This dissertation examines how governmental policies and other incentives have shaped the health insurance market over the period 1900-1960. The dissertation opens with an examination of the early health insurance market, and identifies key factors that contributed to both the initial development of the health insurance market, as well as to its development over time. While rising medical expenditures are usually posited as the catalyst for the initial development and the later growth of the market, results suggest that the true story of market development is more detailed. Strategic behavior on the part of hospitals affected health insurance markets, as did state-level regulatory policies. In addition to state-level government policies, policies at the federal level also had a fundamental impact on the development of health insurance in the United States. A major portion of the dissertation is devoted to examining the impact of the 1954 tax subsidy of employer-provided health insurance. For the first time, the tax subsidy can be analyzed using data that span the period of its implementation. Analysis conducted with these data indicates that the implementation of the tax subsidy generated an increase in the amount of health insurance coverage purchased by lowering its relative price. Perhaps more importantly, the tax subsidy encouraged the development of group health insurance. This partially tax-induced institutional change made health insurance available to more people, and affirmed the development of employer-based health insurance in the United States. The dissertation also focuses on two aspects of the relationship between health insurance and medical expenditures. First, what affect did the tax subsidy have on medical expenditures? Insured households spent more on medical care than their uninsured counterparts. Since the tax subsidy generated an increase in the number of people with insurance, it also contributed to a corresponding increase in medical expenditures. Second, since health insurance coverage during the 1950s was much more heterogeneous than it is today, the dissertation is able to examine the effect of increasing the comprehensiveness of coverage on medical expenditures. Surprisingly, increasingly comprehensive insurance coverage did not necessarily lead to higher medical expenditures in the 1950s.

The purpose of this dissertation is to consider a decentralized model, as opposed to the traditional centralized model, to explain the economic organization of the Late Bronze Age. The goals of this study are threefold: (1) to examine the internal economic organization of southern Canaan during the Late Bronze Age through a comparison of the textual and archaeological data and by comparison to neighboring cultures, (2) to examine and test the applicability of the "city-state" and the "dendritic-trade" model to Late Bronze Age southern Canaan, and (3) to suggest that a system of wealth finance, based on the distribution of imported pottery, was used to encourage villagers to participate in the trade networks. Chapter Two reviews the history of both social and economic theory pertaining to the Late Bronze Age in Syria-Palestine. Chapter Three describes the neighboring economic systems of Mycenaean Greece, Crete, Cyprus and Ugarit. Chapter Four is a database of all archaeological material used in this study. Chapter Five considers the relevant textual information. Chapter Six is a synthesis of the archaeological and textual material by which potential dendritic trade routes are modeled. Chapter Seven presents two case studies on Megiddo and Yavneh-Yam that provide further support for the Dendritic-Trade network Model.

Workers' compensation insurance in the United States began in the early twentieth century when states rapidly enacted their own versions to protect workers and limit the liability of employers. Premiums account for two percent of payrolls, and substantially more in dangerous industries, and therefore represent an important portion of the modern employment compensation package. The introductory section provides an overview of worker's compensation insurance. The second chapter outlines the crucial issues relevant to workers' compensation programs between 1930 and 2000. It also explains how the program has evolved over the past seventy years. The third chapter delves into the political economy of workers' compensation benefits. States passed workers' compensation laws in the early twentieth century and continue to frequently update important aspects of these statutes. The trend has been for state legislatures to mandate more generous benefits; however, these changes seldom occur simultaneously in all states. A panel dataset is used to explain why states mandate unequal benefits. These benefits differ in several ways, including wage replacement rates, maximum weekly benefits, and the duration of payments. To take into account the important variation, state-level information is used to construct an index that describes the expected net present value of benefits an average worker might expect to receive in each state for each year. The results suggest that federal and state governments, employment characteristics, and unionization each influence overall benefits. Then, the interaction between the wages that workers earn and their state-mandated workers' compensation benefits is explored. Economic theory implies that, all else equal, higher expected benefits will be offset by lower wages. A new strategy is developed to reduce the biases inherent in the earlier estimation techniques. I apply a two-step procedure that divides the sample and uses separate measures of benefits to understand the impact on workers' wages. The results suggest that wage offsets are largely avoided by high-wage workers and offsets for workers in hazardous occupations vary over time.

