Essays in Labour Economics

PhD ThesisThis thesis studies two important aspects of labour market earnings dynamics: the post-displacement earning losses experienced by high-tenure workers, and the evolution of the gender wage gap within rms linked to export activity. The rst two essays aim at understanding and quantifying the forces behind the post-displacement earning losses observed in the data. I rst introduce the main empirical and theoretical works in the literature. Then, I propose a structural model of the labour market with on the job search, in which rms are heterogeneous in productivity and workers accumulate both general and speci c skills while employed. Jobs are destroyed at an endogenous rate due to idiosyncratic productivity shocks and workers' skills depreciate during unemployment. The model is estimated via simulated method of moments using matched employer-employee data on Germany. By matching moments related to workers' mobility and wage dynamics, the model reproduces the size and persistence of the earning losses observed in the data. The key driver of the post-displacement earning losses is the interaction between the loss in speci c (mostly) and general human capital and endogenous separation. Finally, the third essay studies the e ect of rms' export activity on the gender wage gap among its workers. Using matched employer-employee data from Germany for the period between 1993 and 2007, we show that an increase in a rm's export widens the wage gap between male and female blue collar workers, while it reduces it between male and female white collars. In particular, the former e ect is stronger for workers in routine manual tasks, while the latter is driven by employees performing interactive tasks. This evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that serving foreign markets relies more on interpersonal skills, which reinforces female comparative advantage and reduces (widens) the gender wage gap in white (blue) collar occupations