EC: Dissertations

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Browsing EC: Dissertations by Subject "Labor market"

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    Essays on Labor Issues : Performance and Efficiency
    (University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, 2021)
    Ngoc, Nguyen Le Bao
    This thesis consists of two essays which focus on labor issues. They are (1) job performance and (2) labor efficiency. In an attempt to understand which factors determine working people’s job performance, the first essay aims to examine the importance of locus of control to job performance. We draw Australian panel data and utilize the fixed effects model to estimate the causal effect of locus of control on working people’s job performance. Our findings reveal that locus of control positively affects the adaptive performance dimension of job performance. This implies that employees with more internal locus of control tend to be more adaptive to conditions and happenings in the workplace, leading to better performance on their job. The positive effect of locus of control on adaptability still holds when we address the endogeneity of locus of control by applying Lewbel’s identification method (Lewbel, 2012) and control for attrition bias driven by panel survey. Our finding also suggests that gender and job complexity matter in how locus of control influences job performance. Particularly, locus of control drives adaptive performance, especially among males with high complexity jobs. The second essay investigates the labor-use efficiency in the context of ASEAN countries using the balanced panel data of the six largest ASEAN economies (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines) from 1990-2018. We use a flexible translog functional form to specify the labor demand, which is defined as a function of output (real GDP), average wage, capital stock, country-specific variables, and time effects. We generalize the model by incorporating a variance function, which accommodates marginal effects. The parameters of the demand and variance functions are estimated through a multi-step procedure using generalized least squares and a nonlinear method, respectively. The empirical results show that the average labor-use efficiency among ASEAN countries is about 96.3%, implying that the six ASEAN countries are very efficient in labor use relative to the country with the best labor-use practice in our sample which is Singapore. The two-sample t-test results show that the labor-use efficiency is significantly different between countries.
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