Essays on employments and wages in the online labour market

Vi, Ngoc Dieu Linh (2023). Essays on employments and wages in the online labour market. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis consists of three empirical papers, which focus on jobs and wage setting in the online labour market. The first paper employs a sample of 38,945 gender-targeted online job vacancies in Vietnam from February 2019 to July 2020 to investigate gender differences in returns to physical attractiveness. In particular, we compare the monthly offered wage in matched vacancies with and without beauty preferences of the same characteristics among job ads directed at men and women separately. We find evidence that better-looking women enjoy a wage premium of up to 5.2 percent, whereas better-looking men do not. Earning premia for attractive women is present not only among occupations with intensive social interactions where beauty is expected to enhance performance but also among other occupations. We also document substantial heterogeneity in returns to look across education, experience levels, job positions and job locations.
The second paper uses a unique dataset of online job vacancies from February 2019 to July 2020 to examine wage dollarisation – the use of foreign currency for salary setting. We first document that employers advertise wages in US dollars to search for highly-skilled workers. Additionally, we employ matching techniques to investigate the relationship between wage and exchange rate benefits offered by jobs quoting salary in US dollars. Our results reveal that there is a complementarity between wage and exchange rate benefits. The positive wage effect of exchange rate benefits is highest in lower-position jobs as well as jobs of lower education and experience levels.
The third paper examines the wage gap between the formal and informal job sectors using online job vacancies data from February 2019 to July 2020. First, we identify a job posting as informal if it shows discrimination against the worker’s (i) marital status, (ii) gender and (iii) disability. Second, we employ various matching techniques and estimate the wage gap between formal and informal employment in the matched samples. Our findings suggest that informal jobs tend to offer a lower salary than their formal counterparts. In particular, the study shows significant wage premia of 1.6 to 1.9 percent for formal jobs and wage penalties of 0.8 to 21.4 percent for informal jobs. Furthermore, we find that the wage gap between formal and informal jobs is highly heterogeneous across different job types.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):