It is increasingly recognized that manpower planning and policies are a major component of a country's development efforts. The purpose of this study is to examine the labor market in Jordan and to identify the main determinants of employment (labor force) during the period from 1961 to 1987 in order to advise policy makers as to the best course of action to achieve full employment. This period was divided into two periods: 1961 to 1972 and 1973 to 1987 for comparative purposes. The socio-economic and political framework of the labor market, as well as the labor policies during the period were examined in an effort to determine the determinants affecting the labor market in the two periods. The findings of this study reveal that Jordan's labor market and policies over the last three decades have been influenced by changes and events not only in Jordan, but by changes and events in the entire region. The study also indicates that factors influencing the labor market differ under different conditions. The impact of the independent variables tested in this study differ between the two periods, 1961 to 1972 and 1973 to 1987. Policy which may serve the country's best interest during the time of instability and crisis may not be in the country's best interest in time of stability and peace.

The rate of unemployment in South Africa remains stubbornly high despite vastly improved macroeconomic fundamentals and relatively high rates of economic growth for most of the post-1994 democratic era. Employment growth was much weaker than might have been expected given the improved economic outlook. This thesis investigates how the sectoral employment intensity of output growth in the eight non-agricultural sectors of the South African economy has evolved from 2000 to 2012, with a view to identifying key growth sectors that are employment intensive. An econometric model of the demand for labour is used to estimate employment elasticities in the major Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) divisions of the economy. The results suggest that aggregate employment and economic growth diverged and that jobless growth occurred in South Africa during the period under review. South Africa has become less labour intensive and more capital intensive, reflecting a structural adjustment that has weakened the employment-growth relationship. At the sectoral level, the results suggest the presence of a long-run relationship between employment and growth in finance and business services, manufacturing, transport and the utilities sectors. In particular, the results suggest that the tertiary sector performed best in terms of the employment intensity of output growth. This reflects the changing structure of the economy and the nature of employment shifting away from the primary towards the tertiary sectors. Investment in the tertiary sector may help to foster new employment opportunities and assist in improving the overall employment intensity of output growth in South Africa. / Economics / D. Litt. et Phil. (Economics)

My dissertation intends to better understand the impacts of large-scale education expansion programs on students’ education and labor market outcomes both by reviewing related theory and prior literature, and by empirically analyzing a radical and large-scale higher education expansion program initiated in 1999 in China. In Chapter 1, I review theories, methods and empirical studies on the labor market consequences of education expansion from both the partial equilibrium treatment effect and general equilibrium structural model literature. This chapter serves as the theoretical and methodological foundation for my later analyses in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, and provides motivation for my empirical work because prior literature has not reached a consensus in terms of the impacts of large-scale education expansion programs on individuals’ labor market outcomes or the wage structure in the labor market. In Chapter 2, I take advantage of the fact that the substantially expanded access to higher education after China’s higher education expansion provides exogenous variation in the probability of college attendance for students of different cohorts and coming from different provinces. I thus employ a two-way fixed-effect model to estimate the expansion’s causal impacts on individuals’ education and labor market outcomes, and find that the expansion substantially improved educational outcomes, such as years of schooling completed, the probabilities of attending college and obtaining any post-secondary degree. The expansion also increased treated individuals’ probability of working and earning positive income, and modestly improved their hourly income. However, the expansion’s earnings effects are less robust to the exclusion of two largest metropolitan cities in China and the inclusion of province-year-level time-varying covariates to control for potential cofounding influences. In Chapter 3, I exploit multiple repeated cross-sections of data to explore how the expansion affects the labor market at large, especially the college-high school earnings gap. Incorporating an aggregate labor supply model with imperfect substitution across labor with the same education level but in different age groups, I decompose the changes in age-group specific college premium over time into changes in the aggregate and cohort-specific relative supply of college-educated (vs. high school-educated) labor, and in the aggregate relative demand for college-educated labor. My findings show that a 1 percent increase in the relative supply of BA-educated workers within one’s own cohorts would depress the BA-HS wage gap by 0.04 percentage point. Given that college enrollment increased by nearly 4 times from 1998 to 2005, the negative cohort effects could be substantial: for example, the cohort-specific relative supply for the youngest age group in my analysis increased by 112 percent from 2002 to 2009, suggesting an additional 4.5 percentage points decrease in the BA-HS wage gap for workers of this particular age group, on top of the effects of changes in aggregate relative supply and demand that are borne by workers in all age groups. Moreover, my estimates reveal a steadily increasing relative demand for BA-educated labor that raises college premium by approximately 2-3 percentage points annually; it is mitigated by the negative effects from the increase in the aggregate relative supply of BA-educated labor though; the latter effect also implies that the expansion has negative spillover effects on workers who attended college before the expansion. Putting together, my dissertation provides a holistic picture of the full impacts of one of the largest education expansion program on record. My work is among the first to systematically analyze how the expansion affects “treated” individuals and the labor market at large, and therefore could contribute to all levels of decision-making. Findings from my analyses could also have global implications for much broader issues such as education-related income inequality, and the general equilibrium and distributional effects of large-scale social programs.

