Cultural transmission, education and employment with labor market frictions.

Summary This thesis assesses the combined effects of cultural values and labor market frictions on individuals' educational choices and unemployment behavior. The first chapter proposes an explanation for social reproduction. I use an overlapping generations model where parents transmit more or less job-friendly values and the child chooses his or her education and seeks a job. The transmission occurs under imperfect information about one's child's academic abilities. In privileged families, parents do not doubt the success of their offspring, and transmit a strong pro-employment value. This mechanism increases social immobility. The second chapter shows how to compute UI in a case where endogenous preferences are represented by an optimal choice of work self-esteem that can be complementary to or substitutable for the wage. By neglecting the endogenous and state-specific nature of self-esteem, a sufficient-statistics approach may wrongly call for an expansion of UI. The third chapter analyzes the relationship between work ethic and the decision to collect unemployment benefits with a job search model in which parents transmit work self-esteem. Increasing unemployment benefits or lowering the cost of claiming increases the probability of receiving benefits, while lowering the cost of job search decreases unemployment and participation rates via an increase in work ethic (for a lower unemployment risk), resulting in a stigma of unemployment.