Three Essays in Labor Economics

This dissertation comprises three autonomous essays on topics in labor economics. The first chapter investigates the impact of socio-cultural, technological, and other transformative factors on employees' labor market decisions over recent decades, focusing specifically on the mobility of young workers in terms of job and occupation transitions. Data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY79 and NLSY97) indicate a marked increase in job mobility among young participants across different cohorts. Analysis of these datasets demonstrates that the influence of age on the likelihood of changing jobs has become more negative for the second cohort. This shift is primarily driven by changes in the impact of age for specific socio-demographic groups of respondents. Additionally, there is a notable between-cohort rise in the relationship between both upward and downward job transitions and occupational mobility. The second essay explores the consequences of the rise in industrial robot installations on shifts in population size and employment within local labor markets, which may be substantially affected by the rapid advancement of robotics technology in recent decades. The cross-sectional study reveals discernible gender disparities in the impacts of robot adoption. The effect of robotization on the labor force participation rate is negative for men and unmarried women yet positive for married women. As industrial robots are predominantly programmed to perform routine tasks in manufacturing industries traditionally associated with heavy manual male-dominated labor, the anticipated impact of robot exposure on employment in the manufacturing sector is predictably negative for male workers. For women, this effect is conversely positive. It was also found that robot penetration leads to an increase in the share of family income attributed to females within married-couple households. The extended cross-sectional analysis in the third chapter indicates that the impact of robotization on local labor markets is more negative for younger people. Fixed-effects models using panel data analysis reveal that robot adoption unexpectedly reduces migration but enhances labor force participation, opposing recent scholarly findings. Employing an alternative robot adoption variable that is based on technology adoption within individual industries and, therefore, can only be utilized to analyze employment-related dependent variables yields more robust and statistically significant results, indicating a negative impact of robot exposure on employment. Nevertheless, panel data analysis does not support the previous chapter's findings regarding gender differences in the impact of robot penetration. These discrepancies may be attributed to differences in the structure, methodology, and nature of cross-sectional versus panel data and the methodological differences in measuring robotization.