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<p>This thesis comprises three essays. The first two essays examine what inferences can be drawn about the structure of wages from the experiences of displaced workers using the Ontario Ministry of Labour Plant Closure Survey. The third essay examines the effect of unemployment benefits on household consumption during spells of unemployment, with a particular emphasis on durables purchases. It employs data from a second and new data source, the Canadian Out of Employment Panel.</p> <p>The first essay revisits the issue of what can be learned about wage tenure profiles from displaced worker data. The positive relationship between wages and tenure in cross section data is consistent with the accumulation of firm specific capital. Alternatively, it may be explained by unobserved heterogeniety across workers, or by endogenous mobility. Displaced worker data is quite helpful in correcting for the first possible bias, and less so for the second. The relationship between various estimation strategies in the literature is illustrated. Estimates that control for individual heterogeniety and endogenous mobility driven by systematic differences in the pay policies of firms are presented. In this data, 10 years of tenure appears to raise wages by about 7%.</p> <p>The second essay examines intra-industry wage differentials. Even after conditioning on a rich set of worker and job characteristics, firm of employment is a significant determinant of wages. Estimates that employ the longitudinal nature of data demonstrate that sorting of workers across firms by unobserved ability can explain about half of the observed differentials. Firm wage differentials are observed within narrow industries, consistent across broad occupational groups, and robust to conditioning on differences in the mix of skills or job characteristics. Further "high wage" firms exhibit high average tenures suggesting that positive wage premia are associated with reduced mobility. These observations imply that compensating wage differentials are also a poor candidate explanation for the observed differentials. The results are more consistent with models based on rents or some firm monopsony power. The results also raise questions about the interpretation of wage regressions which ignore firm heterogeneity, and about the sources of wages losses among displaced workers.</p> <p> The final essay examines how households smooth consumption over the income losses due to an unemployment spell. A model of "internal capital markets" is proposed, which suggests that households adjust the timing of the replacement of small durables to income flows. The plausibility of this model is investigated empirically, using a series of program changes in the Canadian unemployment insurance scheme for exogenous variation in transitory income. The data are consistent with the predictions of the "internal capital markets model" while rejecting both a standard life cycle model and a "rule of thumb" model of household expenditure patterns.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Yes / The study analyses approaches to the management of two projects within the regeneration portfolio of a large UK metropolitan council. Developing a theoretical framework drawing both from mainstream project methodologies and international development, the study highlights a number of key issues which need to be addressed, including entrepreneurship, participation, stakeholder buy-in, project lifecycles and benefit management. Key lessons emerging from the study include the need to foster entrepreneurship within the controlled environment of the project and the importance of setting programme targets which are appropriately orientated to harness the interdependent nature of benefits of regeneration projects in the public sector. / None

Although previous investigations have reported performance benefits following the administration of sodium bicarbonate, evidence of its influence on upper-body activity is limited. / Master of Science

This dissertation explores the role of science and technology in democracy and the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) through an illustrative case on a uranium mining controversy in the US state of Virginia. Arguably, traditional STS scholarship has primarily served what we might call an unmasking function by working to expose political, cultural, gender, corporate, and other factors that get masked by the cultural authority of scientific expertise. Following the lead of other STS scholars seeking to move beyond an unmasking-only mode of scholarship, this dissertation offers a novel take on the relationship between expertise and public controversy over technoscience by suggesting that cost-benefit analysis might serve a beneficial pro-democratic ritual role. To explore this question of the role played by expertise and what we might learn and recommend from approaching CBA as a democratic ritual, I consider the case of a uranium mining and milling controversy in Virginia. This controversy surfaced in two distinct historical moments and prominently featured technical studies utilizing expert predictive methods. I analyze these texts from the perspective of the sociopolitical ritual theory developed in the dissertation and then suggest a set of recommendations regarding how we might humanize and deploy CBA within the context of enhancing rituals that serve to maintain liberal democratic political imaginaries. / Ph. D.

This research presents a new environmental justice assessment toolkit, the Equitable Environmental Justice Assessment Toolkit 2016 (EEJAT 2016). The purpose of this toolkit is to enable urban planners to more effectively measure whether environmental justice populations (low-income, non-white, Limited English proficiency, disabled, or elderly persons) are disproportionately burdened by long-range transportation plans. This toolkit is based on the concept that effective assessment of environmental justice (EJ) in transportation planning requires assessment frameworks that methodologically unify three sometimes divergent interests: those of federal and state bodies enforcing EJ assessment requirements, those of metropolitan planners who face capacity constraints and need guidance on how to conduct these assessments, and, most importantly, those of the protected populations themselves. This thesis involved analysis of current requirements, exploration of existing environmental justice assessment tools, case studies, decision theory, and principles of equity, and stakeholder engagement through surveys, interviews, and public meetings, all towards the development of the toolkit designed for the Roanoke Valley Transportation Planning Organization (RVTPO)'s Constrained Long-range Multimodal Transportation Plan 2040 (CLRMTP 2040) released in 2016. The resulting toolkit is a multi-step framework. The first step is a GIS map-based EJ Index, structured by normalized population distributions for each EJ demographic, and mapped by block group compared to regional (MPO) averages. This z-score based mapping was done in lieu of Roanoke's former linear model in effort to more systematically compare effects, and to more accurately represent the data, and by extension, the people. Second, the Community Profile expands upon the EJ Index to include documentation of community elements and social and economic systematic injustices in the area. Next, a Benefits and Burdens matrix guides planners to an appropriate model or method of assessment for each EJ effect for the project at hand, based on project scale and type, data availability, and skillsets of the assessor. The results of these assessments of each EJ effect are compiled for an overall Project Impact Assessment. Checks on assessor bias based on stakeholder feedback and decision theory are incorporated into this Project Impact Assessment. Cumulatively, the toolkit is designed to incorporate equity as a defining element of both processes and outcomes, to be flexible in order to be applicable to multiple projects, and to be usable by practitioners. / Master of Urban and Regional Planning