<p> Human capital is an important mechanism that influences both the migration decisions of immigrants and the rate at which immigrants assimilate in the host country. Returns to human capital could be correlated with difficult-to-observe factors such as self-selection, and legal status, and these unobservables can affect the economic assimilation of immigrants into the host country differently. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate the returns to human capital for refugees and other immigrants during the first two decades after they come to the U.S. Refugees are a subset of immigrants who have different characteristics and face different constraints than other immigrants. For example, while refugees have greater legal access to the labor market, non-refugees benefit from greater ability to self-select into both migration and (pre-migration) human capital, and those relative advantages change during the years after individuals migrate. </p><p> The empirical results show that non-refugees receive a much larger crude wage return for human capital both at arrival and over time. Although the refugees&rsquo; return grows over time, they do not catch up with that of non-refugees. These findings confirm that non-refugees are not only selected on observable characteristics (as already documented in the literature) but on unobservables as well, and that the initial selection on unobservables will matter for their differential returns to human capital even after they remain a long time in the U.S. In other words, many refugees might not be well-suited for the U.S. labor market for some permanent but unobservable reasons, whereas this may not be the case for non-refugees because they would less likely move to a country for which they are poorly-suited.</p><p>

Through a Marxian critique and analysis of the Broadway musicians' union, Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, and organizational design, this dissertation presents a case study that demonstrates how class blindness leads to contradictory and often unintended results, which reinforces a general critique of particular union strategies and agendas. The theoretical approach of New Marxian Class Analysis (NMCA), developed by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff is used to illustrate the possibility for class transformation. Through a detailed examination of the Broadway musicians' employment, this study shows how unions do not use their collective power for class transformation; moreover, radical union commentators/critics do not theorize about unions as possible agents for such class transformations. Also demonstrated is how unions can facilitate a class transformation that will increase workers' control over their working conditions and enable them to make the changes needed to improve their lives. Finally, this work proffers a proposal for a concrete class-transformative agenda and suggestions how it may be extended to other union workers.

The appearance, disappearance and reappearance of sharecropping in different social contexts and different time periods has been regarded as a puzzle by analysts of both the neoclassical and alternative theories. This dissertation is an attempt to define the conceptual terrain from which the puzzle of sharecropping emerges in non-neoclassical theories and to show a way out of this puzzle by conceptualising sharecropping in terms of class as the appropriation and distribution of surplus labour conditioned by different natural and social processes.

The practice of using the labor of inmates in state and Federal prisons to produce commodities has expanded rapidly in recent years, paralleling the growth of the number of people incarcerated. Last year, prisoners in state and Federal institutions in the U.S. produced over $2 billion worth of commodities, both goods and services. In addition, prisoners performed various acts of labor such as food preparation, maintenance, laundry, and cleaning—forms of labor which, though necessary for the operation of every prison—do not produce commodities with market prices. A conservative estimate places the value of these goods and services at $9 billion. This dissertation analyzes the organization of prison labor and the increasingly important prison industries producing saleable commodities; in particular, we focus on the division between the products of prison labor consumed by the inmates and that appropriated from them by the prison authorities for other uses. This research yields the striking conclusion that the basic organization of prison labor in the U.S. today most closely resembles a form of slavery. Inmates are compelled by economic, cultural, and political forces to enter into this prison slavery, where the products of their labor are taken by others both inside and outside the prison. The effects of prison slavery on both the inmates who are enslaved as well as on American society as a whole are also explored. We find that as the prison has been transformed over the last 150 years by social movements, legal changes, and economic forces, so too has prison slavery. We also find that these social changes have allowed slavery to continue and even to expand in American society, despite the Civil War and the abolition of slavery outside prisons. The enslavement of inmates threatens the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, since slavery is widely seen as an ethically unacceptable form of labor. This loss of legitimacy may lead to increased criminal behavior.

