Three Papers in Labor Market and Commodity Market

This dissertation presents three empirical studies on topics in labor market and globalcommodity prices. The first chapter analyzes how consumption, spending and labor market decisions vary across the life-cycle, and their implications for the aggregate economy. The second chapter discovers the dynamic adjustments of 49 world commodity prices in response to innovations in the nominal and real shocks, and the third chapter reveals how commodity prices are affected by information from the news in high-frequency trading.The first chapter studies the effect of aging on service consumption quantity and pricein the United States. In particular, I ask, do older households consume more service goods? Can aging explain the rise of service price? I investigate the impact of age profile on service consumption and service price in the U.S. using household survey data and metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) level variations, respectively. The results show that after controlling for household income, as people age, they consume progressively more health insurance and medical services and less food away from home. Furthermore, there is a positive correlation between service price and old-age dependency ratio1 in the long run across MSAs. I then build a two-period two-sector OLG model with an education entry cost to explain these results. In this model, age affects service price through two channels: 1) on the demand side, labor markets with older populations tend to demand more services; 2) on the supply side, the education friction would cause worker mobility from the service sector to the manufacturing sector, which further increases the service price.The second chapter is a group project with Professor Hyeongwoo Kim. We studydynamic adjustments of 49 world commodity prices in response to innovations in the nominal exchange rate and the world real GDP. After we estimate the dynamic elasticity of the prices with respect to these shocks, we obtain the kernel density of our estim