The word, competition, entered economic discourse slowly and naturally, over many decades and even centuries, as a term of common usage. From that point of view, I trace the development of the word, as it underwent various conceptual modifications en route to the more technical concept of perfect competition. The growing divergence between the ordinary meaning and the technical concept of competition represents one of the many gauges of the progress of economics towards becoming a rigorous science, but that divergence has also brought with it a number of problems. Thus, the purpose of my thesis is two-fold: it is both a scholarly and a didactic one. As for scholarship, I set forth a textually accurate account of how the word competition has figured in the early rise and the more mature consolidation of economics as a special discipline, in which the abstract idea of a "perfect" type of market competition was employed by economists as an heuristic fiction, to bring together all the separate elements of what Edgeworth has so nicely termed the Economic Calculus. As for didactics, my thesis also serves as an exercise in identifying several root problems stemming from the concept of competition, both in its common and technical forms. Suggestions are made as to how some of the perplexities of present-day economic theory, based on the notion of perfect competition, can be resolved. Key Themes:- In Chapter I, four major themes are announced and subjected to semantic analysis. Eunning throughout the remainder of the history, they refer to the dualities, ambiguities and qualities of vagueness and imprecision which pertain to the common-sense or ordinary notion of competitive conduct, understood as the striving of two or more persons against one another for the same object. Upon careful study, competition is readily seen to be both equilibrating and disequilibrating in its tendencies, comprising both innovative and adaptive patterns of behaviour, and is both freeing and constraining in its effects, entailing as it does not only deliberate and conscious striving (or the exercise of free will) but as well the clash of opposing interests, or contention between two or more persons, Themes 1 and II. As a consequence of the foregoing dualities, the word itself holds out emotive connotations that are both positive and negative (Theme III), giving the word a character of ambivalence which is inherent from its very root meaning. Thus, in its role as a principle of economic thought, competition has elicited widely, and sometimes wildly, varying responses from those who have contemplated its workings and have passed judgement upon its status. Finally, because of its very abstraction or generality of meaning, the common-sense idea of competition is imprecise and open-ended, insofar as its general meaning specifies nothing about (a) the nature of the objectives of competitive pursuit, (b) the Betting in which competitive striving takes place, (c) the participants and their grouping into competitive "units," and (d) the strategies and patterns of conduct followed - Theme IV. Critical Episodes:- The historical narrative proceeds, for the most part, in a chronological sequence, and is organized around a series of decisive moments, when crucial turning-points are reached and passed, separating distinct traditions of thought, or else marking the subtle transition from one mode of reasoning to another. After a brief preliminary survey of the medieval and early modern scholastic literature, the main historical narrative begins essentially with an account of the "classical" mercantilist literature of the first half of the 17th century, with its emphasis upon national rivalries and the so-called balance-of-trade doctrine. With these preparatory steps taken, the remainder of the historical content of the thesis can be summarized in terms of the following critical episodes:- 1. l670s-1700. The beginnings of the breakdown of the classical mercantilist doctrine is accompanied by subtle shift away from the emphasis upon national rivalry towards a more individualized and sectionalized understanding of competitive interdependence, in which the negative overtones of (national) conflict in market exchange are gradually replaced by a more positive attitude towards competition as a stimulus to economic progress and efficiency. 2. 1750s-1776. The final breakdown of the mercantile logic, as the dominant influence over economic thought, occurs with the sudden and dramatic rise and momentary ascendancy of the physiocratio school, a decisive confrontation taking place between Forbonnais, latter-day exponent of "liberal mercantilism," and Quesnay, Baudeau and others of the new school (1766-68). As a principle of harmony in the physiocratic doctrine, market competition is depicted as an exchange of equivalents between individuals, and hence a limited but beneficial force in economic affairs.Adam Smith, sharing the physiocrats' liberal attitude and individualized concept of competition, adapts and improves their economic calculus, giving to competition a more positive and directive role, by showing how it regulates and thus facilitates market exchange, which in turn allows for a more productive employment of resources. 3. 1815-1848. Building upon Smith's foundations of economic liberalism, the classical economists make important conceptual and analytical advances in regard to the economic calculus, such as in enunciating the law of diminishing returns, but do rather little to alter Smith's treatment of competition. A crisis in classical liberalism is soon reached (c. 1825), in facing the newly emergent tradition of socialist thought, whereby there ensues a fierce clash of opinion concerning such things as the freeing versus constraining character of competition. As a result, the behavioural process of competition tends to become associated with a particular set of economic institutions (property, contract, markets, and market exchange). The debate points to the need to distinguish between primary and secondary income distribution (paralleling that of "class" and "individual") and the need to clarify the nature of competitive grouping. 4. 1866-71. After much delay, there occurs a transition from the classical modes of verbal reasoning towards the neoclassical styles and methods of mathematical reasoning, a transition which was hastened by Thornton's sharp attack upon competition as a law-like principle (1866) and by Jevons's response to the growing need to improve the classical value theory. However, the substance of classical doctrine is retained in neoclassical theory, as is shown by the instrumental role played by "perfect" competition, as an heuristic fiction used in the building of the neoclassical calculus. This source of continuity is qualified, though, to the extent that the classical principle of competition is supported less and less by a direct intuitive appeal to empirical evidence and more and more by the resort to abstraction and the logical rigour of mathematical theory. 5. 1889-91. After a decade or more of rapid progress and genuine improvement and refinement of mathematical technique of analysis, neoclassical theory reaches a state of crisis, brief in duration but far-reaching in its implications, when Edgeworth's static approach to equilibrium analysis departs from the Valrasian dynamics of tatonnement, faintly signalling the onset of a new outlook as to the nature and purpose of abstract economics.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0620. Advisers: Carol Neely; Robert Markley. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 187-201) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

