Essays in Labor Economics and International Economics

This dissertation consists of three essays in labor economics and international economics. The first essay, using originally collected data on a sample of 3,408 households, represents an initial attempt to evaluate the Housing Exchange Program in Jiaxing, which offers rural households the opportunity to exchange their previously untradeable homestead for urban residential property. Logit regressions point to a greater appeal of the program to economically disadvantaged households, evidencing its progressivity. Comparisons of participants vs. nonparticipants within the treatment towns suggest a positive program effect on agents' non-agricultural income and the opposite for agricultural income, induced by income variations at the intensive margin but more importantly intersectoral shift of labor. These findings are statistically and economically significant and robust to econometric tests such as IV models using distance to town center and difference-in-differences-in-differences estimation for treatment vs. control towns using propensity score matching.;The second essay, joint with Prakash Kannan, Prakash Loungani, and Bharat Trehan, studies the relationship between sectoral shocks and aggregate unemployment. Unemployment duration has increased sharply during the Great Recession of 2007-09. Standard explanations based on the role of monetary and fiscal policies or oil shocks do not explain movements in long-term unemployment. We present evidence that sectoral shocks, which we measure using the dispersion of industry-level stock market returns, have played a significant role. These findings are robust to the inclusion of measures of uncertainty emphasized by Bloom (2009) and the extension of the sample to a broad set of advanced economies.;The third essay, joint with Bo Becker and David Greenberg, argues that by facilitating exporting firms' intangible, firm-specific investments, a developed financial system can promote exports. We test two new implications of this hypothesis. First, the impact of financial development is higher where fixed costs are large due to either product characteristics or the distance between exporter and importer. Second, we find that in countries with well developed finance, total exports and the allocation of exports across importers arc more sensitive to exchange rates than in countries with lower financial development.