of three chapters that focus on employment protection laws, age discrimination laws, and political institution that affect the labor market. The first chapter focuses on examining the impact of employment protections laws on prolonged duration of unemployment after the recent recession, the so-called Great Recession. The Great Recession has led to an unprecedented length of unemployment durations, which is costly for both individuals and society at large. The adverse selection model predicts that increased firing costs arising from employment protection laws lead to employers preferring to hire employed workers over unemployed individuals. The implication of this prediction is that employment protection laws may lengthen unemployment durations, possibly slowing down recovery from long-term unemployment. This article examines the interaction effects between employment protection laws and labor market conditions on unemployment duration. Using a Cox proportional hazard model, I find evidence that the positive effect of economic recovery on unemployment duration is lower in states that have stronger employment protection laws. The second chapter considers the effect of age discrimination laws on older women, a group who may be subject to intersectional discrimination, in which they are discriminated against for being old and for being women. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects women from sex discrimination, while the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 prohibits discrimination against workers over the age of 40. Since an older woman may be subject to discrimination in the workplace based on both age and sex, legal scholars argue that age and sex discrimination laws must be used jointly to protect the older-woman minority group. However, courts do not always use them together in practice and do not necessarily give older women protection based on membership in both protected classes. This implies that age discrimination laws alone may be not as effective, or may be even ineffective in protecting older women compared to older men. The present study examines this implication by estimating the differential effect of age discrimination laws on labor market outcomes between women and men. The findings show that age discrimination laws do far less to improve labor market outcomes for older women than for older men, which supports the argument that older women need to be classified as a subgroup of two protected classes to receive adequate protection. My third chapter analyzes the economic benefit of Chinese Communist Party membership. Many studies have found that Party membership brings economic benefits to Party members, but some studies also argue that the premium associated with Party membership is merely due to members' higher levels of ability and advantageous family backgrounds. The lack of consensus on the economic returns of Party membership implies that the role of Party membership is not well understood. This study estimates the economic returns to Party membership using three complementary approaches to address the endogeneity of Party membership status: proxy variables to control for omitted variable bias, propensity score matching, and instrumental variables. Although the magnitudes of these estimates vary across estimators, all the estimates show positive economic returns to Party membership. This paper also examines possible mechanisms for how Party membership may bring benefits to members and provides evidence that Party membership may generate political capital, but not social capital in the labor market in China.