Essays on Home Production, Mobility, and Monetary Policy

Sammanfattning: The Allocation of Expenditures and Time over TimeIn 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, I compile and analyze data related to time-use and the allocation of expenditures. The dataset that I compile is customized to fit the needs of my companion paper, Home Production, Expenditures, and Time Use, in which I propose and test a theory that includes home production.Home Production, Expenditures, and Time UseI propose a unified analysis of expenditures and time use, via a model in which households can produce services at home. I show 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 TalentChildren 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, we study how skills and parental background influence occupational choice, intergenerational mobility, and the allocation of talent in the economy. First, we document that sons are disproportionately more likely to follow into the same occupation as their fathers, across all skills and earnings levels. Second, we estimate a general equilibrium Roy model with costly occupational choice and heterogeneous entry barriers depending on parental background. We 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.  Our findings suggest that equalizing career opportunities bring equity gains.Monetary Policy and Liquidity Constraints: Evidence from the Euro AreaWe quantify the relationship between the response of output to monetary policy shocks and the share of liquidity constrained households. We do so in the context of the euro area, using a Local Projections Instrumental Variables estimation. We 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, we 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.