Book Description

This dissertation explores questions in labor economics with a particular focus on economic inequality. As one might expect, race, gender, and location are recurring themes. The dissertation makes headway on long-standing questions in economics, in large part, through the collection of administrative datasets, and complementary field experiments. In the first chapter, I present evidence that employers pay a premium to equalize pay between workers if those workers can share information about their compensation. To establish a causal relationship between pay transparency and wage compression, I work with the operator of an online labor market who granted me access to detailed records of the tasks that employers advertise and the prices at which workers are willing to do them. These data capture the entire wage determination process, making it possible to observe the drivers of wage compression and the gender wage gap. Three facts emerge. First, for a particular multi-worker setting, pay between any two workers differs on average by over fifty percent when workers propose a price for their services. Second, when workers are in the same location, employers deliberately raise the pay of lower bidders, reducing dispersion, irrespective of differences in assessed productivity or reservation values. Finally, employers who compress pay when workers work in the same place will allow disparities when workers are physically separated. Overall, we find that even in this short-term spot market for labor, consideration of relative pay are quantitatively important for both wages and labor supply. We combine these online platform data with a field experiment to show that, with few institutional constraints, paying a premium to compress pay may be efficient when workers can communicate pay. Our field experiment shows that when pay is unequal, workers strategically use information about co-worker pay to negotiate higher wages that can double the time it takes to complete a job. Worker morale response to lower relative pay can lead quality of output to fall by a full standard deviation. An employer can make trade-offs between these costs by adjusting the terms of negotiation or compressing pay. A profit maximizing employer may optimally equalize wages ex-ante in equilibrium. An important extension to this empirical result is the effect of gender on the ramifications of pay transparency. While a male worker who communicates with co-workers is, on average, able to close the wage gap between the highest paid work and himself by 85 percent, a female worker in the same position closes the gap by 12 percent. This result may give pause to advocates of pay transparency policies if their goal is more equal pay for men and women. The second and third chapter examine the relationship between place and productivity. In the second chapter, I study the impact on aggregate productivity of policies that affect a firm's choice of where to locate. In particular, I study the relationship between state corporate taxes and the investment of firms in R& D, as captured by new patents. While tax advantaged-areas make investment cheaper for firms, they often require firms to locate where their productivity will be lower. In this chapter, I create a unique patent-establishment panel dataset by linking the residence of scientists on each patent application granted, over a thirty-year window, with the address of U.S. establishments. With this dataset, I show that innovation productivity is lower in low tax places, suggesting that place-based productivity is a more important determinant of innovative activity than traditional explanations which focus on the cost of investment. Our analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we analyze establishment mobility and show that lower taxes attract establishments. In particular, a one percent lower corporate tax rate increases the share of establishments in a local area by roughly 3.4%. Second, we exploit establishment migration to separate variation in innovation productivity due to establishment-specific and place-specific characteristics. We show that moving to a place that is 5% more productive increases a given firm's patent activity by 1 %. We follow this literature in evaluating the validity of this variation using pre-move behavior and control functions in the spirit of Dahl (2002). We then relate these place effects to corporate taxes and document that low tax places tend to have lower innovation productivity. The third chapter provides evidence that the voluntary choice of African-Americans to move from Northern regions in the U.S. to Southern regions is responsible in part for lower occupational standing and real income. I find that these migration patterns are also part of a trend that accelerated during the early 21st century among Northern born African-Americans. We combine evidence from four nationally-representative surveys, the U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, and the Survey of Income Program and Participation, to statistically assess the forces behind a reverse migration from North to South and associated economic trade-offs. Using variation in the precise timing of individual moves and a model of the wage process, I provide evidence that, on average, African-American are moving to places where their earnings are lower after adjusting for regional price differences, and much lower relative to non-Hispanic white migrants. As suggestive evidence about the reason for these moves, we find that the magnitude of the economic trade-off between origin and destination is proportional to the severity and duration of riots which occurred in Northern cities at the time of the earlier Great Migration. We conclude from this that attractive amenities of the South may play a minor role in driving a reverse migration relative to the failure of some Northern cities to integrate during the 20th century. In chapters 1 and 2, I work closely with co-authors Bobak Pakzad Hurson, currently a classmate of mine, and Juan Carlos Suarez Serrato, who was a post-doc at Stanford at the inception of our collaboration, and who has since take a faculty position at Duke University.