An increasingly challenging phenomenon for both developing and advanced economies, the negative consequences of long-lasting youth unemployment both at the individual and the societal level are well established. The volatility of local economies in an era of recurrent global economic crisis may have solidified the disadvantaged status of young people within the larger economies. Understanding youth labor outcomes in developing countries may offer new perspectives for policy makers as well as help to unmask chronic problems in our economic systems and give direction to further studies concerning the youth labor market. / One might expect that declines in the size of the youth cohort observed in the past two decades would have contributed positively to labor outcomes of youth in developing countries. Panel fixed-effects regression analyses covering a span of the last 22 years in 18 economically advanced and 23 developing countries were conducted to test the impact of changes in the size of the youth cohort on youth employment and unemployment controlling for macroeconomic conditions. A second question this study focused on concerns the impact of individual supply factors on youth outcomes in Turkey. The roles of human capital factors such as education and of family factors such as parent and sibling characteristics related to social capital were tested using micro data from the Turkish Household Labor Force Survey and hierarchical modeling. The study also tested the impact of the structural characteristics of regions. / Analysis of time series data across countries illustrated that relative cohort size had no impact on youth labor market outcomes controlling for other factors, in contrast to the findings of earlier studies. Results of the micro-level analysis illustrated the varying impact of education, the significance of the role of both parents and siblings and the distinct nature of family dynamics in rural versus urban contexts and across genders. Both micro and macro analysis indicated that with the structural changes taking place in developing economies today coupled with their context-specific features, youth unemployment is both a problem in its own right and signifies a problem larger than itself.

Kevin Bales, through his study in Understanding Global Slavery: A Reader, provides an important quantitative analysis on the predictive factors of modern slavery. Upon examining his study though, several issues arise including too few observations for several of the variables and the lack of a regional variable. The author decided to rerun his study with replacements for the problematic variables used previously. Upon obtaining the results from this, the author examined development theory (development is believed to be closely liked to slavery), and began creating an alternative model, which eventually included the addition of a regional variable. This model differed from Bales', but showed that region matters in predicting modern slavery and further examination of the regions separated out shows there are differences in what predicts slavery in various regions. The potential policy implications include targeting appropriate programs in a region to fight the issues might lead to slavery there.

Recent academic studies reveal a pronounced trend of increasing income inequality in the United States. For those policymakers concerned with increasing income inequality, wage inequality is a logical policy focus. Wage inequality analyses often focus on demographic characteristics or education; however, a more subtle consideration is job mobility, i.e., the movement of an individual from job to job throughout his career. To the extent that particular job mobility patterns are associated with higher wages, unequal opportunity for workers either to make job changes or to remain in their current jobs can contribute to wage inequality in general. In this study, I focus on the relationship between job mobility and wages in order to understand which job mobility levels are associated with the highest wages for workers at different stages of their careers. Existing academic literature suggests that job mobility is associated with positive wage returns for workers early in their careers, but that the effect diminishes as workers gain experience and positive wage returns to job tenure grow stronger. These findings indicate that the relationships between job mobility, tenure, and wages may depend upon experience. Specifically, I hypothesize that high voluntary job mobility is associated with positive wage returns for low experience workers, while high tenure is associated with positive wage gains for high experience workers. To explore these relationships, I run several regression models that control for person and year fixed effects and a variety of time-varying control variables. I find evidence of positive wage returns associated with high voluntary job mobility, which appear to diminish as workers gain experience. I also find that high tenure is positively associated with higher wages for both low and high experience workers, not just for those workers with high work experience. In terms of policy implications, these findings broadly indicate that some work patterns could result in higher average wages than others, and that a diverse portfolio of labor policies may, therefore, stand to benefit workers who are just beginning their careers, whereas policies that foster increased tenure may create the greatest opportunity for wage growth among workers later in their careers.

