Jae Wook Jung

This paper examines how a minimum wage increase affects youth schooling in a developing economy where many workers hold uncovered jobs that the minimum wage does not reach. I extend a model of the schooling decision in this dual labor market. In the model, a higher minimum wage increases the wage youth could earn by leaving school but can also make those jobs harder to find. It can also raise the value of a high school diploma if covered job losses fall on workers without one. Using Thailand’s 300 Baht minimum wage policy and variation in mandated increases across provinces, I find that youth had a harder time finding covered jobs. Among adults, covered employment fell for workers without a diploma and rose for those with one, increasing the benefit of a diploma. Enrollment among youth aged 15–17 increased by about 1.4 percentage points more in a province whose minimum wage increased by 10 percent more than another’s, and the share working without attending school decreased by about 1.3 percentage points more. The gain was concentrated among youth from less-educated households. Household expenditure showed no detectable response, pointing to labor market changes rather than household resources as the source of the schooling response.

Does Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption bias technological change toward labor? We estimate the effect of AI adoption on labor-augmenting and Hicks-neutral productivity for Korean firms from 2017 to 2024. AI adoption raises labor-augmenting productivity by 6.1% and leaves Hicks-neutral productivity indistinguishable from zero, and the adoption effect on output is 1.6%. Manufacturing carries twice the labor-augmenting coefficient of information and communication (ICT). The labor efficiency comes through production processes in manufacturing and through product and service development in ICT. We recover firm markups and find no evidence that AI adoption raises them.

Diversity statements are increasingly common in job advertisements. Using data from nearly 11,500 job advertisements in Sweden, we characterize the types of jobs and firms who choose to include diversity statements in a context where they are still relatively uncommon and opt-in. Further, we examine how the presence of diversity statements interacts with ethnic and gender discrimination in hiring decisions. Jobs that include diversity statements are much more likely to come from smaller firms and occupations like chefs, haircare, and cleaners. Using a correspondence study design, we find evidence of lower callbacks for ethnic minorities and higher callbacks for women. Prima facie, discrimination levels appear lower for jobs with diversity statements relative to those without, but this is not the case once we account for differences in job and employer characteristics using entropy balancing methods. From the perspective of an ethnic minority worker, applying to jobs with diversity statements is not associated with higher callback rates or lower discrimination levels.