Essays on Housing and Labor Markets

Download or read book Essays on Housing and Labor Markets written by Stylianos Christodoulou and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter evaluates the effectiveness of targeted rental subsidies and their impact on neighborhoods. The second chapter studies the impact that local labor market composition changes have on local post-secondary institutions. The last chapter analysis how worker whose abilities are underestimated or overestimated choose occupations when employers differ in the speed in which they learn about workers. Despite the benefits of residing in low-poverty neighborhoods, rental assistance recipients are disproportionately located in high-poverty neighborhoods. However, it is unclear whether efforts to promote their relocation will be successful or whether it will introduce adverse effects on neighborhoods. Using a novel treatment magnitude in a triple difference design that leverages a reform to the largest rental assistance program in the US, this paper finds a significant causal effect on the number of rental assistance recipients residing in each neighborhood that varies across broad geographical areas. Furthermore, this study finds improvements in recipients' average neighborhood quality of residence, with the effects remaining significant 5 years after the reform. Lastly, no evidence of adverse effects on neighborhoods were found as measured by home appreciation rates. The second chapter examines the responsiveness of major specific completions to its employment share at the local level. The dynamic effect is identified by exploiting quasi-random variation that is constructed using shift-share instruments which leverage both changes in the occupational composition and the composition of majors within occupations at the national level. Using data for the time period of 2009-2018, the results suggest a significant response of the major choice to changes in the local labor market with the effect being largest between freshman and sophomore years. A decomposition of the effect suggests a larger response to changes in the occupational composition than to changes in the major composition within occupations. The third chapter studies occupational decisions when workers' abilities are overestimated or underestimated and employer differ in the speed in which they learn about workers, which is called employer learning rate. Due to asymmetric information, individuals who are more (less) productive than what their observables reveal, will be underpaid (overpaid) at the beginning of their careers. In this paper, I develop a two-period, two-occupation model which analyzes the occupational decisions in an asymmetric information game where workers differ on whether their productivity was underestimated or overestimated and occupations are heterogeneous with respect to an employer learning rate proxy. Lastly, I use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and Current Population Survey (CPS) Merged Outgoing Rotation Group(MORG) to directly test model predictions separately for workers with less than college degree education and for college graduates."--Pages vii-viii.