This dissertation analyzes the effects of women's participation in paid work on gender subordination in the context of carpet weaving in rural Turkey by drawing on results of a sample survey of weavers in ten villages. Two distinct arguments with respect to this relationship are evaluated: the effect of social relations of work on women's position as a gender and the importance of women's income for the household. Examination of working conditions under three relations of production (independent production, the putting-out system and capitalist production) shows that work relations represent a continuity and reinforcement of the norms, customs which govern women's lives, since they are based on kinship ties and weavers' relations to the employer are mediated through their male kin. Extension of familial control into the workshops is effective in maintaining work discipline and a high volume of weaving. Hence, even workshop weaving does not challenge age and gender hierarchies in rural Turkey and is therefore unlikely to empower weavers. Exploring the factors which shape women's income contribution through weaving in a multiple regression framework, the dissertation shows that weaving in a workshop, having greater number of women in the household, and household inability to meet subsistence needs from alternative income sources greatly enhance the volume of weaving. The effects of carpet weaving work on women's gender position are explored by focusing on three dimensions of women's economic autonomy: control over labor power, participation in trade and financial autonomy. Hypotheses on the determinants of financial autonomy are tested in a multiple regression framework and the results show that women's financial autonomy is insensitive to the importance of weaving income but is largely governed by variables that traditionally shape women's position in rural Turkey (age, headship status of their household, type of household structure). While weaving in workshops enhances financial autonomy, this is accompanied by diminished control over various decisions affecting weaving work. The insensitivity of women's economic autonomy to the extent of their economic contribution to the household is explained by the control over women's labor and the fact that weaving is premised on women's subordinate position.

What is the relationship between economic crises and crises of the legal order? In both asking and attempting to answer that question, Marxian political economy provides the theoretical framework. The emphasis is on the establishment of collective bargaining under the control of a federal adminstrative agency--the National Labor Relations Board. The goal is to locate legal conflict in a theoretical framework explaining the production of legal doctrine in terms of class struggle, which is generated by crises in the process of capital accumulation. Analysis of legal authority (such as cases and statutes) using lawyers' reasoning by analogy and distinction demonstrates the internal dynamics of the production of legal doctrine in the United States. Legal conflict illuminates the economic, political and ideological conflicts of its time and place. Analysis of data on occurrence of strikes using social scientists' reasoning by statistical testing of hypothesized functional relationships demonstrates the Wagner Act's positive impact on organization of trade unions and the number of organizational strikes. There have been two great upsurges of class struggle in the United States during the past century--one from the 1890's through the First World War (the Progressive Era) and one from the 1930's through the Second World War (the era of F.D.R. and the New Deal). These periods have corresponded to crises in capital accumulation in which monopoly capitalists supported or at least accepted increased state intervention into the economy in order to rationalize and thereby reconstitute the accumulation process. In each of these cases, a crisis of capital accumulation generated class struggle in the workplace which in turn created a crisis of the legal order governing labor relations between workers and capitalists. The legal crisis leads to some new form of legal intervention into labor conflicts in order to help resolve the original accumulation crisis. However, the new legal framework which forms part of the solution to one crisis becomes part of the problem by the time the next accumulation crisis occurs.

Previous sociological studies of class consciousness have employed survey methodology to evaluate the attitudes expressed by a sample of respondents. This approach fails to consider the dynamic, collective quality of the phenomenon, whose expression may be manifested in a variety of cultural practices. My approach treats class consciousness as "cultures of solidarity," which are expressed within and are shaped by the oppositional context of the class relationship. In order to illustrate my approach I offer two case studies of collective actions by workers. The first analyzes the creation of a "culture of solidarity" in a steel casting plant. The dynamics of two wildcat strikes indicate that class consciousness is highly episodic and emerges during the course of the collective action. Its sustenance is based on the ability of workers to organize further activity, rather than on the level of ideology achieved. The second case documents a "culture of solidarity" forged by workers in response to management's sustained attempt to break their union. Workers, and the community which is formed through the strike, engage in militant activities, create institutional structures to maintain their collective solidarity, and develop alternative values and conceptions in the context of this emergent "culture of solidarity." Based on the empirical research, it is suggested that class consciousness (as ideation) is not a precondition for militant activity; but rather that it is in the context of militant activity that class conscious ideas and practices emerge, are given coherence, and are negotiated collectively. Conversely, class consciousness had not been destroyed by expunging the ideas held by workers, but by controlling or ending activity, or the context in which ideas are cultivated and nourished.

