This thesis investigates help-seeking and effects of help-seeking on causal attributions for helping (i.e., what people believe caused help or lack of help). Additionally, it examines self-serving and other-serving attributions (i.e., to augment a person's positive sides and diminish the negative ones). Help-seeking was investigated in questionnaires, describing situations where spouses collaborate in doing household chores. A first study showed that women and men report using direct styles (i.e., explicitly verbalising the requests) more often than indirect ones. A second study showed that spouses inaccurately believe that wives in general would report more indirect and less direct styles than husbands in general. Causal attributions for helping were investigated in four studies with different methods, settings, and types of relationships (questionnaires, laboratory experiment; spouses doing chores, students and strangers doing computerized exercises). Consistent support was obtained for a predicted interaction between helping and the clarity of the request for help in determining the attributions. It is suggested that this finding is an effect of people comparing the behavior of one person with their beliefs about how other persons behave (i.e., consensus). Additionally, the findings did not support the claims that people make self-serving attributions and that the latter would be more pronounced among men than women. However, the attributions were other-serving. The thesis gives a novel understanding of everyday life by combining the issues of help-seeking and causal attributions. It also offers a discussion of the previous literature and of theoretical and applied implications of the findings.

This thesis contains four different studies on the dynamics of gender in households and workplaces. The relationship between family life and work life is in focus, particularly in the paper on labour market outcomes after divorce. In the introductory chapter, the Swedish context is briefly described. The description focuses on gender differences in the labour market and in the home. Theories concerning the division of work in the household are discussed, as are two theories on labour market discrimination, viz. taste discrimination and statistical discrimination. The theory part is concluded with a discussion of social closure processes and gendered organizational structures. The Reproduction of Gender. Housework and Attitudes Towards Gender Equality in the Home Among Swedish Boys and Girls. The housework boys and girls age 10 to 18 do, and their attitudes towards gender equality in the home are studied. One aim is to see whether the work children do is gendered and if so, whether they follow their parents’, often gendered, pattern in housework. A second aim is to see whether parents’ division of work is related to the children’s attitude towards gender equality in the home. The data used are taken from the Swedish Child Level of Living Survey (Child-LNU) 2000. Results indicate that girls and boys in two-parent families are more prone to engage in gender-atypical work the more their parent of the same sex engages in this kind of work. The fact that girls still do more housework than boys indicates that housework is gendered work also among children. No relation between parents’ division of work and the child’s attitude towards gender equality in the home was found. Dependence within Families and the Household Division of Labor – A Comparison between Sweden and the United States. This paper assesses the relative explanatory value of the resource-bargaining perspective and the doing-gender approach in analysing the division of housework in the United States and Sweden from the mid-1970s to 2000. Data from the Swedish Level of Living Survey (LNU) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) were used. Overall results indicate that housework is truly gendered work in both countries during the entire period. Even so, the results also indicate that gender deviance neutralization is more pronounced in the United States than in Sweden. Unlike Swedish women, American women seem to increase their time spent in housework when their husbands are to some extent economically dependent on them, as if to neutralize the presumed gender deviance. Divorce and Labour Market Outcomes. Do Women Suffer or Gain? In this paper, the interconnected nature of work and family is studied by looking at labour market outcomes after divorce. The data used are retrospective work and family histories collected in LNU 1991. A hazard regression model with competing risks reveals that women’s chances of improving their occupational prestige appear to be better after divorce compared to before. Increased working hours and perhaps also increased energy invested in the job may pay off in better occupational opportunities. Worth noting, however, is that the outcome among women with a less firm labour market attachment is more often to a job of lower prestige than one of higher prestige. Hence, the labour market outcome for women after divorce is to some extent conditioned by their labour market attachment at the time of divorce. Men, on the other hand, in most cases seem to suffer occupationally from divorce. For separated men the risk of negative changes in occupational prestige is greater than for cohabiting men. Formal On-the-job Training. A Gender-Typed Experience and Wage- Related Advantage? Formal on-the-job training (FOJT) can have a positive impact on wages and on promotion opportunities. According to theory and earlier research, a two-step model of gender inequality in FOJT is predicted: First, women are less likely than men to take part in FOJT and, second, once women do get the more remunerative training, they are not rewarded for their new skills to the same extent as men are. Pooled cross-sectional data from the Swedish Survey of Living Conditions (ULF) in the mid-nineties were used. Results show that women are significantly less likely than men to take part in FOJT. Among those who do receive training, women are more likely to take part in industry-specific training, whereas men are more likely to participate in general training and training that increases promotion opportunities. The two latter forms of training significantly raise a man’s annual earnings but not a woman’s. Hence, the theoretical model is supported and it is argued that this gender inequality is partly due to employers’ discriminatory practices.