This dissertation analyzes how cultural and behavioral frictions affect decision-making in labor markets of developing economies. It studies factors that have received relatively little attention in economics—namely concerns about preserving identity, cognitive strain from financial stress, and gender norms—and examines their impacts on labor supply and productivity. Field experiments in the state of Odisha, India are used to provide direct empirical evidence on these relationships. Chapter 1 investigates how identity—one's concept of self—influences economic behavior in the labor market, focusing on the effect of caste identity on labor supply. In the experiment, casual laborers belonging to different castes choose whether to take up various real job offers. All offers involve working on a default manufacturing task and an additional task. The additional task changes across offers, is performed in private, and differs in its association with specific castes. Workers' average take-up rate of offers is 23 percentage points lower if offers involve working on tasks that are associated with castes other than their own. This gap increases to 47 pp if the castes associated with the relevant offers rank lower than workers' own in the caste hierarchy. Responses to job offers are invariant to whether or not workers' choices are publicized, suggesting that the role of identity itself—rather than social image—is paramount. Using a supplementary experiment, I show that 43% of workers refuse to spend ten minutes working on tasks associated with other castes, even when offered ten times their daily wage. Results indicate that identity may be an important constraint on labor supply, contributing to misallocation of talent in the economy. Chapter 2—joint work with Supreet Kaur, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Frank Schilbach—tests for a direct causal impact of financial strain on worker productivity. The experiment randomly varies timing of income receipt among laborers who earn piece rates for manufacturing tasks: some workers receive their wages on earlier dates, altering when cash constraints are eased while holding overall wealth constant. Workers increase productivity by 5.3% on average in the days after cash receipt. The impacts are concentrated among poorer workers in the sample, who increase output by over 10%. This effect of cash on hand on productivity is not explained by mechanisms such as gift exchange, trust in the employer, or nutrition. The chapter also presents positive evidence that productivity increases are mediated through lower attentional errors in production, indicating a role for improved cognition after cash receipt. Finally, directing workers’ attention to their finances via a salience intervention produced mixed results—consistent with concerns about priming highlighted in the literature. Results indicate a direct relationship between financial constraints and worker productivity and suggest that psychological channels mediated through attention play a role in this relationship. Chapter 3 examines whether gender norms lead women to hold back their potential in the labor market. While the existing literature has shown that women tend to earn less than their husbands, there is limited direct evidence on whether women actively avoid earning more than their spouses and the determinants of such behavior. The experiment engages married couples working as casual laborers in a short-term manufacturing job that pays piece-rate on output. The experiment provides women an extra hour to work without this difference being salient, making it likely that they could earn more than their husbands. After husbands finish piece-rate production, women are randomized into one of three conditions in which 1) the wife is informed of her husband’s production and expects both spouses to learn how much each spouse has produced, 2) the wife is informed of her husband’s production and expects that only she will learn how much each spouse has produced, or 3) both spouses are only informed of their joint total production. Results show that women in the last two conditions achieve on average one hour’s worth of production more than that of their husbands, suggesting that women do not face intrinsic concerns about earning more than their husbands. However, this productivity gap substantially decreases when husbands are expected to learn about individual production. This finding suggests that norms in marriage may be an important factor contributing to gender inequality in the labor market.

The spread of Covid-19 led to social restrictions of various kinds, of which closing schools was one. This paper studies the effect of school closures on parental labor supply. To this end, I use repeated cross-sectional data on households at the monthly level from the US Current Population Survey (CPS), and employ a difference-in-differences methodology where I compare the labor market outcomes for parents to school-aged children that require supervision with parents to slightly older children, before and after March 2020. The results show that there is a significant reduction in the labor supply of parents to younger children as a result of school closures, and that the effects are larger for mothers than for fathers.