This dissertation consists of three essays on behavioral economics. The first two investigate the role of a principal in solving the collective action problem in team production, and the third essay provides a critical interpretation of John Maynard Keynes's psychological insights by comparing them with the recent evidence collected in the fields of behavioral and experimental economics. The first essay develops a model in which workers have social preferences in the form of inequality aversion towards the principal. The workers face a "rent extractor" boss who selects in advance the fraction of total output that she wants to receive from them. The presence of this "rent extractor" boss may solve the free-rider problem in team production if: (1) workers take into account their subjective costs of effort when assessing inequality; and (2) workers are sufficiently averse towards positive inequality. The second essay is an experimental study on team production that compares the levels of contribution to a group project when workers face different types of bosses. The main result suggests that the endogenous creation of heterogeneous marginal benefits when a productive boss is present generates the highest levels of contribution when punishment is not allowed, and that the collective action problem is solved completely when this productive boss chooses to divide output equally. The third and last essay examines Keynes's hints and suggestions about what a realistic approach to behavior under uncertainty might be. It claims that Keynes was deeply conscious of the necessity to incorporate realistic behavioral assumptions in macroeconomic models that deal with judgment under uncertainty. It is found that his research program is broadly compatible with and finds support in most of the latest findings of behavioral and experimental economics, even though his inferences were largely based on "subjective impressions" rather than rigorous scientific studies.

The dissertation develops and demonstrates a new Marxist approach to analyzing interactions between education and class. This new approach, overdeterminist class theory, uses an antiessentialist logic and a surplus-labor concept of class. It is thus distinguished from other political economy approaches to education. Chapter 1 is an introduction. Chapter 2 critically reviews the relevant literature, which includes Dewey, Bowles and Gintis, and Althusser. Chapter 3 demonstrates the new approach by analyzing several illustrative cases. In addition, it indicates the importance of the concept subsumed class process for analyzing the interactions between class and the nonclass process of education. An important point of this chapter is that the securing of educational conditions of class engenders new contradictions as it alleviates others. Chapter 4 analyzes the recent U.S. education crisis in terms of the complex relationships between the capitalist class process and education. The analysis supports several conclusions. First, the rhetoric of the mainstream discourse tends to reduce education's social importance to its structural role in enhancing economic competitiveness. Second, the education crisis resulted from the historically complex interaction between education and the capitalist class process. Third, the education crisis has motivated the emergence of many innovative relationships between education and class, and these new relationships in turn engender new contradictions.

This dissertation examines the effects of neoliberal economic policies in Latin America in 25 years (the 1970–1995 period), focusing especially on macroeconomic stabilization under IMF support and on IMF and World Bank structural adjustment lending, where the debate centers on the effect of these policies on growth, macroeconomic stability, and income distribution. The study includes formal, models on both macroeconomic stabilization and trade liberalization, as well as cross-country statistical tests. In contrast to the predictions of structuralist and dependency critics of neoliberal policies, the statistical results find that neoliberal policies, when supported by the Bank and the IMF, not only help bring about macroeconomic stabilization, but also help to improve the position of capitalist firms and thus act to increase long term economic growth and maintain capital accumulation. However, they invariably do so with a greater degree of economic inequality and possibly increased levels of urban poverty as well. One possible normative conclusion that could be derived from these results is that since state-led import substitution industrialization has also been discredited in the eyes of most economists as a development strategy for Latin America (or has outlived its usefulness, depending on which economist one talks to), any alternative set of policies for the region must focus not just on coming up with non-laissez faire domestic policy alternatives, but also on ending the asymmetric and deflationary bias of adjustment to international macroeconomic imbalances and on redistributing power and economic-decision making to workers and communities at the local level. Making such reforms politically feasible would require a gradualist approach with policies substantially different from both state-led import substitution and from the populist policies associated with governments such as Allende in Chile, Garcia in Peru, and Peron in Argentina, and would require the active coordination of Latin American and other developing country governments in order to push for change in existing international monetary arrangements.

