Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

6010

Date

2017

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Business Administration

Concentration

Economics

Committee Chair

William Smith

Committee Member

Jamin Speer

Abstract

This dissertation is composed of three different essays. In the first essay, we investigate wage determinants and dynamics across the distribution. Our approach is different than the large body of research in the area. We are the first to establish wage dynamics at different regions of the wage distribution and to show how wage dynamics are different among quintiles. The most notable results of this essay are showing how some economic theories differ across wage distribution. Our results support some previous findings, for instance, there is a negative relationship between real wages and unemployment rate in the long-run. However, in the short-run, this negative relation between real wage fifth quintile and unemployment rate no longer holds. Another contribution of this essay is methodological. Since wage data are skewed, classical approaches are questionable, and our wage-quintile approach makes a huge difference in finding different relationships among economic variables. The second essay deals with model comparison, which procedure is more appropriate when data are limited. It compares different methodologies, which deal with small sample size. The competing procedures are Bayesian Method: Bayesian with informative prior and Bayesian with non-informative prior, Theil-Goldberger Mixed Estimator, and the Bootstrapping. Our recommendation for future researchers who analyze limited data is to adopt the Bayesian method with informative priors since it produces smaller predictive errors.The third essay re-examines wage productivity gap. Considering the nature of wage distribution-skewed, we propose to examine wage productivity gap by quintiles. Our findings indicate that labor productivity growth shocks impact positively all real wage quintiles, but at different rates. However, mainly those at the top of wage distribution are profiting from labor productivity growth.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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