This study was undertaken to evaluate the effects of various wage rates on the minimum amounts of resources needed to obtain specified income levels on farms in Southwest Virginia. In addition, the aggregate effects of these wage rates on the structure and organization of farms in this area was determined. A linear programming model with added average outlay as a minimization criterion was constructed to determine the optimum resource use and enterprise combinations for' three representative farms to achieve operator labor incomes of $3,500, $5,000, $7,000, respectively. An aggregation model was used to determine the aggregate effects of these changes on farm organization and structure in the area. The study indicated that there are presently a large number of farms in the area with open land acreage below the minimum required to provide full-time productive employment for the operator. When available cropland is not sufficient to enable an individual to obtain a specified income, it is more profitable, in terms of minimizing average outlay, to purchase additional open land in order to obtain additional tobacco acreage and other cropland, than to utilize large amounts of existing unused pasture. An increase in hired labor wage rates, when an individual farm is achieving a specified income, may result in the hiring of additional labor, however, added amounts of non-labor inputs would increase at a faster rate than increases in amounts of labor used. Should all farms in the area adjust to attain the income levels specified in the study, farm numbers would decrease. An increase in the production of crops and livestock enterprises would result. This increased production would result in gross returns from the sales of crops of more than three times the amount presently received from crop sales in the area, and returns from livestock sales would be more than twice the amount presently received. This production would be produced by a total labor force of one-half, or less, the present labor force available on the farms in the study area. The results of this analysis substantiate the results of earlier studies which indicate that capital will be substituted for labor as farm wages are increased, and, an increase in aggregate farm production can be obtained with a decrease in total farm labor utilized. A need for some type of labor-saving innovation, as increased price supports for burley tobacco, will become necessary as the price of labor and other farm inputs increase. A study devoted to the development and analysis of some type of policy to encourage the combination of the smaller farms into larger, more efficient units is in order if all farm operators are to earn income levels comparable to that of off-farm employment. The resulting production from such a change would alter the type of farming presently conducted in the area. / Ph. D.

One purpose of higher education is to graduate students who will become productive citizens. An integral aspect of being a productive citizen is employment. Finding a job requires the acquisition of skills that employers report they seek in college graduates. There are various ways that students can learn these skills. They can be learned in the classroom, and through extracurricular activities. They can also be learned from students' part time employment. Part-time employment is a significant part of the college experience for many undergraduate students. Students are employed in a variety of different jobs while in college. These jobs can be grouped into three categories: cooperative education experiences, leadership positions, and wage positions. Scholars have explored the impact of cooperative and leadership positions on students. However, an extensive search of the literature revealed no studies which investigated the kinds of skills students in wage positions learn. Yet, the number of students employed in wage positions may exceed the number of students employed in the other two types of student jobs. The purpose of this study was to examine the skills learned by undergraduate students who were employed in on-campus wage positions. The study was designed to measure whether the skills student employees learn are skills that employers seek in college graduates. To seek answers to these research questions a list of skills was developed from the literature available on job skills employers seek in college graduates. After determining the eight most common skills employers seek in college graduates they hire, the researcher operationalized the skills by assigning typical job-related activities to each of the eight skills identified in the literature as being sought by employers of college graduates. Then, the researcher recruited 32 undergraduate students (16 male and 16 female) in wage positions to report data about what they learned while working. These data were collected through logs that detailed activities in which student employees engaged while on the job. The study found that students in on-campus wage positions engaged in certain activities more than others. The activities in which they engaged indicated that they were learning some skills which employers seek in college graduates. Results showed that participants reported a high number of activities which related to Analytical Skills, Adaptability/Flexibility, and Communication Skills. Participants reported activities which related to Interpersonal Skills and Teamwork Skills to a moderate degree. Activities related to Initiative, Self Confidence, and Leadership Skills were reported least often. Differences were found in the reporting patterns of men and women. Some of these differences were found to be significant. / Master of Arts