The traditional approach to U.S. environmental policy has been to regulate emissions to air, land and water separately. Recognizing that efforts to enforce medium-specific environmental regulations are also medium-specific, we hypothesize that the enforcement of regulations pertaining to one environment medium may cause polluters to alter their releases to other media. This dissertation examines the impacts of the enforcement of air and water regulations faced by the U.S. pulp industry on their toxic chemical releases to air and water pathways and the human-health risks associated with these releases. The results suggest that pulp facilities respond to a greater number of inspections for compliance to air regulations by reducing their TRI emissions to water pathways. On the other hand, these firms seem to respond to a greater number of inspections for water regulation compliance and efforts taken against violators of water regulations by increasing their toxic chemical releases to air pathways. Using the EPA's Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators Model enforcement-induced cross-media transfers of human-health risks from air and water releases of toxic chemicals are also examined. This study finds that cross-media risk impacts can differ substantially from cross-media release impacts. Additionally, TRI release trends and their associated human-health risks are examined for the U.S. pulp industry between 1988 and 1997. This analysis finds that while combined air and water releases did not change much during the decade, the overall risk impact of these releases declined by more than 70%. The results suggest that setting environmental goals that focus solely on reducing the volume of toxic releases may produce unfortunate outcomes. This work also presents a theoretical model of firm behavior. The factors that determine whether a firm responds to a tighter control on its emissions into one medium by increasing or decreasing its emissions into another are derived; that is, whether emissions into two media can be characterized as substitutes or as complements. The analysis finds that characterizing cross-media transfers depends in large part on how the marginal costs of controlling releases into one medium are affected by a change in releases to another medium.

This dissertation evaluates the applicability of Elinor Ostrom's theory of the commons to other forms of collective action by mapping it on a case study of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union in Ethiopia and its efforts to overcome the vast disparities that have long structured the global coffee commodity chain (the "Coffee Paradox"). The conclusions I draw are the following. While Ostrom's theory has serious omissions, it also sheds much needed light on the struggles of Ethiopia's coffee farmers to overcome their poverty. Both the design principles that Ostrom identifies for governance rules and her list of predictors for successful common property resource management institutions suggest that Ethiopia's coffee cooperatives could be in peril. However, by expanding Ostrom's governance framework to incorporate a broader enabling role for governments as well as supportive roles for civic organizations, NGOs, and social movements, we see greater potential for the success of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union.

In this dissertation, I try to understand processes of dispossession and exclusion within a class-focused Marxian framework grounded in the epistemological position of overdetermination. The Marxian concept of primitive accumulation has become increasingly prominent in contemporary discussions on these issues. The dominant reading of “primitive accumulation” in the Marxian tradition is historicist, and consequently the notion itself remains outside the field of Marxian political economy. The contemporary literature has de-historicized the concept, but at the same time missed Marx’s unique class-perspective. Based on a non-historicist reading of Marx, I argue that primitive accumulation—i.e. separation of direct producers from means of production in non-capitalist class processes—is constitutive of capitalism and not a historical process confined to the period of transition from pre-capitalism to capitalism. I understand primitive accumulation as one aspect of a more complex (contradictory) relation between capitalist and non-capitalist class structure which is subject to uneven development and which admit no teleological universalization of any one class structure. Thus, this dissertation claims to present a notion of primitive accumulation theoretically grounded in the Marxian political economy. In particular, the dissertation problematizes the dominance of capital over a heterogeneous social formation and understands primitive accumulation as a process which simultaneously supports and undermines such dominance. At a more concrete level, I apply this new understanding of primitive accumulation to a social formation—consisting of “ancient” and capitalist enterprises—and consider a particular conjuncture where capitalist accumulation is accompanied by emergence and even expansion of a “surplus population” primarily located in the “ancient” economy. Using these theoretical arguments, I offer an account of postcolonial capitalism in India, distinguishing between two different regimes—(1) the dirigiste planning regime and (2) the laissez-faire regime. I argue that both regimes had to grapple with the problem of surplus population, as the capitalist expansion under both regimes involved primitive accumulation. I show how small peasant agriculture, traditional non-capitalist industry and informal “ancient” enterprises (both rural and urban) have acted as “sinks” for surplus population throughout the period of postcolonial capitalist development in India. Keywords: primitive accumulation, surplus population, postcolonial capitalism