Essays in empirical labor, housing and social network economics
This thesis explores the following two topics : (i) determinants of labor force participation at older ages in the US ; (ii) the role of social network in the earnings of recent immigrants in Canada. Specifically, Chapter 1 provides estimates of the causal effect of local house prices on the labor supply decisions of older workers in the US during the 1994-2004 housing boom period using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Local house prices are instrumented by plausible exogenous spatial and time-varying credit supply shocks. The estimates suggest that the housing boom accounted for about two thirds of older men labor force exit during the studied period. Chapter 2 responds to the question : are people in good health more likely to stay in the labor market when unemployment rises? This work provides empirical estimates of the relative impact of local unemployment shocks on the labor force participation of US older workers with heterogeneous health conditions. This study documents that most of the labor force exit of older workers during the Great recession can be attributed to poor health conditions measured before the recession. Finally, Chapter 3 analyses the effect of living in a neighborhood where the majority of the residents belongs to visible minority groups on the earnings of permanent residents who landed in Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto in 2001. Overall, this research documents a negative effect of ethnic clustering on the earnings of recent immigrants in Canada and explain it by the "referral effect".
enclave ethnique immigration Retirement Labor supply House prices Social security Health Ethnic enclave Social network Immigration