Economies of obligation| Western Nicaraguan women and valuations of their work

This dissertation consists of three independent chapters. Chapter 1 examines the determinants and welfare implications of the increased geographic of workers by skill from 1980 to 2000. I estimate a structural spatial equilibrium model of local labor demand, housing supply, labor supply, and amenity levels. The estimates indicate that cross-city changes in firms' demands for high and low skill labor were the underlying forces driving the increase in geographic skill sorting. I find that the combined effects of changes in cities' wages, rents, and endogenous amenities increased well-being inequality between high school and college graduates by a significantly larger amount than would be suggested by the increase in the college wage gap alone. / Economics

This dissertation models occupational wage using a fusion of the economic model of supply and demand and an ecological theory of social groups. I argue that competition between different occupations for similar workers is a key element in determining the amount of labor supplied to occupations, and therefore also determines wages. The model places occupational groups in niches within a social space composed of the sociodemographic dimensions of age, education, race, and gender. Occupations compete in their niches for members with other occupations in the niche. High levels of competition lead to lower levels of supply, and, therefore, higher wages. This approach challenges a key assumption of current approaches to wage determination, namely that human capital dimensions are the only dimensions relevant to wage outcomes, and that the effect of these dimensions is constant and unidirectional. I address several lacuna evident in previous work. The model I present is the first truly structural model of occupational interdependence. The model treats the set of occupations holistically, as a interdependent system, rather than independently. In addition, I introduce price into the theory of community ecology, which has been heretofore ignored in this work. Finally, this dissertation presents a theory which may explain the so called dual labor market wage effect. Data is taken from nine consecutive years of the Current Population Survey (1983-1991). I estimate the rate of change of supply and demand in the occupational labor market using a simultaneous equations model which incorporates the effect of competition along multiple social dimensions. I estimate both unidimensional effects of competition along age and education and multidimensional effects of competition along age, education, race, and gender simultaneously.

In the past 10 years, state financial support for public universities has declined, when measured as a proportion of current-fund revenues. Whether in response to this decline or to satisfy other ends such as personal utility and prestige enhancement, universities and their faculty have sought alternative sources of revenue, mostly through increased research grants and contracts and student tuition and fees. The effects of these revenue changes are observed in the primary operating units of universities, academic departments, which serve as the primary focus of this study. These changes have promoted concern in recent years that public research universities devote too much of their scarce resources to research at the expense of teaching. Specifically, concerns over teaching productivity and quality abound, especially at the undergraduate level. These concerns have been explained theoretically in terms of faculty preferences to perform research and research-related tasks, over undergraduate instruction--The Economic Theory of the Firm; and in terms of the increasing influence of providers of external revenues upon the behavior of the institutions--Resource Dependency Theory. These two frameworks are used to examine whether changes in departmental revenue support patterns affect undergraduate education at major public research universities. To test the theories, departmental instructional and research productivity data from the 1994 and 1996 American Association of Universities Data Exchange (AAUDE) are examined. This sample data contains information on 8 public Research I universities, 200 departments, and 1000 data points for 1994, and 6 public Research I universities, 134 departments, and 680 data points for 1996. Seemingly Unrelated Regressions and Piecewise Linear Regressions, following a semi-log specification, are used to estimate the rate of return to instructional productivity, research productivity, and departmental quality, within the income production function of the departments. The primary finding was that although some shifts in resource allocation were observed to move in a direction that potentially favored research-related endeavors, i.e., graduate instruction and departmental quality, instruction, overall, was most greatly rewarded in the allocation process, and undergraduate instruction more so than graduate instruction.