Thesis advisor: Anant Nyshadham / Thesis advisor: Kit Baum / The dissertation consists of three independent explorations of labor market dynamics in developing countries. I first investigate how minimum wages affect employment and investment decision of firms in India and how they can lead to accelerated automation and offshoring. Then, I investigate how managers of garment production lines in India's largest ready-made garment producer establish informal agreements to deal with worker absenteeism shocks. Finally, I study how Indonesian households learn about their productivity in different sectors of the economy and show that they often spend years, if not decades, in sectors where they are less productive which depresses their earning potentials, but they converge to their most productive sector over time. In the first chapter, "Effect of Minimum Wages on Automation and Offshoring Decisions of Firms: Evidence from India", I study the effect of India's local minimum wages on the production structure of firms in the formal economy. I compile data on the country's numerous minimum wages which vary at the state, year, and industry level, and show that changes to these wages have important effects on firm-level capital investment and employment of different types of employees. The effects depend on the firms' ability to automate and offshore certain tasks. Using a difference-in-difference approach, I show that firms in the average industry, that is, firms in industries neither intensive in routine nor offshorable tasks, continue to invest in machinery and computers at a rate of 8% per year following a minimum wage hike. However, they substitute payroll workers with managers and contract workers less likely to be bound by the minimum wage. Firms in industries intensive in routine tasks that are easier to automate invest 6.1% more in machinery and 4% more in computers, at the expense of payroll workers. Firms in industries intensive in tasks easier to do remotely continue to invest in machinery and computers, but the rate of investment in computers falls by 6.2% following a minimum wage hike, and payroll worker employment falls as well. This suggests that some tasks that combine workers and computers, like data analysis, may be offshored. These results support the predictions of a task-based production model, and indicate that minimum wages have a strong effect on the structure of production at the firm level, leading some towards increased rates of automation and offshoring. In the second chapter, "Absenteeism, Productivity, and Relational Contracts Inside the Firm", joint with other researchers, we study relational contracts among managers using unique data that tracks transfers of workers across teams in Indian ready-made garment factories. We focus on how relational contracts help managers cope with worker absenteeism shocks, which are frequent, often large, weakly correlated across teams, and which substantially reduce team productivity. Together these facts imply gains from sharing workers. We show that managers respond to shocks by lending and borrowing workers in a manner consistent with relational contracting, but many potentially beneficial transfers are unrealized. This is because managers' primary relationships are with a very small subset of potential partners. A borrowing event study around main trading partners' separations from the firm reinforces the importance of relationships. We show robustness to excluding worker moves least likely to reflect relational borrowing responses to idiosyncratic absenteeism shocks. Counterfactual simulations reveal large gains to reducing costs associated with forming and maintaining additional relationships among managers. In the last chapter, "Learning, Selection, and the Misallocation of Households Across Sectors", joint with other researchers, we study the role of labor misallocation (i.e., suboptimal sorting of households across sectors) in explaining low productivity in developing countries. We estimate a generalized earnings equation with dynamic correlated random coefficients, allowing households to learn about their relative productivity across the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. Estimates show that households sort across sectors on comparative advantage, but learn and converge slowly over time, with many households spending substantial time in a suboptimal sector. Roughly 33% of households are misallocated to start, earning 64% less on average than they could have if they were properly sorted across sectors. Our approach nests several alternative models which can be ruled out, including those without dynamics and/or heterogeneity in relative productivity across sectors. We also evaluate alternative interpretations for the dynamic sorting we observe in the data such as saving out of financial constraints and skill accumulation or learning by doing. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

This study analyzes the wage and non-wage factors underlying non-metropolitan-to-metropolitan commuting decisions of households in five non-metropolitan counties in Northern Virginia. The potential fiscal and planning implications of these decisions are also discussed. Chapter one contains a description of the study area, problem statement and objectives. Chapter two reviews related literature on commuting, housing and job location, as well as rent and wage gradients. Chapter three provides a theoretical framework for analyzing household commuting decisions. Chapter four presents descriptive statistics, and introduces a switching regression system of equations to simultaneously estimate factors influencing commuting decisions and earnings in non-metropolitan and metropolitan labor markets. Chapter five reports the regression results, and simulates wage gaps and the distance of the metropolitan labor market draw for different groups of workers. Chapter six discusses potential fiscal implications of commuting and potential policies to manage growth in commuting. The empirical result shows that the major incentive for workers to commute is a large age gap between metropolitan and non-metropolitan labor market areas. Household responsibilities, housing preference and ability to find local jobs represent non-wage factors underlying commuting decisions. Two study findings suggest that the local fiscal implications of non-metropolitan-to-metropolitan commuting households may be limited. First, commuting households are found to have fewer school-aged children, and require less local expenditures on education. Second, commuting households are more likely to be homeowners, have more rooms in their homes, and provide a larger tax base. / Master of Science

Researchers investigated how the contingent delivery of a cultural consequence on target culturants in an asymmetric iterated prisoner's dilemma game (IPDG) affected players' choices. The asymmetric IPDG creates an analogue to income disparities created by wage gaps and other cultural practices that create wealth inequalities between different members of the population and allows researchers to explore how these inequalities affect cooperation between players. Six undergraduate students divided into three dyads participated in an ABABCDCD reversal design. An asymmetric IPDG was arranged in Condition A and C such that one player received a greater number of points regardless of the second participants' selections - analogue to contingencies that produce income inequalities from wage gaps. In Condition B and D, a metacontingency was arranged such that delivery of a cultural consequence (CC; bonus points equally distributed among the dyad) was contingent on the oscillating production of target aggregate products (AP) across two consecutive cycles. When participants' coordinated responding and contacted the target AP→ CC relation, the wage gap was reduced. However, individual contingencies are in direct competition for the "wealthier" player, reducing the probability of cooperative responding. Results showed the CC selected certain oscillations between target APs resulting in a decrease of a point disparity between the players while also establishing equal points between the players during certain conditions.

