Yang Wang

Although lawyers as a group represent some of the wealthiest and most politically powerful professionals in the United States, within the profession there is a significant amount of inequality. In spite of the divisions that exist within the profession, our understanding of the sources of inequality among attorneys remains limited. This project seeks to address this limitation by investigating how human, cultural, and social capital, along with demographic characteristics, are associated with the development of inequality among a cohort of recent law school graduates as they proceed through the first decade of legal practice. Specifically, using a dataset entitled After the JD: A Longitudinal Study of Careers in Transition, the project examines the relationships between recently minted lawyers' various forms of capital and positive career outcomes during three time periods: the law school-to-work transition, the first two years of legal practice, and the time period where private law firm associates compete to become partners. Findings indicate that each form of capital plays important roles throughout the first decade of practice. During the law school-to-work transition, interpersonal and organizational connections, along with human capital in the form of educational credentials, are associated with gaining employment in prestigious, high paying private law firms. Similarly, during the first few years of practice, connections formed with peers, professional groups, mentors, supervisors, and employers contribute to satisfying work environments. The models show, however, that access to these professional connections, depend on the gender, race, and sexual orientation of the individual lawyers in question, and that, in general, minority groups are at a disadvantage when it comes to the formation and maintenance of these types of professional ties. Finally, the findings also demonstrate that human, social, and cultural capital remain important predictors of career success during the transition to partnership in private firms.

acase@tulane.edu / This dissertation includes three essays analyzing the socio-economic impacts of fiscal policies in the areas of educational attainment, interstate migration, inequality, and poverty. The first chapter, Labor versus Capital in the Provision of Public Services: Estimating the Marginal Products of Inputs in the Production of Student Outcomes, evaluates and compares the impact of various types of school expenditures on student test scores. It finds that additional operating expenditure has a positive short-term impact on students’ test scores (mainly through its impact on teachers’ compensation) while capital expenditures do no have any impact. The second chapter, Do Government Subsidies to Low-income Individuals Affect Interstate Migration? Evidence from the Massachusetts Health Care Reform, estimates the impact of MHCR on interstate migration of low income individuals to Massachusetts. It finds that providing health subsidy to low income individuals increases the population growth rate of low income individuals in border cities of Massachusetts with the other states and the effect diminishes quickly as distance to the state border increases. The third chapter, Fiscal Policy, Inequality, and Poverty in Iran: Assessing the Impact and Effectiveness of Taxes and Transfers, analyzes the fiscal system in Iran and its impact on inequality and poverty. It finds that the Targeted Subsidy Reform plays the major role in reducing inequality and poverty in Iran. / 1 / Ali Enami

In recent decades, there have been an increasingly large number of developing countries that have embraced external economic liberalisation policies. Following trade theory, trade liberalisation has the potential to increase employment elasticity of economic growth and hence, have a greater poverty reduction impact, compared to import-substitution or closed economies. However, critics of globalisation often emphasise that the benefits from growth may not be evenly spread; hence, the distributional impacts may have an adverse effect on the poor. Vietnam has undertaken major market-based reforms to transform itself into an outward-oriented economy. The resulting effects show that not only has Vietnam achieved significant growth, but it has also managed to satisfy all the Millennium Development Goals. However, a significant element of Vietnam’s reforms involves integrating the Vietnamese economy with world markets through trade liberalisation policies, which may affect the welfare and distributional impacts on Vietnamese households. This dissertation examines the impact of trade liberalisation on growth, poverty and inequality for Vietnam. It develops a macro-micro analytical framework whereby a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model is linked to a representative household model in order to capture these effects. The findings indicate that trade liberalisation will cause a significant increase in economic growth. The smallest gains occur under Vietnam’s unilateral trade liberalisation against ASEAN while the largest gains take place when Vietnam extends its liberalisation with the rest of the world. There will be a shift away from primary sectors towards industry-based sectors such as low-tech, intermediate manufacturing and durables. There is also substantial up-skilling of unskilled labour. Combined with the large real returns to capital goods, this will result in significant increases in both capital investments as well as in the accumulation of human capital. In addition, economic growth will induce a fall in poverty rates in Vietnam. Nonetheless, there will also be large increases in the inequality of income, especially in the rural sector. Hence, although growth has lifted a large proportion of households out of poverty, the distributional impacts have been detrimental to the most vulnerable households.