In Taiwan area, it has become a rule that the national identity cards of all population are changed every 10 years. The fifth comprehensive change of national identity cards was implemented from Dec. 21, 2005 to Dec. 31, 2006. The government institutions of different cities and counties (municipal) under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior positively conducted national propaganda of the important news through the strong promotion of the change of identity cards by various means of mass media. First of all, the study investigates promotion strategies and procedures of the change of national identity cards in Taiwan, and then studies the promotion situation of the services for people, and further investigates how to strengthen the use of marketing ideas to achieve the goal of offering services for people. In view of this, the study reviews the related literature about the development procedures of the household registration system of Taiwan. Through the understanding of the situation and problems of the current use of new national identity cards, as well as the necessity of the change of national identity cards, the study focuses on marketing strategies to adopt SWOT analysis of trend and use questionnaire survey to make proof analysis and review. The study examines the effects and improvement measures of the government for execution of public domains, and provides the following research conclusions and suggestions for the Ministry of Interior and other government institutions as a reference for innovative promotion of public policies: 1. It is not easy to promote relationship marketing of the first line household registration institutions. 2. Important project work relatively needs the increase of reasonable and proper budget for promotion. 3. Strengthen the innovative development culture of household registration organization, and cultivate the overall marketing team. 4. A sound evaluation mechanism should be established for the marketing of public policies 5. Although the promotion of comprehensive change of national identity cards used different marketing channels, measures should still be strengthened on how to integrate different communication tools effectively. 6. Strengthen the public¡¦s rights of their awareness of the use of identity cards. The government has the responsibility and obligation to teach the public use of identity cards. The conclusions made by the study are that national identity card system is not a system that has to be existed in all countries. Each country can determine the necessary of offering identity cards to the citizens according to the country¡¦s idea of system. Under the national identity card system constructed in Taiwan, the nature of national identity card is to ¡§prove¡¨ that a citizen possesses the archive of his/her nationality. It also refers that national identity card is a document that cites the nationality relationship between a citizen of his/her country. Under this system, all the citizens of Taiwan are obliged to collect their national identity cards, and have the rights to ask for offering them. Therefore, the people of Taiwan should be cautious about the importance, safekeeping and use of national identity cards. The government should more positively bear the responsibility of strengthening the concept of ruling by laws because the maintenance of social stability depends on the people¡¦s practices and compliance with laws. Keywords: national identity card, household registration system, SWOT analysis of trend, relationship marketing, development culture, public policy marketing, national identity card system, concept of ruling by laws

This dissertation contains three essays on environmental economics and on credit market imperfections. The literature on carbon tax incidence generally finds that carbon taxes have a regressive impact on the distribution of income. The main reason for that finding stems from the fact that poor households spend a larger share of their total expenditure on energy products than the rich households do. This literature, however, has ignored the impact of carbon taxes on income stemming from changes in relative factor prices. Yet, changes in household welfare depend not only on variations in commodity prices, but also on changes in income. Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive analysis of the distributional impact of carbon taxes on inequality by considering both demand-side and supply-side channels. We use a multi-sector, multi-household general equilibrium model to analyze the distributional impact of carbon taxes on inequality. Using equivalent income as the household welfare metric, we apply the Shapley value and concentration index approaches to decomposing household inequality. Our simulation results suggest that carbon taxes exert a larger negative impact on the income of the rich than that of the poor, and are thereby progressive. On the other hand, when assessed from the use side alone (i.e., commodity prices alone), our results confirm previous findings, whereas carbon taxes are regressive. However, due to the stronger incidence of carbon taxes on inequality from the income side, our results suggest that the carbon tax tends to reduce inequality. These findings further suggest that the traditional approach of assessing the impact of carbon taxes on inequality through changes in commodity prices alone may be misleading. Chapter 2 investigates the economic impacts of creating an emissions bubble between Canada and the US in a context of subglobal participation in efforts to reduce pollution with market based-instruments. One of the advantages of an emissions bubble is that it can be beneficial to countries that differ in their production and consumption patterns. To address the competitiveness issue that arises from the free-rider problem in the area of climate-change mitigation, we consider the imposition of a border tax adjustment (BTA) - a commonly suggested solution in the literature. We develop a detailed multisector and multi-regional general equilibrium model to analyze the welfare, aggregate, sectoral and trade impacts of the formation of an emissions bubble between Canada and the US with and without BTA. Our simulation results suggest that, in the absence of BTA, the creation of the bubble would make both countries better off through a positive terms-of-trade effect, and more importantly, through a significant reduction in Canada’s marginal abatement cost. The benefits of these positive effects would spill over to the non-participating countries, leading them to increase their trade shares in non-emissions-intensive goods. Moreover, the simulation results also indicate that a unilateral implementation of a BTA by any one of the two countries is welfare deteriorating in the imposing country and welfare improving in the other. In contrast, a joint implementation of a BTA by the two countries would make Canada better off and the US worse off. Chapter 3 shows that learning by lending is a potential channel of understanding the business cycle fluctuation under an imperfect credit market. An endogenous link among the learning parameter, lending rates, and the size of investment makes it possible to generate an internal propagation even due to a temporary shock. The main finding of this chapter is the explanation of how ex post non-financial factors such as information losses by individual agents in a credit market may account for a persistence in real indicators such as capital stock and output.