Prior research (Luft 1994) has shown in a between-subjects laboratory setting that individual decision makers are more likely to accept an employment contract containing an incentive described as a bonus than one with identical payoffs described in penalty terms. Each of these budget-based contracts has exactly two potential payoffs; which payoff a given subject receives depends on whether the subject's task performance meets (or exceeds) the budget. Luft's (1994) results are interesting because they demonstrate in an individual decision-making setting the empirical invalidity of the assumption in most formal economic analyses that people are indifferent between such alternative verbal descriptions. However, there is continuing debate and mixed evidence on the issue of whether decisional behavior evident in individual decision-making settings is also evident in market settings. This research tests whether a preference for bonus incentives characterizes equilibrium in a laboratory setting in which subjects serving as employers in half (the other half) of the markets compete with each other to attract subjects serving as workers by offering them bonus (penalty) contracts. Worker subjects are always free to choose a fixed-pay contract. Market outcomes were consistent with the prediction of no significant bonus preference evident at equilibrium.

In the past 15 years, state financial support for public universities has declined, when measured as a proportion of current-fund revenues while expenditures, in the same time period have risen dramatically. In this mixed methods study, several theories were used to explain patterns of university resource allocation: The economic theory of the firm , resource dependency theory, rational/political and critical/political. The research combines d'Sylva's (1998) and Volk's (1995) work and considers, by measuring directly the role of administrators who have budget authority, the impact of the socially constructed production function. The study uses d'Sylva's work extensively in order to create the baseline econometric analysis by including the relevant variables. In addition, the study adds to the existing body of knowledge by providing a broader understanding of production functions that encompasses the role of the socially constructed production function by key administrators who have budget authority. To test and explore the theories, departmental instructional and research productivity data from the AY 1999 American Association of Universities Data Exchange are examined. The quantitative data sample consisted of 10 major public Research I universities and 152 departments. OLS and GLM regressions, following a semi-log specification were employed to estimate the rate of return to instructional productivity, research productivity, and departmental quality. The qualitative sample consisted of six administrators with budget authority from one Research I university. A thematic analysis technique was employed in order to identify salient themes related to internal resource allocation. Significant findings are that undergraduate instruction and departmental quality yield high returns to departmental earnings. Cross-subsidization exists and some departments within fields enjoy "halo effects" above and beyond their productivity and merit. In describing the socially constructed nature of such difference, one dean is cognizant that his college is very productive and efficient delivering "cheap" instruction, yet it is penalized in the allocation formula. Similarly, another dean is very aware that his college has large numbers of women and minorities that help in the "coloring" of the university, and that disadvantages his college in the allocation formula.

<p> Since the recognition of diabetes over 200 years ago, key fundamental breakthroughs have improved our understanding of the disease process and shaped the design of interventions for effective management. Unfortunately, the sky-rocketing increases in the number of persons with diabetes have slowed advances made in this field. Experts project that if current trends continue, one of every three U.S. adults will have diabetes by 2050. In the view of many researchers, the implications of this increase, along with a concomitant rise in diabetic complications, are profound. They indicate that this diabetic trend will result in increasing hospitalizations, disabilities and health care costs, as well as reduced quality of life and workforce productivity. </p><p> Understanding the triad of diabetes, hospitalization and work-productivity losses is therefore very important from a health policy perspective. To date, no study has examined the relationship between diabetes, the likelihood of hospitalization and the combined effect on labor force participation. Using a quantitative model and review of literature, this study 1) explores the impact of interventions designed to prevent and treat diabetes, 2) analyzes work-force productivity impacts, such as presenteeism and absenteeism, of diabetes-related acute events and 3) projects the growth of prevalence of diabetes in children 0-17 years. </p><p> The findings from this research are manifold: 1) For persons with diabetes, early enrolment in a chronic disease management intervention&mdash;before the development comorbidities that can aggravate the disease state&mdash;can delay the occurrence of any acute event necessitating hospitalization, emergency room visits and observations. 2) Diabetes results in significant productivity losses. In the cohort assessed, the productivity loss within a one-year period was about $2 million and approximately 20,000 lost workdays. Additional research is needed to elucidate the best approach to reduce presenteeism caused by diabetes. 3) By 2030 the number of children with diabetes will almost double the current children with diabetes population. Minority children will continue to bear a larger burden of the diabetes epidemic. The implications of this overall increase are enormous, especially with regard to more people having and managing diabetes for most of their lives.</p>