Thesis advisor: Christopher Maxwell / This paper aims to measure the impact of increases to Seattle minimum wage from the years 2015 – 2018 on total earnings of the greater Seattle area. My research concentrates on low-wage industries but also touches upon the effect on high wage industries and the overall economy. Also, to ensure continuity of results, models were replicated at the federal level. This question is important because of a modern movement for higher state and city minimum wages. There have been several research papers about this topic already; however many economists have come up with conflicting results. My methods are a combination of previously used methods in an attempt to provide an unbiased analysis. In addition, research that has been released on this topic only covers the initial increases in minimum wage from 2015 – 2016. My research expands on this time frame and analyzes the impact of minimum wage increases from 2015 – 2018. My results show a statistically significant positive impact of minimum wage on total earnings for the greater Seattle area, not just for low-wage industries but also for the overall economy. These results show that a high minimum wage can be beneficial for the economy. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Economics.

The aim of our study is to investigate the effect of immigrants on wages for natives with divergent skill level within one country. Skill level is measured as education level and the purpose is to focus on the level where it according to us is a lack in research, namely the effect on high skilled native-born worker wages. Further, our contribution to the already existing studies may be considered to be a complement. Using panel data, collected from the time period 2000-2008 for the 290 municipalities in Sweden to get regional variation, we investigate and interpret the estimated outcome of how wages for native-born workers in the Swedish labor market respond to immigration into Sweden. The main findings, when controlling for age, unemployment, and differences between year and municipalities in this study are on the short run, in line with the theory. The closer to a substitute the native-born and foreign-born workers are, the greater are the adverse effect on the wage for native-born, given that we assume immigrants as low skilled. The effect on wage for high skilled native workers in short run, when assuming immigrants and natives as complement, is positive, i.e. the wage for high skilled natives increases as the share of immigrants increases. The effect on high skilled native-born wages is positive even in mid-long run and adverse for the low and medium skilled native-workers. This is not an expected outcome since we according to theory predict the wage to be unaffected in mid-long run. This may be the result of errors in the assumption that immigrants are low skilled, or that five years is a too short time to see the expected effect in the long run; the Swedish labor market may need more time to adjust to what we predict the outcome to be.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

During the 1960s and early 1970s, the black – white wage gap narrowed significantly, but has remained constant since the late 1980s. The black – white wage gap in the recent period may reflect differences in human capital. A key component of human capital is labor market experience. The first chapter of this dissertation examines how differences in the returns and patterns of experience accumulation affect the black – white wage gap. Accounting for differences in the nature of experience accumulation does not explain the very large gap in wages between blacks and whites. Instead, the wage gap seems to be driven by constant differences between blacks and whites which may represent unobserved differences in skill or the effects of discrimination. The second chapter of the dissertation examines the role of discrimination in explaining the wage gap by asking whether statistical discrimination by employers causes the wages of never incarcerated blacks to suffer when the incarceration rate of blacks in an area increases. I find little evidence that black incarceration rates negatively affect the wages of never incarcerated blacks. Instead, macroeconomic effects in areas with higher incarceration rates play a more important role in explaining the variation in black wages. The third and final chapter of the dissertation examines the black – white wage gap and its determinants across the entire wage distribution to determine if the factors that are driving the wage gap vary across the distribution. I find that at the top of the conditional distribution, differences in the distribution of characteristics explain relatively more of the black – white wage gap than differences in the prices of characteristics. At the bottom of the conditional distribution, differences in the distribution of characteristics explain relatively more of the wage gap—although this finding varies across different specifications of the model.

As of 2016, women in the U.S. are still making 80 cents on the dollar relative to men, and even with controls for other factors such as education, experience, and hours worked, the pay disparity is still around eight percent. The equity, efficiency wage, and Cognitive Evaluation Theories, suggest that a closed gender wage gap would be more beneficial to society. This paper uses these theories to investigate the relationship between productivity and pay disparity by using an ordinary least squares regression model to test the effects of the gender wage ratio on labor productivity while controlling for some human capital characteristics. Additionally, this paper furthers the hypotheses that the wage gap is detrimental to labor productivity and worker well-being by proposing a study in which a simulated wage gap is predicted to negatively affect worker satisfaction, motivation, and productivity. Findings and implications for further research are discussed.