This thesis explores women's learning in unpaid household work through the lenses of impairment and disability. Informal learning from this standpoint is a perspective that is not yet integrated into the adult learning literature. The impetus for the study came from dissatisfaction with the social undervaluing of unpaid housework and carework, and the largely unrecognized learning behind the work, which is predominantly done by women. Disability and impairment provide unique lenses for making visible what people learn and how they learn in this context. Those who have or acquire impairment in adulthood need to learn how to do things differently. For this study I have taken a segment of data from a 4-year, 4-phase project on Unpaid Housework and Lifelong Learning in which I participated. The participants in this segment are women and men with disabilities who took part in 2 focus groups (11 women), an on-line focus group (20 women), and individual interviews (10 women and 5 men). Learning is explored through three different themes: first, learning related to self-care; second, learning to accept the impaired body; and third, strategies and resources used in the learning process. Analysis of the data shows that the learning that happens through unpaid household work is multidimensional, fluid, and diverse. Learning is accomplished through a complex 4-dimensional process involving a blend of the body, mind, emotions, and the spiritual self. Furthermore, what participants learned and how they learned is influenced by the sociocultural context in which it takes place. Learning, when seen as a 4-dimensional process, provides a framework for challenging traditional Western cultural beliefs about what counts as learning and knowledge. Such beliefs have cultivated the viewpoint that learning is individualistic, cognitive, and based on reason. I contest these beliefs by disrupting the binaries that support them (e.g., mind vs. body, reason vs. emotion). Participants used both sides of the binaries in their learning processes, negating the oppositional and hierarchical categories they establish. The concepts in the binaries still exist but the relationship between them is not oppositional, nor is one concept privileged over another, either within or across binaries.

This thesis explores women's learning in unpaid household work through the lenses of impairment and disability. Informal learning from this standpoint is a perspective that is not yet integrated into the adult learning literature. The impetus for the study came from dissatisfaction with the social undervaluing of unpaid housework and carework, and the largely unrecognized learning behind the work, which is predominantly done by women. Disability and impairment provide unique lenses for making visible what people learn and how they learn in this context. Those who have or acquire impairment in adulthood need to learn how to do things differently. For this study I have taken a segment of data from a 4-year, 4-phase project on Unpaid Housework and Lifelong Learning in which I participated. The participants in this segment are women and men with disabilities who took part in 2 focus groups (11 women), an on-line focus group (20 women), and individual interviews (10 women and 5 men). Learning is explored through three different themes: first, learning related to self-care; second, learning to accept the impaired body; and third, strategies and resources used in the learning process. Analysis of the data shows that the learning that happens through unpaid household work is multidimensional, fluid, and diverse. Learning is accomplished through a complex 4-dimensional process involving a blend of the body, mind, emotions, and the spiritual self. Furthermore, what participants learned and how they learned is influenced by the sociocultural context in which it takes place. Learning, when seen as a 4-dimensional process, provides a framework for challenging traditional Western cultural beliefs about what counts as learning and knowledge. Such beliefs have cultivated the viewpoint that learning is individualistic, cognitive, and based on reason. I contest these beliefs by disrupting the binaries that support them (e.g., mind vs. body, reason vs. emotion). Participants used both sides of the binaries in their learning processes, negating the oppositional and hierarchical categories they establish. The concepts in the binaries still exist but the relationship between them is not oppositional, nor is one concept privileged over another, either within or across binaries.