This paper employs a three period overlapping generations' model to investigate (i) the labor supply effects of the linkage between the benefits of a pay-as-you-go social security program and the payroll taxes that finance them and (ii) the nature of the optimal linkage. The main result of the paper is that, for a given statuary tax rate, the weights that must be placed on earnings of different periods (in benefit calculation) depend on population and productivity growth rates only. This result implies that the optimal net tax rates are not uniform over the life cycle unless the economy is on its steady state golden rule path. Moreover, if the economy is on the golden rule path, the optimal net tax rates are not only uniform but also zero. The paper also demonstrates that, if preferences are additively separable, as more weight is placed on earnings when young labor supply by the young increases while labor supply by the middle-aged decreases.

Female labor and commuting behavior has been inappropriately approached by traditional economic and location theories. While labor economists assume that commuting is a "fixed" element of the cost-of-entrance, they ignore the spatial variation in wage rate or job opportunities. Urban economists, on the other hand, treat the variation in commuting distance as a function of household housing consumption, and a "fixed" amount of labor supply is assumed. Both assumptions are unrealistic, especially in the case of females. The major contention raised in this study is that labor supply and commuting behavior are interrelated decisions. This "simultaneity" relationship should be captured by any model studying either labor or commuting behavior. In the case of female household members, time as a scarce resource must be allocated more efficiently since women are traditionally assigned housework responsibility--be they housewives or working women. A simultaneous-equation model has been specified to simulate the household decision of appropriating its (economic and human) resources among female income-earning activities--i.e., market labor supply and commuting--and housework. Time is adopted as the measurement unit of the three endogenous variables. Demographic and environmental variables are included in order to obtain the most efficient estimation and to link the results of this research to other economic and sociological studies. A two-stage Tobit and OLS estimation procedure is employed, according to the characteristics of the data, to avoid the selection bias problem (Tobin, 1958; Killingsworth, 1983). The results derived give (empirical) support to the theoretical argument that the relationship between commuting and labor supply is not a single-direction one, suggesting that the estimation of the traditional single-equation model may well be subject to serious specification bias. The theoretical and empirical inferences provided by this study contribute to a better understanding of how a household perceives its female members' domestic service and income-earning activity. Also, theoretically, the estimation can be used to give a more precise measure of the local (potential) labor pool and a more precise prediction of the amount of (female) commuters using certain routes. All these contributions have significance with respect to the firm's location decision and production planning, and the planning for the provisions of other public services.

With an annual growth of almost 20% since the year 2000, Indian merchandise exports exceeded 300 billion U.S. dollars in 2012. The country is becoming a major supplier to the world. However, companies sourcing products and operating in India are experiencing a variety of supply chain disruptions that impede their operations and finances. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the frequency, impact and severity of supply chain risks experienced by companies in India, as well as assess the usefulness of mitigation methods and enquire about future expected disruptions. It is hoped that the results will prepare managers to better prioritize their supply chain risk management efforts and investments. The scope of this study is upstream (sourcing and operations) disruptions that affected Indian supply chains over the past three years, including the areas of logistics and transportation. The methodology is a quantitative, empirical study, using a survey instrument in the form of a questionnaire distributed electronically to thousands of members of four prominent trade associations in India. The platform for the questionnaire is a modification of a traditional risk analysis progression: mapping, identifying, assessing, mitigating and improving, also dubbed "MIAMI". The main findings are that there are major and significant differences in severity (frequency and impact) between the thirteen risk categories presented. There are also significant group differences among the respondents. Traditional mitigation methods differ with respect to usefulness, and expected risks are somewhat different than past risks. Conclusions reached are that chronic risks such as inadequate transportation, logistics and utilities infrastructure, supplier and labor problems, and bureaucracy/red tape are more severe than highly publicized and visible risks such as natural disasters, terrorism and crime. Traditional mitigation methods are useful for many of the disruptions, but ineffective for non-physical risks. There is a certain optimism with respect to future infrastructure related disruptions. Limitations of the study include a relatively low response rate, the classic difficulty in risk analysis of comparing and scaling the impact of disruptions, and that it is not fine grained enough to fully describe any specific industry sectors. This study contributes to the field of supply chain risk management by adding crucial empirical information from a heretofore unexplored market.

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