<p>Workers are remaining in the labor force at older ages and despite their desire to work, those without jobs face unprecedented durations of unemployment. Many of the unemployed lack current skills for jobs in demand and need to either upgrade their skills or be trained for a new occupation to become reemployed. An aging workforce combined with concerns about the long-term viability of social welfare programs has increased the importance of identifying strategies to encourage working at older ages. In recent years there has been increased focus on credential attainment through participation in publicly sponsored employment and training programs. While many older workers benefit from participation in publicly sponsored employment programs, they are less likely than their younger counterparts to receive training services. </p><p> This mixed methods research used a combination of multivariate regression, binary logistic regression, and key informant interviews to examine outcomes of older workers who participated in a training program through the Workforce Investment Act&rsquo;s (WIA) Dislocated Worker Program between April 1, 2008 and December 31, 2009 and/or enrolled in credential programs at community colleges. This involved interviews and site visits at 14 community colleges to gain an understanding of the role community colleges play in linking older students to credential or certificate programs and analysis of secondary data to evaluate the benefits of obtaining a credential. Unemployed workers aged 55 to74 were the focus of the quantitative portion of this research. </p><p> Attaining a credential through participation in WIA&rsquo;s Dislocated Worker Program resulted in improved employment and wage changes as compared to those who were not credentialed. Effective strategies for community college involvement in workforce training were identified and include outreach programs for older students, providing advice for specific programs of study, support during the program to ensure completion, job placement services, and continuing education for skill upgrading. Implementation of programs and policies that encourage work at older ages has the potential to improve economic security and reduce the risk of poverty in retirement. Community colleges and public workforce programs play an important role in meeting the education and training needs of an aging and increasingly diverse population. </p>

Our research examines the decision to participate in crime using a dynamic model of individual choice under uncertainty. The motivation for studying this decision in a dynamic framework is twofold. First, it allows us to formulate a theory of rational criminal choice, where agents anticipate the future consequences of their decisions. Second, it permits explanation of the temporal pattern displayed in aggregate arrest data. Across different countries, cities, and time periods, the aggregate arrest rate is a unimodal and positively skewed function of age. The standard static approach to crime offers no insight into the cause of this empirical regularity. We study criminality in a dynamic context by introducing social capital into the economic theory of crime. Social capital measures the extent to which an individual is bonded to legitimate society. The social control theory of crime posits that bonds to society strengthen as the individual ages, increasing the cost of deviant behavior, making criminal acts less likely. This hypothesis is consistent with the temporal pattern displayed in aggregate arrest data. In our formulation, preferences and legitimate income depend on the individual's stock of social capital. Rationality is imposed by requiring agents to take these effects into account. We empirically implement our model using panel data on a sample representative of young men in urban areas of the United States. Estimation is complicated by an omitted regressor problem, which arises because there are two possible future states--apprehension and escaping apprehension. Only one state is realized for each individual and subsequently observed by the econometrician. However, the unobserved choices in the state not realized enter the Euler equations. We resolve this problem by replacing the unobservables with Monte Carlo draws from the conditional empirical distribution of observed outcomes and using a Simulated Method of Moments estimator. Our results provide evidence in support of a social capital theory of crime. We find that social capital affects both preferences and earnings in the legitimate sector. Further, as predicted by social control theory, social capital becomes increasingly important over the life-cycle. This raises the cost associated with crime, making its occurrence less likely.

This study addresses the impact of Mexican illegal immigration on the U.S. labor market. It constitutes a first step towards developing rigorous structural econometric models that empirically analyze undocumented labor force dynamics. Structural estimation of the labor supply and the participation decision of illegal Mexican immigration requires the solution of intricate theoretical problems that have not been addressed in previous literature. The analysis developed here identifies those problems and proposes innovative solutions. In particular, undocumented participation in the U.S. labor market is studied in the context of life cycle theory and stochastic behavior. The empirical part of the analysis reviews the problems of sample selection and missing observations that characterize the available data on Mexican migration. The proposed empirical specification is evaluated employing limited dependent variables procedures, where a Tobit simultaneous equation model is solved using maximum likelihood methods. According to the empirical results, Mexican undocumented immigration may be viewed as a transitory phenomenon. Individuals switch back and forth between Mexico and the U.S. reacting not only to income differentials, but also to social, family and economic attachments in their home-communities. Mexican workers seem to have little incentives to invest in human capital specific to the U.S., such as the ability to speak English. This behavior may be result of the partial transferability of Mexican skills, i.e. formal education, to the secondary market in the United States. Finally, contrary to conventional wisdom, the empirical evidence suggests that exogenous increases in U.S. wages, i.e. a non-expected hike in the legal minimum wage, may actually discourage Mexican undocumented participation in the U.S. labor market.

