Essays on labor and development economics

The dissertation consists of two essays on labor and development economics. The first essay seeks to identify the main factors that contributed to the decline in gender earnings gap in Thailand's wage and salary sector from 1985-2005. Two parametric methodologies, Neumark's version of the Blinder-Oaxaca method and the Juhn-Murphy-Pierce method, are implemented in order to decompose gender earnings gap at a point in time and across time period. I also make a methodological contribution by proposing a way to modify the DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux nonparametric decomposition method so that its results are comparable to those from Neumark's version of the Blinder-Oaxaca method. The key findings of this essay are as follows. First, I find that increases in female education and changes in unobserved factors, which were concurrent with modernization, were the main sources of the decline in gender earnings gap. Second, over time, improvements in the education of females in this sector surpassed that of males. However, the superior education of females did not result in higher female earnings because of the overwhelming effect of the unexplained factors that supported higher male earnings. Finally, the nonparametric investigation corroborated the results from the parametric methodologies.