After 100 years at an historically low level, inequality began to rise in the late 20th century, a trend which was especially marked in the English-speaking countries including New Zealand. Various explanations have been advanced, but internationally the most favoured theory is skill-biased technological change, driven by the new information and communication technologies. This thesis used income and wage data from the New Zealand Population Census and the New Zealand Income Survey to examine wage trends between 1991 and 2004. As in other developed countries wage dispersion was increasing in the 1990s, though it appears to have slowed since 2001, and the increased inequality is strongly correlated with workers' skills and qualifications. There is also a correlation between new technology and earnings inequality, but this appears to be attributable to the demand for skills in the industries which are changing fastest, rather than anything intrinsic to the new technology.

Equal opportunity offices have been described as agencies of organisational change, and the term ‘cultural change’ has been used to describe aspects of equal opportunity work.Universities are sites of organisational cultures where equal opportunity officers have worked in Australia for the past decade. In this time there have been significant changes to higher education, in terms of the size of the university sector in Australia, and also in terms of funding, governance and management. These changes in universities provided the context for questions about the roles of equal opportunity officers in universities, and how they may have changed. This research investigated the practice of equal opportunity officers in universities by using a grounded theory approach to generate understandings about how this group of university staff may have impacted on university cultures. The study develops links between theories of culture and organisational change that was situated in the practices of equal opportunity officers.The research identified a central conceptual category that was described as ‘picking the pitch’, as the main theme in the work of equal opportunity officers in identifying issues and gaining support for a cultural change agenda. All of the preliminary themes that were identified, and the interactions, the observations and the analysis of culture were prerequisites for ‘picking the pitch’.The thesis uses the research for further reflection and integration of the goals of equal opportunity, and the means that were available to equal opportunity officers to achieve these goals. The interactions of power and influence, and some of the limitations on equal opportunity officers are discussed.In the thesis the usefulness of the concept of culture to equal opportunity officers is examined, along with the underpinning theories about the mind of humanity that contributed to their approach to their task.Finally, the thesis discusses the impact of the research for equal opportunity officers, and for the universities in which they worked.

The existing scholarship on women in China suggests that gender inequality still exists against the background of the country’s reform and opening in recent years. However, the situation of women in enterprise ownership and leadership seems to indicate that under the surface of women being disadvantaged, some of them are playing a more active and significant role in China’s economic development. Based on a series of interviews with women enterprise owners, wives of enterprise owners and women managers conducted in three localities in three difference provinces of China, this research aims to discover the deeper socio-political realities of leading women in enterprises. By analyzing information on these women’s personal experiences, career and families, this thesis investigates their status at work and at home, as well as their connections with local politics. The research results suggest that although traces of gender inequality can still be found in these women’s lives, they appear to be actively engaged in the business establishment and operation and gradually casting off the leash of domestic responsibilities. At the same time, these women have developed strong connections with the Party-state, not necessarily in their own right, but largely through their family ties. The research has also highlighted that the varied socio-economic development of each locality has its effects on these women’s development.