Rent controls lead not only to a smaller market quantity of rental housing; they also result in a deterioration in the quality of available rental housing. A model of the labor market is presented in which the same kind of adjustment can take place when a minimum wage is imposed. The quality of a job is represented by the effort level which workers expend on the job. We assume that firms can observe and control this level of effort. This assumption may be particularly true of the lower paying jobs which would be most affected by the imposition of a minimum wage. Although effort can be controlled, there are limits to how much effort the firm would enforce. To begin with, enforcing effort is costly. In addition, workers have the option of working elsewhere or engaging in non-market activity. We examine the Pareto optimum and short-run perfectly competitive versions of this problem. The two coincide when the on-the-job utility takes a form which eliminates income effects. When a minimum wage is imposed, the short-run perfectly competitive system is no longer Pareto optimal, even in the "second best" sense. For commonly used functional forms, we find that required effort increases enough to make utility on the job decline when a minimum wage is imposed. This contradicts the classical notion that the workers who keep their jobs under a minimum wage are better off. The overall welfare generated by the system also declines. This type of adjustment in the quality of jobs is not accounted for in the standard analysis. When the adverse effects of a minimum wage are measured only in terms of lost employment, therefore, they may be underestimated.

<p> This dissertation is mainly concerned with the distribution of between individuals in the economy. </p><p> The first chapter (Chapter 1) examines the various problems with Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDPpc) as a measure of economic welfare. The chapter proposes the Vast Majority Income (VMI) as a new measure of economic welfare that combines both national income and income distribution in a single, intuitive measure. The VMI measures the average income per capita of the vast majority of the population, defined as the first 80 percent of the population within the income distribution. </p><p> Chapter 2 proposes a model of the labor market that has a statistical equilibrium wage rather than a single point equilibrium wage as in the standard microeconomic model of wage equalization. Using heterogeneous agent-based modeling techniques, the chapter presents a labor market model where wages equalize around an exponential distribution of wages. Compared to previous models of statistical equilibrium in economics, this model does not require a fixed average wage levels. </p><p> Chapter 3 proposes a measure of inclusive growth that is based on the concept and methodology of the VMI discussed in Chapter 1. The growth rate of the VMI across time is proposed as a measure of the inclusivity of growth. We then compare and contrast the growth rate of the VMI to the growth rate of GDP per capita, economic growth. The Chapter shows how the last thirty years were mostly a period of non-inclusive growth in the majority of developing economies. Growth in developing nations was accompanied by a worsening of the equality of income distribution and as a result the growth in the incomes of the vast majority (the bottom 80% of income earners) was 1% less than the growth in GDP per capita for the population as a whole in developing countries. </p>

<p> Abstract not available.</p>

<p> This dissertation explores catalysts to divorce and the effects of different shocks to marital stability. In order to determine how marriage market participation and job opportunities affect marital stability, a panel data set was constructed of all marriages and divorces (or annulments) granted in each county in the United States from 1965 to 1988. The divorce records are merged with county- level employment and population levels to estimate the employment and divorce rates. Using county level data this dissertation is able to exploit a number of labor-market geographical observation levels, such as state border regions, Statistical Metropolitan Areas (SMA), and Labor Market Areas (LMA). </p><p> The first chapter analyzes how changes in the number of available marriage-market participants in a community affect the marital stability of existing couples in the area. The analysis focuses on border regions of neighboring states and assesses the impact of fluctuations in divorcee population in one state on the divorce rates in the neighboring states' border region. Large and statistically significant effects are identified in border regions where the neighboring state's border population is larger than one's own border population, which is consistent with the theoretical models on the subject. </p><p> In the second and third chapters, attention is turned to how employment opportunities affect marital stability. In chapter two, I use my unique data to more precisely determine the relationship between employment rates and divorce. Using a fixed-effect panel-data model at the LMA level, the results indicate a strong a pro-cyclical relationship between divorce and the business cycle. Finally, in chapter three, the focus of the research transitions, from temporary employment fluctuations, to how permanent changes in the labor market affect marriage. Exploiting structural changes to the labor markets of steel and coal mining, an instrumental variable approach is used that interacts county-level steel and coal industry-concentrations with a national-level demand measure. The model estimates a strong positive relationship between the real-earnings of low-skilled male workers in the county and the county-level divorce rate in steel regions but finds minimal effects on divorce rates in coal regions.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-06, Section: A, page: 2688. Adviser: Geoffrey J. D. Hewings. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 129-134) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Iowa State University, 2005. / (UnM)AAI3200409. Major Professor: Brent Kreider. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-01, Section: A, page: 0272.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: A, page: 4879. Adviser: Craig A. Olson. Includes bibliographical references. Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.