Essays in Labour Economics
Creators: name: Deng, Zechuan
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2022
Subjects: Labour economics
Education
Labour market flows
Gender

description: The first chapter examines the causal effect of education on individuals' retirement decisions and changes in quality of life after retirement. When estimating the return to education, much of the existing literature assumes implicitly that individuals optimize over their career with a fixed year of retirement ("fixed-retirement-age" assumption). Using the provincial compulsory schooling laws as instruments to estimate the causal effects of educational attainment on individuals' retirement decisions and change in the quality of life after retirement, I find that years of schooling have no significant impact on retirement decisions. Furthermore, among those who are already retired, years of schooling do not have any impact on their age at retirement and the change in the quality of life after retirement. Results in this paper support the "fixed-retirement-age" assumption used in empirical studies based on the classical return to education model where the exogenous assumption on retirement age might not be a bad approximation. The second chapter relates to labour market flows and worker trajectories in Canada during COVID-19. We use the confidential-use files of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) to study the employment dynamics in Canada from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic through to mid-summer. Using the longitudinal dimension of this dataset, we measure the size of worker reallocation and document the presence of high labour market churning that persists even after the easing of social-distancing restrictions. As of July of 2020, many of the recent job losers -- especially those who had been temporarily laid-off between February and April -- have regained employment. However, this apparent strong recovery dynamics hides important heterogeneity, and large groups of workers, such as those who were not employed prior to the pandemic, face important difficulties with finding a job. Our results further suggest that gross job losses were higher among women and young workers during the shutdown and that older workers were more likely to leave the labour force when the economy reopened. The third chapter analyzes the gender differences in early career labour market trajectories and wage growth in Canada. Using the Longitudinal Workers File (LWF) linked to the 2006 and 2016 Census, I find that, although some progress has been made on the gender gap on labour market trajectories for young workers in their earlier careers, women faced higher penalties for taking time out of the labour market compared with men. More specifically, regardless of the type of job separation, changed employer or occupation, and reason for separation, women's weekly wage annual growth rate was lower compared with their male counterparts. The results from regression analysis suggest that labour market trajectories affect women's and men's weekly wage annual growth rates differently. Women's weekly wage annual growth rate was more sensitive to temporary job separation compared with men, whereas men's weekly wage annual growth rate was more sensitive to permanent job separation. The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition shows that the total number of permanent separations and the total number of permanent separations due to parental/maternity leave each explains about one-third of the cross-sectional gender differences in weekly wage annual growth rate observed for young workers in Canada.