Muhammad Usman Taj

I am a PhD candidate in Economics, at the University of Delaware. I am on the 2023-24 Economics Job Market. My research interests are in the fields of labor economics, development economics, and household finance.

In my job market paper, I explore how reservation wage fluctuates with the changes in the local labor market conditions. My results suggest that the reservation wage is most elastic to the employment-to-population ratio. I also compare the aggregate market indicators with the worker group-specific outcomes and find that the overall indicators matter more than group-specific indicators. For instance, unemployed workers react more towards the state-level unemployment rate as compared to the age-specific unemployment rate in their state. The updated version of my JMP is here.