Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Aging

This dissertation considers the effect of labor market experiences on workers. The papers focus on unexpected components of the experiences (natural experiments) that reveal something about the world, and about the operation of economic theories regarding the health and well-being of the workers in question. The workers studied are drawn from disparate socioeconomic and historical backgrounds, but in each case, the group studied carries particular import for the theories being tested./nIn the case of young US veterans, I examine a group of labor market entrants who are especially vulnerable to economic conditions, and ask how much they would pay to enter at another point in the business cycle. The cost of delaying entry, further military service, is quite salient. This work extends the existing literature on college graduates to a strata of workers with lower average income and education, in a framework where the choice to avoid the labor market is observed and reducible to financial terms. I find that the lost earnings of these young workers exceeds the losses of college graduates entering the labor market in a recession, and that young US veterans give considerable weight to these losses when making their reenlistment decisions./nIn the case of University of California professors, I study a group of older workers who are very likely to receive health benefits from delaying retirement and continuing in employ- ment. The work they engage in is cognitively and socially stimulating, and has few physical requirements. As well, strong employment protections both serve to reduce work-related stress and permit professors to make retirement decisions according to their own costs and benefits. Thus, the effects of early retirement on this group likely reflects an upper-bound on the potential health effects of early retirement for other workers. I find that this upper-bound may be quite far from the null of no effect, with each year of early retirement shortening the lifespan of professors by one month or more./nIn the case of US presidents, I consider a group of elite workers at the pinnacle of a human hierarchy in order to test an important theory of the socioeconomic gradient in lifespan. Theories of the socioeconomic gradient have focused on the role of rank itself, and I test for a direct effect of rank by comparing winning and losing US presidential candidates. I find that losing presidential candidates have outlived winners by almost 4 years, a fact which suggests that rank does not exert an uni-directional effect on workers./nTaken together, this dissertation argues for a complex characterization of work, one in which a job is more than an exchange of hours for wages. Jobs are valuable, give us identity and motivation, and, in some cases, carry costs to freedom and even life. Throughout, I have attempted to consider the goals of the workers involved and respect the choices they make as indicative of their preferences, while acknowledging our limited abilities as humans to achieve our desires. In the words of Robert Hunter,/nLotta poor man make a five dollar bill Keep him happy all the time Some other fellow making nothing at all And you can hear him cryin.../n"Can I go buddy Can I go down Take your shift at the mine?"/nGotta get down to the Cumberland Mine That's where I mainly spend my time Make good money, five dollars a day Made any more, might move away.../n-Cumberland Blues, Robert Hunter

Advisor: Card, David
Saez, Emmanuel