Mattias Almgren's thesis available for download

IIES graduate student Mattias Almgren's thesis "Essays on Home Production, Mobility, and Monetary Policy" consists of four separate papers which are available for download.

 

The Allocation of Expenditures and Time over Time

In the year 2018, the average high skilled single male worked more than 35 hours per week in the market and allocated more than 70 percent of expenditures to services. In the same year, the average low skilled female worked 22 hours per week in the market and allocated around 65 percent of expenditures to services. What might explain these differences at that point in time, and how they have developed over time? In this paper, Mattias compiles and analyze data related to time-use and the allocation of expenditures. The dataset that he compiles is customized to fit the needs of his companion paper, Home Production, Expenditures, and Time Use, in which he proposes and tests a theory that includes home production.

 

Home Production, Expenditures, and Time Use

Mattias proposes a unified analysis of expenditures and time use, via a model in which households can produce services at home. He shows that the model, which uses stable homothetic preferences and standard functional forms for home production, can match data for the U.S. about expenditures and time-use, both in the cross-section and the developments over time. For women, changes in social norms were important. Absent changes in social norms, the developments would have been vastly different, both in terms of how they allocated their time and in terms of how expenditures were allocated.

 

It Runs in the Family: Occupational Choice and the Allocation of Talent

Children frequently grow up to work in the same jobs as their parents. Using unique data on worker skills and personality traits, and administrative data on the labor market outcomes of Swedish men, Mattias and his co-authors study how skills and parental background influence occupational choice, intergenerational mobility, and the allocation of talent in the economy. First, they document that sons are disproportionately more likely to follow into the same occupation as their fathers, across all skills and earnings levels. Second, they estimate a general equilibrium Roy model with costly occupational choice and heterogeneous entry barriers depending on parental background. They find that these entry barriers lead to misallocation: Equalizing entry costs across workers leads occupational following to fall by half. This leads to increased intergenerational mobility, with the largest income gains among sons of fathers in the bottom income decile. Third, exploiting structural change in employment in fathers' occupations, difference-in-differences estimates imply that occupational following leads to reduced earnings, concentrated among sons of low-income fathers and those whose skills are misaligned with those of incumbents in their father’s occupation. Their findings suggest that equalizing career opportunities bring equity gains.

 

Monetary Policy and Liquidity Constraints: Evidence from the Euro Area

Mattias and his co-authors quantify the relationship between the response of output to monetary policy shocks and the share of liquidity constrained households. They do so in the context of the euro area, using a Local Projections Instrumental Variables estimation. They construct an instrument for changes in interest rates from changes in overnight indexed swap rates in a narrow time window around ECB announcements. Monetary policy shocks have heterogeneous effects on output across countries. Using micro data, they show that the elasticity of output to monetary policy shocks is larger in countries that have a larger fraction of households that are liquidity constrained.

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Mattias will defend his thesis on 24 May 2023.

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