Essays On Estimated Labor Search Models

Search theory has proven to be a very useful tool to analyze and understand the impact of labor market policies and institutional arrangements on labor market outcomes. Structural econometrics, on the other hand, seeks to recover the primitives of economic theory and to estimate decision rules. These essays use the conjunction of both to analyze various labor market issues. The first chapter estimates a search and matching model to analyze the relationship between duality in the labor market and labor market protection in Chile. Results indicate that both types of contracts, permanent and temporary, survive in equilibrium and that there is a strong substitution effect between contracts. Also, stringent labor protection generates important trade offs between flexibility and productivity. The second chapter provides lifetime measures of inequality for Chile and analyzes its main sources. Results indicate that inequality is not only high in a cross-section perspective, but also in a lifetime perspective and that low mobility is the main source of lifetime inequality. Finally, the third chapter uses a descriptive approach and a structural estimation of a search model to identify the sources of gender differentials in the United States. Results show that prejudice may still have a role in explaining the evidence on gender differentials and it is responsible for the reversal of the returns to schooling ranking in recent years.