Essays On The Economics Of Labor Market Institutions And Political Economy

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Labor Market Institutions and Political Economy written by Vidhya Soundararajan and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation compiles three empirical studies in Labor Economics and Political Economy. Overall, the manuscript focuses on policy evaluation, and in understanding the hurdles in policy implementation in developing countries. The first study estimates the effects of minimum wage on employment in India, filling an important gap in the empirical minimum wage literature by accounting for the imperfect nature of law enforcement rampant in developing countries. The results are consistent with a model of imperfect competition and imperfect enforcement. The second study employs a semi-structural model using a 13-year firm-level panel dataset from India, and estimates the contemporaneous and lagged productivity effects of firms hiring contract workers. Results indicate that although firms benefit from hiring contract workers through increased productivity in the current period, lagged productivity effects are negative, reflecting the tradeoff in hiring workers on temporary contracts. The last study, a joint paper with two coauthors, develops a model on political clientelism to show that politicians may not only target swing voters to buy support, as shown in previous studies, but can additionally simultaneously target politically active households who can inturn indirectly influence other swing voters. Our empirical results based on a household survey in a southern Indian state, are consistent with these predictions.