This thesis examines the central figures of the mid-eighteenth century book trade and places them within the broader historical moment by exploring booksellers as individuals in Hanoverian society as well as principal actors in the proliferation of printed material during the mid-century period. It argues that booksellers of the mid-eighteenth century were instrumental in cultivating the widespread fascination with books within Hanoverian society. During the mid-eighteenth century period, Britons enjoyed an unprecedented array of readily available titles, and this dramatic increase in published material available for consumption owed much to the activities of the booksellers in the literary marketplace. The lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 made it considerably easier for Britons of the middling ranks to set up book businesses, resulting in an increasingly competitive book trade throughout the eighteenth century. By the 1730s, the trade was in a state of flux, the initial cohort of post-1695 booksellers was leaving the trade, creating a particularly lucrative market for newcomers. In the years that followed, many new booksellers, including Robert Dodsley and Andrew Millar, established successful shops founded on business principles. The activities of these booksellers shifted principles of the book trade from the literary merits to the profitability of a title. Through publishing catalogues and advertisements, booksellers promoted books as fashionable commodities and offered features that emphasized the novelty of each edition, such as paper, art, and additional chapters. Profitability permeated the mid-eighteenth century trade, as it shaped the manner in which booksellers marketed their titles to the literate and book-buying public, as well as the way booksellers understood their own copyright property. Appeals for further protection of their non-traditional forms of property culminated in the landmark Donaldson v. Becket legal decision of 1774 that abolished the traditional concept of perpetual copyright and resulted in further changes in the book trade of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In addition to its influence on concepts of property, the commercial book trade encouraged Britons, including women, to both produce and to consume literature. In transforming the literary marketplace, booksellers of the mid-eighteenth century fostered the development of a discerning book buying public craving literary commodities of all sorts.

Location matters. A firm's proximity to other firms, finance, and infrastructure affects its profitability and productivity. My dissertation examines how. In chapter one, I quantify the underlying sources of agglomeration, or productivity gains from co-location, and investigate the extent to which those sources changed from 1880 to 1990. In chapter two, I shift to proximity to finance and measure the impact of local bank distress on local manufacturing outcomes during a period of unprecedented---and unrepeated---financial panic, the Great Depression. And in chapter three, I study the importance of local capital and infrastructure destruction on agricultural and manufacturing outcomes using General William Sherman's 1864-1865 march through the US South. Together, my dissertation chapters shed light on the influence of location on firm profitability and productivity, and in turn, US economic growth from 1860 to 1990. / Economics

The late Iron Age in the ancient Near East was a period marked by dramatic changes. Politically, the rise of the Neo-Assyrian empire ushers in the beginning of imperial rule. At the same time, Phoenician expansion efforts across the Mediterranean, and the emerging South Arabian caravan trade led to greater connectivity across the ancient Near East and Mediterranean worlds. In the southern Levant, the late Iron Age is also a period marked by change, including large scale urbanization at sites such as Jerusalem and Ekron, increased scale of production of goods such as wine and olive oil on the coastal plain, and increased settlement in previously marginal areas such as the Negev and Judean deserts. Yet despite all of these changes, the local economy shows a remarkable continuity with previous periods. In this dissertation we examine the regional economy of the southern Levant, focusing on Judah and the Philistine city-states, during the 8th-7th centuries BCE through the lens of New Institutional Economics. In order to do this, we focus on the different regional players that impacted economic life during this time period: the local producers and consumers living in the southern Levant, the imperial governing structures of the Assyrians, the emerging caravan trade from the Arabian peninsula, and the world of the Mediterranean trade networks of the Phoenicians and Greeks. By examining the archaeological and textual evidence relating to these different players we attempt to build a picture of the diverse social contexts, or institutions, that governed different spheres of economic behavior. Furthermore, we examine how these different regional players encouraged and motivated participation in a large variety of overlapping social contexts, and explain changes and developments in local economic structures during the late Iron Age. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

In my first chapter, I consider the long-term effects of World War II on women. WWII drew women into the workforce in unprecedented numbers and, often, into atypical occupations. After the war, they returned home where they became the mothers of the baby boom generation. Their daughters changed the female labor force by pursuing higher education and careers. My research analyzes whether cultural change during World War II helped to produce this break with the past. I use data on war manufacturing infrastructure and armed forces mobilization rates to predict whether the daughters were affected by the war's impact on their mothers. I also construct a measure of predicted war plants using pre-war infrastructure to remove the possibility of an endogenous decision to locate plants where women were particularly amenable to employment. My analysis shows that these war-related variables increased baby boomer women's education, although not their labor force participation. The primary impact was on their attainment of a college degree. The Quiet Revolution in women's employment, careers and education was therefore impacted greatly by their mothers' experiences before their daughters were born. My second chapter also considers intergenerational impacts on women's careers, though in a more contemporary context. This chapter considers the effect of a stay-at-home mother on her daughter's career choice, specifically her tendency to choose her father's career. I provide some descriptive statistics of women who choose to be homemakers and those who have chosen their parents' occupations. I hypothesize that a woman with a stay-at-home mom is more likely to choose her father's career, given that she lacks a female occupational role model in the home. I find no conclusive evidence of this, even when I only examine women in competitive careers. However, I do find statistically significant effects of the community in which she grows up. Women who grew up in communities where women were employed in competitive careers are less likely to choose their father's careers. Communities with men who are employed in competitive careers are more likely to produce women who inherit their father's occupation. Such a decision proves highly advantageous, since women in their father's careers earn more, while women in their mother's careers earn less. My final chapter focuses on the rural South and analyzes trends in segregation due to private schools. Though in less extreme conditions than during the 1960's, school children are still segregated by race. Throughout the United States, this primarily occurs because of residential segregation. But there exists a unique pattern and opportunity in the heart of the South, its rural communities. Segregation in the rural South occurs largely through the presence of private schools. This is fascinating in that different races can live relatively near each other but never go to school together. White students' enrollment in private schools is highly dependent on the black proportion of the student population. Thus, black students in public schools in largely black areas have even fewer white peers. Segregation due to private schools is highest within the Cotton Belt, a region historically known for racism. The evidence is also consistent with a detrimental effect of private schools on public school funding. I find that rural Southern school districts with high levels of private school segregation also have low levels of school resources per student, even after controlling for what the median voter could afford. Using votes for segregationist presidential candidate Strom Thurmond as an instrument for segregation due to private schools only strengthens the results. Moreover, the recent increases in white enrollment at private schools may be slowly increasing racial separation due to private schools. / Business Economics

Abstract not available.