Essays on Labour Markets: Worker-Firm Dynamics, Occupational Segregation and Workplace Conditions

The main chapters of this book, “Essays on Labour Markets”, focus on analyzing the dynamics of the employment relationship between workers and firms (chapters 2 and 3), modelling occupational segregation and labour market inequalities between social groups (chapter 4) and characterizing the link between a firm’s health & safety work conditions and its financial performance (chapter 5). Each essay contributes with original insights often using innovative and uncommon techniques, such as real options theory applied to wage-tenure profile analysis, social network analysis of occupational segregation, or estimation of firm production functions augmented with workplace environment indicators. Particularly intriguing conclusions of this thesis include: the effect of the selectivity on the worker’s outside option explains the largest part of the observed wage-tenure profiles; at least part of the wage return to “tenure” is in fact a wage return to “s! eniority”, i.e. the worker’s position in the tenure hierarchy of her firm; if informal contacts are relevant in job search, occupational segregation is the optimal social welfare policy for social groups with homophilous preferences; improving certain physical dimensions of the workplace health & safety environment raises a firm’s productivity, whereas other dimensions do not appear to matter in this regard.

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