The Texas state gas tax has been 20.0 cents per gallon since 1991, and the federal gas tax has been 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993. The gas tax is not only stagnant, but depreciating in value due to inflation. Thus, damage is being done to the infrastructure but the money needed to maintain and improve roadways is not being adequately generated. One proposed alternative to the gas tax is the creation of a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) fee; with equity being a crucial issue to consider. This research used 2009 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) Texas data to consider the equity impacts surrounding four VMT fee scenarios. Data were filtered and weighted to reflect results representative of Texas vehicle-owning households in 2008. Each scenario was run both statically and dynamically under the assumption that the VMT fee would replace the state gas tax. An assessment of the relative vertical equity of each scenario was made by calculating the Gini Coefficient associated with the proportion of state gas tax or VMT fee revenue generated by each household income level quintile. Results indicate that all VMT fee scenarios are essentially as equally vertically equitable than the current state gas tax system. Scenario 4 was designed to be inherently horizontally equitable because the per mile fee associated with each roadway type (urban or rural) was assessed to all vehicles driven on these roadway types at a rate calculated to generate needed funds to address the mobility and infrastructure needs of that roadway type. Scenario 3, a scenario favoring vehicles with high fuel efficiency, was found to be the least horizontally equitable. Scenarios 2-4 were able to generate additional revenue desired to meet the infrastructure and mobility needs of Texas set forth by the 2030 Texas Transportation Needs Committee. The large fee increase necessary to achieve the desired additional revenue may not be popular or possible. However, an evaluation of the philosophy governing each scenario designed to generate additional revenue is informative when it comes to equity impacts. No one VMT fee scenario affects all household income levels and geographic locations uniformly and it was not the goal of this research to design an equitable VMT fee scenario. Rather, the effect of each scenario on 2008 Texas vehicle-owning households disaggregated by household income level and geographic location are presented and left to the discretion of elected officials to decide which VMT fee, if any, would be best for their constituents.

This dissertation contains three essays on environmental economics and on credit market imperfections. The literature on carbon tax incidence generally finds that carbon taxes have a regressive impact on the distribution of income. The main reason for that finding stems from the fact that poor households spend a larger share of their total expenditure on energy products than the rich households do. This literature, however, has ignored the impact of carbon taxes on income stemming from changes in relative factor prices. Yet, changes in household welfare depend not only on variations in commodity prices, but also on changes in income. Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive analysis of the distributional impact of carbon taxes on inequality by considering both demand-side and supply-side channels. We use a multi-sector, multi-household general equilibrium model to analyze the distributional impact of carbon taxes on inequality. Using equivalent income as the household welfare metric, we apply the Shapley value and concentration index approaches to decomposing household inequality. Our simulation results suggest that carbon taxes exert a larger negative impact on the income of the rich than that of the poor, and are thereby progressive. On the other hand, when assessed from the use side alone (i.e., commodity prices alone), our results confirm previous findings, whereas carbon taxes are regressive. However, due to the stronger incidence of carbon taxes on inequality from the income side, our results suggest that the carbon tax tends to reduce inequality. These findings further suggest that the traditional approach of assessing the impact of carbon taxes on inequality through changes in commodity prices alone may be misleading. Chapter 2 investigates the economic impacts of creating an emissions bubble between Canada and the US in a context of subglobal participation in efforts to reduce pollution with market based-instruments. One of the advantages of an emissions bubble is that it can be beneficial to countries that differ in their production and consumption patterns. To address the competitiveness issue that arises from the free-rider problem in the area of climate-change mitigation, we consider the imposition of a border tax adjustment (BTA) - a commonly suggested solution in the literature. We develop a detailed multisector and multi-regional general equilibrium model to analyze the welfare, aggregate, sectoral and trade impacts of the formation of an emissions bubble between Canada and the US with and without BTA. Our simulation results suggest that, in the absence of BTA, the creation of the bubble would make both countries better off through a positive terms-of-trade effect, and more importantly, through a significant reduction in Canada’s marginal abatement cost. The benefits of these positive effects would spill over to the non-participating countries, leading them to increase their trade shares in non-emissions-intensive goods. Moreover, the simulation results also indicate that a unilateral implementation of a BTA by any one of the two countries is welfare deteriorating in the imposing country and welfare improving in the other. In contrast, a joint implementation of a BTA by the two countries would make Canada better off and the US worse off. Chapter 3 shows that learning by lending is a potential channel of understanding the business cycle fluctuation under an imperfect credit market. An endogenous link among the learning parameter, lending rates, and the size of investment makes it possible to generate an internal propagation even due to a temporary shock. The main finding of this chapter is the explanation of how ex post non-financial factors such as information losses by individual agents in a credit market may account for a persistence in real indicators such as capital stock and output.

