Essays in Labour Economics

This thesis comprises three self-contained chapters. In these, I examine how non-wage factors and institutional frictions shape labour market outcomes and welfare at the individual and country level. The first chapter investigates how co-parenting following divorce affects parents' labour market outcomes. Exploiting a Dutch reform that raised co-parenting uptake, I find that mothers' wages decline by 0.8% in an intention-to-treat framework post-reform, and that this effect rises to a substantial 10% wage loss for mothers who adopt co-parenting due to the reform (the complier population). This impact is driven by reduced geographical mobility, which constrains mothers from moving to access better-paid employment. Fathers’ wages remain unchanged. The findings highlight an efficiency cost of co-parenting that falls disproportionately on mothers, thereby widening the gender wage gap. The second chapter examines the role of non-wage factors in the labour market. Using a large-scale Dutch survey linked to administrative data, we find that workplace amenities - such as flexibility, workload, and social support -, like wages, strongly predict job satisfaction, search, absenteeism, and mobility. We document that desirable amenities are often bundled with high-paying jobs, which amplifies overall compensation inequality. The final chapter turns to international capital markets and documents that foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows are procyclical while remittances are countercyclical with respect to recipient-country GDP growth. Estimating a model of both capital flows jointly, we evaluate how policies that lower barriers to these flows can enhance risk-sharing and improve welfare. The results show that reducing the cost of either enhances cross-border risk sharing, but the welfare gains from cheaper remittances dominate. Taken together, the essays reveal how location constraints, worker sorting based on amenities, and cross-border capital flows influence the allocation of human and financial capital, with implications for gender inequality, job design, and macroeconomic risk sharing.