UC Irvine

This dissertation tries to answer some important questions in labor and transportation economics in an attempt to broaden understanding of different topics.In the first chapter “Correlated Labor Market Risk and Housing Investment” I show that households have lower levels of housing investment when they live in areas with labor markets that are more correlated with their industry of employment. I find that if a household lives in an area where many other households work in the same or similar industries, then housing may be a riskier asset as it is more correlated with labor market income. In response household decrease their investment in housing, and this This decline is driven by concentrations and riskiness of other correlated industries, suggesting agglomeration in one industry can have negative spillovers to workers of other related industries. The second chapter “Loyalty rewards and redemption behavior: Stylized facts for the U.S. airline industry” joint with Alexander Luttmann, provides a novel identification method for frequent flyer tickets in a comment industry database, DB1B. Using the FFAs we identify, we show how the characteristics of award tickets differ from paid tickets and how these characteristics have changed over time. We then demonstrate how various market and product quality characteristics influence the share of passengers traveling on FFAs. Finally, we find that price dispersion increases on routes with larger shares of frequent flyer passengers, implying that airline loyalty programs enhance market power. In the third chapter, “Help Really Wanted? The Impact of Age Stereotypes in Job Ads on Applications from Older Workers” joint with Ian Burn, Daniel Firoozi and David Neumark, We construct job ads for administrative assistant, retail, and security guard jobs, using language from real job ads collected in a prior large-scale correspondence study. We modify the job-ad language to randomly vary whether the job ad includes ageist language regarding age-related stereotypes. In contrast to a correspondence study in which job searchers are artificial and researchers study the responses of real employers, in our research the job ads are artificial and we study the responses of real job searchers. We find that job-ad language related to ageist stereotypes, even when the language is not blatantly or specifically age-related, deters older workers from applying for jobs. The change in the age distribution of applicants is large, with significant declines in the average and median age, the 75th percentile of the age distribution, and the share of applicants over 40. Based on these estimates and those from the correspondence study, and the fact that we use real-world ageist job-ad language, we conclude that job-ad language that deters older workers from applying for jobs can have roughly as large an impact on hiring of older workers as direct age discrimination in hiring.