Essays on Matching and Sorting in Labor Economics
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Economics
First Advisor
Meghir, Costas
Abstract
This dissertation comprises three essays exploring matching and sorting in innovation teams and the marriage market, alongside an examination of gender disparities in inventors' productivity, wages, and teamwork dynamics. In the first chapter, ``Multidimensional Skill in Inventor Teams'', I study the complementarity of multidimensional skills in innovation production and the skill composition of inventor teams. Using patent data linked to inventor social security records and establishment panels in Germany, I construct inventor skills from labor market biographies and uncover a mismatch pattern in inventor teams: There is positive sorting of inventors' skills even though teams with diverse skills have higher productivity. Quasi-experimental evidence from inventor mobility caused by establishment closures rules out endogeneity or selection bias as the reason behind the discrepancy, pointing instead to search frictions arising from inventor type segregation across labor markets. To rationalize the observed allocation, I build a team formation model in which firms assemble inventor teams for innovation, subject to search costs that are increasing as firms' chosen team mix deviates from the market composition of inventors. I show that search costs and inventor segregation can reinforce each other in equilibrium, driving the excessive positive sorting in talent allocation. Absent search costs, the share of homogamous teams will decrease by 28.6pp, boosting total innovation by 2.4\%. The second chapter, ``Gender Differences Among Inventors: Productivity, Wages, and Teamwork Dynamics'', examines gender disparities in inventors' life-cycle profiles of productivity, wages, and teamwork patterns. I uncover novel facts that provide insights into the barriers faced by female inventors as well as their comparative advantages. First, female inventors' productivity closely tracks men's in the first 8 years of their career but stagnates thereafter, while men's productivity continues to rise. As a result, the lifetime productivity of female inventors is 55\% of their male peers. The turning point in women's productivity coincides with their expected childbirth age, suggesting that family responsibilities might be a potential factor. Second, a persistent gender wage gap exists even controlling for skill types and productivity. Moreover, an event study analysis of inventors' wages surrounding patent filings shows that women derive lower long-term returns from their innovations. Third, women appear to be better team players: While they do not have a productivity advantage as sole inventors, their participation in teams positively correlates with team productivity. Having female members increases patent quality by 2.7\% in teams of two, 5.0\% in teams of three, and 5.4\% in teams of four. These facts suggest that targeted support for female inventors should equalize returns to innovation, offer opportunities for women to engage in teams, and address the factors causing the stagnation of their productivity. In the third chapter, ``Marriage Market Responses to Childcare Policies'', I study how childcare policies affect marriage market matching. Leveraging spatial and temporal variations in childcare expansions in Canada and difference-in-differences designs, I show that the short-term effects of childcare expansion depend on how sorted couples are, with larger responses found among couples with the same level of education. In the long run, however, educational assortative matching increases among newly-wed couples, amplifying the short-term effects. To explain the mechanism, I build an equilibrium model of marriage market matching that incorporates child quality production and childcare arrangements. The ratio of individuals' productivity in childbearing to wages in the labor market diminishes with human capital, creating incentives for specialization. Formal childcare serves as a market substitute for home care that contributes to child human capital, but its utilization depends on childcare quality relative to its prices. I show that policies enhancing external childcare options increase the complementarity of spousal human capital in the marital surplus, thereby strengthening positive assortative matching in equilibrium. Welfare analyses using the model indicate that high-educated women benefit the most from improved childcare due to both increased match surplus and higher Pareto weights. Conversely, low-educated women initially experience welfare losses due to decreased Pareto weights, but these losses are later compensated by welfare gains from increased match surplus as formal childcare continues to improve. The results underscore the importance of considering marriage market equilibrium feedback when analyzing the effects of childcare policies.
Recommended Citation
CUI, HANXIAO, "Essays on Matching and Sorting in Labor Economics" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1488.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1488
