Resumen de Three essays on the macroeconomics of knowledge
This doctoral thesis consists of three self-contained essays in Labor and Regional Economics.
Essay 1. "Labor mobility and knowledge diffusion: a theoretical approach" This paper analyzes an economy with two main features: labor mobility goes together with knowledge transfer and firm productivity increases with the exchange of ideas. Each firm develops some specific knowledge that will be transmitted to the rest of the industry through the mobility of workers. We characterize the equilibrium outcome under two distinct labor market settings. We then use comparative statics to derive the testable implications of the model. Different patterns of labor mobility are expected to occur depending on the variety and level of knowledge, the presence of mobility costs, the institutional environment, the absorptive capacity of the firms and the size of the industry. Results are robust to different labor market settings.
Essay 2. "Industry differences in wage structure: a theoretical analysis on wage level and experience premium" This paper proposes an alternative explanation for the empirically observed inter-industry wage variation and provides new hypotheses on differences in experience premium across industries. We represent an industry by a small open economy with inter-firm labor mobility. Each industry is characterized by a degree of learning-by-doing, learning-by-hiring, inter-firm mobility costs and technological level. In this economy we analyze how these features affect the wage structure of the industry. The variety of knowledge within an industry and its capital intensity is also analyzed. Results show that industries with high learning-by-hiring and low mobility costs generally pay higher wages. More learning-by-doing and higher technological level in an industry is also giving higher wages and higher rewards to experience. Results are consistent with the empirical findings that more capital intensive industries pay higher wages and that high-tech industries pa
