Understanding the role of heterogeneity across agents is crucial in predicting how the macroeconomic outcomes are affected by these differences. This dissertation presents three papers in which I study labor market outcomes of different segments of the population according to their choice of education and how labor market characteristics affect people’s life time choices such as fertility. I argue that productivity differences between education groups are crucial to understand unemployment rate differences between educated and less educated. In countries where college educated workers do not have particularly better skills than high school graduates, they face higher unemployment rates even though they can perform the same jobs as high school graduates. Fertility, on the other hand, is a life time choice affected by not only business cycles but also characteristics of the labor market. I show that fertility presents procyclical features and the fertility decline in recessions is amplified because of cyclical properties of industries as well as gender asymmetry in industry employment.

Last modified

• 11/18/2019

Creator

• Sena Coskun

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-z9gg-nr89

Subject

• Economics

Keyword

• Economics

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright