This paper examines salary determination in the National Football League (NFL). The heterogeneity of teams and players in the league leads to thin labor markets. Under such circumstances, the neoclassical model in which labor supply and labor demand uniquely determine wages is too simple. Instead, a competing model of salary determination is tested - McLaughlin's (1994) rent-sharing model. This is the only study of its kind to investigate salary determination at a disaggregated level for all of the non-kicking positions in the NFL. A comprehensive model of salary determination, using many unique variables, is constructed and tested for each position. Quantile regression techniques are employed to examine the bargaining aspects of the model. Although, little support is found for the rent-sharing model, this study lays the groundwork and presents the argument for further investigation. / Economics

This dissertation includes three chapters. The first two chapters mainly focus on the effects of job displacement on earnings. The first chapter analyzes how the effects of job displacement on earnings vary among natives and immigrants in the United States, while the second chapter studies the distributional effects of job displacement using quantile regression and distribution regression. The third chapter considers the distributional effects of having children on women's income. In particular, I apply the Changes in Changes approach and distribution regression to study how the motherhood penalty varies across different women. Chapter 1, tilted THE HETEROGENEOUS EFFECTS OF JOB DISPLACEMENT ON IMMIGRANT AND NATIVE WORKERS, extends the previous literature by analyzing the consequences of job displacement on weekly earnings among natives and immigrants in the United States and also examines whether job displacement has different effects among native displaced workers residing in states with different share of immigrants' population. Although there are contradictory findings in the literature about how immigrants would respond to labor market shocks differently from natives, the existing literature agreed on the fact that workers who involuntarily lose their jobs experience long spells of unemployment after displacement. Fully understanding the consequences of job displacement among natives and immigrants, and the role of the share of immigrants' population on native displaced workers may help policy-makers to better formulate immigration policies as well as off-setting labor market policies for displaced workers. My results show that some groups of immigrants experience slightly smaller earning losses following displacement compared to natives, and I did not find significant effects of the share of immigrants on the earning loss of native displaced workers. Chapter 2, titled HETEROGENEOUS EFFECTS OF JOB DISPLACEMENT ON EARNINGS (with Brantly Callaway), considers how the effect of job displacement varies across different individuals. In particular, our interest centers on features of the distribution of the \textit{individual-level} effect of job displacement. Identifying features of this distribution is particularly challenging -- e.g., even if we could randomly assign workers to be displaced or not, many of the parameters that we consider would not be point identified. We exploit our access to panel data, and our approach relies on comparing outcomes of displaced workers to outcomes the same workers would have experienced if they had not been displaced and if they maintained the same rank in the distribution of earnings as they had before they were displaced. Using data from the Displaced Workers Survey, we find that displaced workers earn about \$157 per week less than they would have earned if they had not been displaced. We also find that there is substantial heterogeneity. We estimate that 42\% of workers have higher earnings than they would have had if they had not been displaced and that a large fraction of workers have substantially lower earnings than the average effect of displacement. Finally, we also document major differences in the distribution of the effect of job displacement across education levels, sex, age, and counterfactual earnings levels. Throughout the paper, we rely heavily on quantile regression. First, we use quantile regression as a flexible (yet feasible) first step estimator of conditional distributions and quantile functions that our main results build on. We also use quantile regression to study how covariates affect the distribution of the individual-level effect of job displacement. Chapter 3, titled THE HETEROGENEOUS EFFECTS OF HAVING CHILDREN ON WOMEN'S INCOME, estimates the distributional effects of having children on women's annual income in the United States using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1979 to 2016. Existing work on motherhood penalty shows that while the wage gap among men and women becomes smaller in the United States, the gap between mothers and childless women is increasing (\cite{waldfogel1998understanding}). After childbirth, women usually experience an immediate decrease in their earnings relative to what they would have earned if they had not become a mother. The gap closes somewhat over time though mothers never fully catch up to their counterfactuals. Previous work tried to explain the motherhood wage penalty by estimating the average treatment effect of children on women's earnings, but these effects can be quite heterogeneous across mothers with different observable characteristics. By utilizing the Changes-in-Changes model and distribution regression, I find that around 90\% of mothers have lower income after having children. White, married, older, and highly educated mothers with two or more children experience a substantial drop in their income. / Economics

Bhushan (1989), O'Brien and Bhushan (1990) and Brennan and Hughes (1991) have identified specific firm characteristics that they find to be associated with either the level of analyst following or year-to-year changes in security analyst coverage (or both). This dissertation extends these investigations by examining additional earnings-related firm-specific variables that were found to be significantly associated with aggregate analyst coverage decisions. / Drawing upon findings reported in the "earnings response coefficient" literature, I argue that analysts have an incentive to identify and follow those firms whose time-series properties reveal historically persistent earnings innovations and less predictable earnings patterns. Two additional hypotheses first posed by King, Pownall and Waymire (1990) concerning analyst coverage were also examined within the framework of the developed model. Finally, market value was disaggregated into separate price and shares outstanding variables to investigate differential effects. / The results indicate that analysts can and do identify those firms with more persistent and less predictable earnings and concentrate research effort on these companies vis-a-vis other sample firms. The hypotheses of King et al. (1990) were also confirmed. The findings suggest that more analysts follow those firms with an earnings history that has proven informative in predicting earnings changes of industry co-members. Also, increased levels of (size-adjusted) research and development expenditures attracts analyst attention. Finally, as predicted, shares outstanding was found to be positively associated with analyst coverage while the effect of share price proved insignificant. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-10, Section: A, page: 3584. / Major Professor: Kenneth S. Lorek. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

This dissertation contains three independent essays on labor market issues that are most relevant for Latin American countries from a development economics standpoint. The first essay is about microenterprises' informality. Our research question is whether access to physical and human capital play a role in the decision of a microentrepreneur to become formal. Results show that human and physical capital are essential in explaining institutional participation. Thus, the transition towards formality would only be natural for firms with access to credit, education, and training The second essay studies the relationship between women's bargaining power in the household and female labor supply in Chile and Nicaragua. Most cooperative and non-cooperative bargaining models incorporate bargaining power as an exogenous factor in the determination of female labor force participation and number of hours worked. The objective of this essay is to establish whether bargaining power is an exogenous or endogenous determinant of labor force participation and labor supply in a specific theoretical and empirical context. Our findings indicate that appropriate treatment of simultaneous causality is essential to study the relationship among bargaining power, labor force participation, and labor supply The purpose of the last essay is to study the impact of occupational choice on measures of inter-sectoral wage differentials in the context of urban Mexico, employing individual survey data. The existence of wide inter-sectoral wage differentials unexplained by human capital characteristics has important implications both for labor economics theory and labor markets policy. One weakness of current estimations of inter-sectoral wage differentials is the lack of appropriate consideration of occupational choice. We propose to use a model of earnings and occupational choice, which employs a multinomial logit specification to predict the probabilities of having selected an occupation for workers who are already in the labor force. We estimate inter-sectoral wage differentials using the traditional least squares regression with dummies as a benchmark. In general the interval of wage variation explained by inter-sectoral wage gaps is reduced when using selectivity corrected log-wage regressions for each occupation / acase@tulane.edu

This paper analyzes the effects of minimum wages on employment and the wage distribution in Colombia from 2006 to 2010. Specifically, it uses multinomial logistic regressions to explore the effects of the minimum wage on the probability of being unemployed, employed or inactive and on the odds of being a formal worker, an informal employee or self-employed. Unconditional quantile regressions are employed to observe the effect of the minimum wage on the gender differentiated wage distribution. The study uses data from the new National Household Survey (Gran Encuesta Integrada de Hogares, GEIH) which contains significant changes relative to the previous Survey and has not been used for analytic purposes yet. Results show that increases in the minimum wage raise both the probabilities of being employed and unemployed relative to inactive, but the effect on unemployment is larger. Informal workers are more affected by increases in the minimum wage, although the odds of having either a formal or an informal job relative to being an independent worker decline with a raise in the wage. In terms of wages, for male and female workers, increases in the minimum wage tend to reduce the reported wages at the tails of the distribution, while increasing the salaries of those in the middle, creating a compression effect. In addition a simple simulation showed that increasing the minimum wage results in reductions in wage inequality at the right tail of the distribution but not at the left tail, which has important inequality consequences for poor and low-skilled workers.

This study builds on an ever growing health demand and retirement literature. I extend the literature on structural models by developing and estimating a stochastic model that jointly considers health status, retirement and consumption in a life-cycle framework. I also use a number of specifications of reduced form models for mortality, morbidity, and labor withdrawal to examine the influence of social and economic factors and to study the difference in the experiences of black and white men. I develop and estimate a model that has the following characteristics: it (a) jointly determines health demand and labor supply, (b) allows the decisions to be made in a life-cycle framework, (c) is set in a stochastic environment, and (d) relaxes the assumption of intertemporally separable preferences by using a dynamic preference structure which incorporates forms of intertemporal nonseparability. Closed-form solutions can only be reached if strong and unrealistic restrictions are imposed on the model. This problem is solved by using generalized method of moments estimation on the set of highly nonlinear Euler equations. I use a number of models to explore black white inequalities in the United States with regard to mortality and morbidity for older men and to study the extent to which such differences are associated with observed differences in socioeconomic characteristics. Two measures of health status are used: a categorical variable of self-assessed health and a continuous variable that combines subjective and objective measures of health status. Within a race, the estimates are robust to changes in statistical specifications. Between races, the estimates differ in magnitude and statistical significance. By using the observed characteristics of black men in the sample in the equations of white men, I find that most of the differences in the health status of the two groups disappears. I estimate five labor withdrawal models at two stages of the life-cycle, early retirement and late retirement. I look at the social and economic determinants of early labor withdrawal and advanced-age work effort for black and white men. I also study the robustness of the relationships between the socioeconomic variables and labor withdrawal as the definition of retirement changes.

<p>Over my Ph.D. study, I work on various projects about the school choice reform in New York City, with a special focus on understanding how students or parents choose high schools and evaluating education policies. Specifically, my dissertation consists of two essays: the first one aims to detect whether small schools are effective in improving students' academic performance; the second one measures how one's own school choice is affected by his or her neighbors. </p><p>In the first chapter, which is coauthored with Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag Pathak, We use assignment lotteries embedded in New York City's high school match to estimate the effects of attendance at a new small high school on student achievement. More than 150 unselective small high schools created between 2002 and 2008 have enhanced autonomy, but operate within-district with traditional public school teachers, principals, and collectively-bargained work rules. Lottery estimates show positive score gains in Mathematics, English, Science, and History, more</p><p>credit accumulation, and higher graduation rates. Small school attendance causes a substantial increase in college enrollment, with a marked shift to CUNY institutions. Students are also less likely to require remediation in reading and writing when at college. Detailed school surveys indicate that students at small schools are more engaged and closely monitored, despite fewer</p><p>course offerings and activities. Teachers report greater feedback, increased safety, and improved collaboration. The results show that school size is an important factor in education production</p><p>and highlight the potential for within-district reform strategies to substantially improve</p><p>student achievement.</p><p>In the second chapter, I use the exact home addresses and the complete high school application records to estimate neighborhood impact on the choice of high schools in the New York city. This paper converts home addresses to location coordinates and exploit that metric to rank students' neighbors by distance and estimate the marginal influence of the school choice of the immediate (ten nearest) neighbors relative to that of more distant neighbors. With the assumption that one's immediate neighbors are formed roughly randomly within the reference group, I find that students are 20\% more likely to rank the identical schools as their immediate neighbors than their more distant neighbors. The estimated effects are stronger among students with homogeneous ethnic and academic backgrounds. For a robustness check, I match the home addresses with the 2010 census data to group students into different census blocks and block groups. This alternative definition of neighborhood peers by census geographic boundaries further confirms the existence of social interactions on school choice. Further, I study if elder neighbors' experience of school choice benefits younger neighborhood peers. On one hand, information sharing can be beneficial: experience from older students improves their nearest neighbors' probability of being matched with their top choice. On the other hand, inefficient herding for students living in the less informed areas can be a disadvantage of neighborhood interactions.</p> / Dissertation

<p> This dissertation continues the tradition of identifying the unintended consequences of the US health insurance system. Its main contribution is to estimate the size of the distortions caused by the employer-based system and regulations intended to fix it, while using methods that are more novel and appropriate than those of previous work. </p><p> Chapter 1 examines the effect of state-level health insurance mandates, which are regulations intended to expand access to health insurance. It finds that these regulations have the unintended consequence of increasing insurance premiums, and that these regulations have been responsible for 9&ndash;23% of premium increases since 1996. The main contribution of the chapter is that its results are more general than previous work, since it considers many more years of data, and it studies the employer-based plans that cover most Americans rather than the much less common individual plans. </p><p> Whereas Chapter 1 estimates the effect of the average mandate on premiums, Chapter 2 focuses on a specific mandate, one that requires insurers to cover prostate cancer screenings. The focus on a single mandate allows a broader and more careful analysis that demonstrates how health policies spill over to affect the labor market. I find that the mandate has a significant negative effect on the labor market outcomes of the very group it was intended to help. The mandate expands the treatments health insurance covers for men over age 50, but by doing so it makes them more expensive to insure and employ. Employers respond to this added expense by lowering wages and hiring fewer men over age 50. According to the theoretical model put forward in the chapter, this suggests the mandate reduces total welfare. </p><p> Chapter 3 shows that the employer-based health insurance system has deterred entrepreneurship. It takes advantage of the natural experiment provided by the Affordable Care Act's dependent coverage mandate, which de-linked insurance from employment for many 19&ndash;25 year olds. Difference-in-difference estimates show that the mandate increased self-employment among the treated group by 13&ndash;24%. Instrumental variables estimates show that those who actually received parental health insurance as a result of the mandate were drastically more likely to start their own business. This suggest that concerns over health insurance are a major barrier to entrepreneurship in the United States.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Kinesiology, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 24, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4473. Adviser: Lawrence W. Fielding.

abstract: People going through homelessness in the contemporary U.S. struggle with a number of dehumanizing challenges. Even as some attempt to secure employment and end their homelessness, they may run into difficulties because they have been Othered to such a significant level. They have effectively been left out of society because of their lack of participation in its dominant activity as prescribed by market fundamentalism, the creation and exchange of goods. The following thesis seeks to explore the experience of homelessness for those within a homeless shelter environment in an economic-focused society. It utilizes Midrash Social Research Methodology (MSRM) to focus on the voice of the person going through homelessness, the marginalized Other. It relies on the phenomenology of the 20th-Century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in an effort to explore the meaning and knowledge to be found in conversations held with the Other. The goal of this thesis is to propose a purposeful refocusing on service through conversation. The issue of homelessness is multi-faceted and its causes are as diverse as the people who experience it. Service providers in particular must engage those being Othered, and they must provide support in ways that allow for pluralistic realities, not prescribing singular means of ending homelessness. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Social Justice and Human Rights 2011