This thesis is an empirical investigation of the concentration of employment in Australian cities since 1976. In 1976, Australians shared the same access to employment irrespective of where they lived. However, by 1991 the employment–population ratios varied systematically by socio-economic status. The purpose of this thesis is to use a variety of basic statistical techniques to discern whether it matters where one lives.¶ A panel of 9384 small urban areas is constructed from the last four censuses to enable us to fully document the increasing spatial employment inequality in urban areas and to analyse the possible causes and effects of this increase. The first two chapters describe the overall changes in employment inequality in the urban panel using several summary indexes. Group averages from deciles ranked by socio-economic status are used to illustrate the nature of the problem.¶ The more formal analysis of the causes of increasing inequality commences with a shift share analysis of the changes in employment levels. The results show that national changes in industry structure play an important role in determining the intra-urban distribution of employment. The index of sectoral change also varies systematically within Australian cities, with sectoral change being concentrated in low status areas. The apparent importance of industry structure in determining the geographic dispersion of employment points to employment demand being a significant part of the story.¶ Basic regression techniques and principal component analysis are also used to shed light on several possible inter-related causes and effects of the increasing inequality of employment–population ratios including: increased concentrations of personal characteristics, spatial mismatch, neighbourhood effects and the development of an underclass.¶ There are three main findings about the causes and effects of neighbourhood employment inequality. Firstly, spatial mismatch within or between Australian cities is not an important explanation of the changes in the geographic dispersion of employment. Outside Sydney the location of workers vis-à-vis firms does not influence neighbourhood employment–population ratios. However, even in Sydney, spatial mismatch provides a very limited explanation of neighbourhood inequality.¶ Secondly, substantial neighbourhood-specific effects on employment–population ratios are apparent in the bottom decile(s) of urban neighbourhoods ranked by socio-economic status. These neighbourhood effects explain between one and two-thirds of the differential between the top and bottom decile. The rest of the differential can be explained by differences in endowments of personal characteristics such as human capital variables.¶ Finally, there is convincing evidence that class, and perhaps even an Australian underclass, are important determinants of the distribution of employment outcomes. The underclass in Australia, as measured using techniques similar to US studies, is still very small but is increasing at an alarming rate. However, the sensitivity analysis shows that the underclass, so measured, is closely related to a more general concept of class captured in standard socio-economic status indexes.¶ The scope of this thesis is limited by the regional aggregates supplied in all four censuses. Regional aggregates prevent us from asking subtle questions about who is being affected by the observed changes. The lack of adequate individual-level migration data for neighbourhoods means that it is not possible to directly test any hypothesis about social mobility. This thesis is merely a preliminary analysis of whether the local social environment is important.

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In standard contract-theoretic models, the underlying assumption is that an agent is purely selfish, and his objective is to maximize his own payoff. A large amount of empirical evidence has pointed out that many individuals are also motivated by other psychological considerations, such as fairness concerns and reciprocity. Theorists have been engaged in finding more realistic assumptions that are consistent with the ways in which economic agents behave in real life. Among the existing theories, the theory of inequity aversion developed by Fehr and Schmidt [35] has attracted enormous attention. It soon became a useful tool in behavioral contract theory, which capitalizes on the power of social preferences theories to enhance understanding of real-world contracting phenomena. The present thesis aims at contributing to the behavioral contract literature by investigating how inequality aversion preferences impact on the optimal contract design in a financial contracting environment and the agent's incentive in a career concerns experiment. Chapter 2 reviews some of the recent theoretical contributions to the development of the theories of reciprocity and fairness. Emphasis is placed on sketching the theories, demonstrating their abilities to explain experimental regularities and pointing out some potential problems that are inherent in the existing theories. In addition, we present a survey of the recent theoretical contributions linking inequality aversion and the theory of incentives, where the traditional selfish agent assumption is replaced by the more realistic assumption that the individual agent is also inequality-averse. Incorporating more realism into economic modelling, such as assuming some individuals are inequality-averse, appears to be a promising avenue for research in the theory of incentives, as it generates more refutable predictions that models based on the selfish agent assumption cannot offer. Chapter 3 analyzes a tractable two-period staged financing model in which a single principal interacts with an agent who is risk-neutral and inequality-averse, offering him an equity contract. We fully characterize the menu of the optimal sharing contracts. Our results show that inequality-aversion changes the structure of the optimal contract. More importantly, we show that it is more likely we will observe an equal sharing contract when the agent is inequality-averse. Our findings for efficiency comparison indicate that inequality-aversion exacerbates the distortions caused by moral hazard, which leads to a further downward distortion in terms of total social welfare in this staged financing context. Incorporating inequality-aversion into a dynamic staged financing game thus allows us to interpret real-world contractual arrangements in the venture capital industry where equal split contracts dominate. In Chapter 4, we revisit the innovative Holmström's-type career concerns experiment by Irlenbusch and Silwka [47]. In particular, we introduce inequality-aversion, a theoretical short cut for reciprocity, into the analysis and investigate if it is the missing link that potentially drives the results in the experiment. Two related but conceptually different models are considered. The complete information model confirms that inequality-aversion induces positive effort in the second period, but does not predict any differences in the effort choices across both periods in the revealed-ability setting. The incomplete information model's predictions conform more closely to the observations in the revealed-ability setting, and its predictions for the hidden-ability setting can partly explain the lower effort choices observed in the hidden-ability setting. Our analysis suggests that inequality-aversion is part of the missing link, but not all. Incorporating fairness intentions into the analysis should open more opportunities for explaining the experimental results in Irlenbusch and Silwka. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1339820 / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, Business School, 2008