This study deals with the intergenerational coresidence during the nineteenth century. The main focus is placed on the possible differences in the coresidences among parents and children and whether demographic transition and industrialization changed this relation. Were parents and children living in the same household? It was also important to study the children network; if the children did not live with their parents, where did they live? In the neighbourhoods, in the parish or in another area? Two perspectives were mainly considered, industrialization and demographic transition. On one hand industrialization gave children the opportunity to work outside the parental household and consequently the relationship between parents and children probably became weaker. On the other hand the fall of infant mortality would have facilitated the creation of a new complex household. Did industrialization with a new labour market change in decline the coresidence among parents and children? Or did the fall of mortality increase the number of coresidences? Two more factors influenced the coresidences, social status of the first generation and number of children born. The area of study is the region of Sundsvall, situated in middle Sweden. During the nineteenth century this region experienced a fall of infant mortality and in the middle of the century the introduction of steam-sawmills started and it arrived to be one of the largest sawmill districts at the world in the end of the century. The cohort chosen regarded people born between 1770 and 1820 and they lived their old age in the Sundsvall district. The first methodological approach is cross-sectional and analyses the entire cohort. The second method is a longitudinal analysis of a micro study of 135 people. The results show the decrease of the coresidences between the two generations when parents were 80 years old. In the previous years no difference has been found between the preindustrial and industrial period, thus the decline of mortality did not help the increase of coresidences. Social status was the most determinant factor for the creation of coresidence. People employed in agriculture, peasants and crofters were more likely to coreside with married children compared to the workers’ groups. Social difference increases with the industrialization, workers experienced the decline of coresidence in a stronger way compared to the others groups. The number of children born from the first generation helps in a marginal way the creation of coresidences. The main difference was between one or more children born, but no differences were found among those people who had two children or more. The micro study put in evidence the life cycle of the family. Peasants and crofters were the most likely to experience the cycle of the stem family. However the coresidence could be interrupted by the death or the migration of the family members. Other alternatives as the presences of children in the neighbourhoods or the coresidence with unmarried children were noticed. Finally, the study showed that sons were more likely to live with their parents compared to daughters but in one third of the cases the first generation constituted the stem family with a daughter.

The challenge for the future was defined by the Brundtland Commission (1987) and by the Rio Declaration (1992), in which the fundamental principles for achieving a sustainable development were provided. Sustainable chemistry can be defined as the contribution of chemistry to the implementation of the Rio Declaration. This thesis shows how Pressurized Fluid Extraction (PFE) can be utilized in chemical analysis, and how this correlates to Green Chemistry. The reliability and efficiency of the PFE technique was investigated for a variety of analytes and matrices. Applications discussed include: the extraction of the antioxidant Irganox 1076 from linear low density polyethylene, mobile forms of phosphorus in lake sediment, chlorinated paraffins from source-separated household waste, general analytical method for pesticide residues in rape seed, total lipid content in cod muscle, and squalene in olive biomass. Improved or comparable extraction yields were achieved with reduced time and solvent consumption. The decrease in use of organic solvents was 50-90%, resulting in minimal volatile organic compounds emissions and less health-work problem. Due to higher extraction temperatures and more efficient extractions, the selection of solvent is not as important as at lower temperatures, which makes it possible to choose less costly, more environmentally and health beneficial solvents. In general, extraction times are reduced to minutes compared to several hours. As a result of the very short extraction times, the amount of co-extracted material is relatively low, resulting in fewer clean-up step and much shorter analysis time. Selective extractions could be obtained by varying the solvent or solvent mixture and/or using adsorbents. In this thesis, the PFE technique was compared to the twelve principles of Green Chemistry, and it was shown that it follows several of the principles, thus giving a major contribution to sustainable chemistry.