Economic theories of occupational sex segregation are incomplete. They explain why women do not work in men's jobs, by referring to productivity traits which give men an advantage over women in the labor market. These explanations, however, preclude the possibility of persistent male unemployment coexisting with segregated women's occupations, because they imply that unemployed men, possessing superior labor market traits, could obtain women's positions. To allow for this coexistence of male unemployment and women working in segregated jobs and to correct several other lacunae in theories of women's work, this dissertation integrates a model of gendered job traits with models of labor markets. Four gender hypotheses accomplish this integration, centering on the hypothesis that many jobs themselves have gender identity in requiring job skills which are feminine, masculine or neutral. Job traits, moreover, change gender due to a variety of economic and cultural disturbances. Evidence supporting these hypotheses comes from statistical tests based on data from original surveys of teachers and restaurant waitpeople and from the history of clerical work. The hypotheses have significant implications for labor policies such as affirmative action and comparable worth. Legislated policy that promotes occupational integration, for example, may require a number of auxiliary policies to be effective. And implementing comparable worth policy faces a number of potential biases which we may diminish if we attend to gendered job traits in choosing compensable factors for job evaluation.

This dissertation consists of three chapters concerning the consequences of incarceration and performance pay for the modern US economy. The first two chapters consider the impact of the spatial location of prisons on two relevant groups: state prisoners and rural counties hosting state and federal prisons. The third chapter examines the relation between the incidence of performance pay in the labor market and the gender wage gap. The first chapter estimates the causal impact of offenders' distance from home during incarceration on later recidivism using a two-sample instrumental variables strategy. I instrument for an inmate’s distance from home with the average or minimum distance to state facilities from their home county, which varies across county and within county over time due to prison openings and closures. Doubling an inmate’s distance from home decreases the rate of 1-year recidivism by approximately 3 percentage points. Inmates convicted of a crime associated with membership in a criminal network experience the greatest decline in recidivism with distance. The second chapter assesses the effect of prisons on rural employment using a generalized difference-in-difference approach. The principal employment effect of prison openings and closures is a one-for-one gain or loss in public sector jobs. Prisons do not exert a local multiplier effect: employment in the private sector is generally unaffected by prison presence. Prisons thus appear to have little utility as a local development strategy and not to induce a county-level economic decline upon closure. The third chapter uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to show that women are less likely to be in performance-pay jobs and experience a smaller earnings increase from participating in such jobs. I compare these findings with theoretical predictions of differing tastes for competition or biased subjective evaluation but find limited support that either factor explains most of the gender difference in performance pay. However, bonus-awarding jobs also demonstrate a higher elasticity of earnings with respect to weekly hours than other jobs do, and thus some of the wider wage gap is explained by gender differences in time at work.

This thesis focuses on female labor supply, human capital and assortative mating. The first chapter examines the link between the gap in spousal education and the labor supply behavior of married women over the life-cycle. Based on data from the 1965-2011 March Current Population Surveys and the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979, it documents that, all else equal, if the wife's education exceeds her husband's then she is substantially more likely to be employed than if she is less educated than her husband (up to 14.5 percentage points). A dynamic life-cycle model of endogenous marriage and labor supply decisions in a collective framework is formulated and structurally estimated. It establishes that the link between a husband's educational attainment and a wife's labor supply decision, at the time of marriage, produces dynamic effects due to human capital accumulation and implied wage growth. Returns to experience account for 57 percent of the employment gap observed between women who had married "down" and those who married "up". Counterfactuals also indicate that, alone, the changes in assortative mating patterns across cohorts, which are implied by the changes in the marginal distributions of education, are able to explain a sizable proportion (roughly 25 percent) of the observed rise in married women's labor force participation. The second chapter analyzes the evolution of educational assortative mating along racial lines. Previous studies suggest that preferences have changed across cohorts in the US to produce an increase in assortative mating. The analysis in the second chapter challenges the metric of measurement for assortative mating and shows that educational assortative mating has been stable over time for blacks and whites despite social and economic changes that might have impacted individual's incentives to form a marriage. The third chapter proposes a novel instrument for catholic school attendance that exploits the abrupt shock to catholic schools' human capital in the aftermath of the second Vatican council. It shows that the positive correlation between Catholic schooling and student outcomes is explained by selection bias.

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This study contributes to exploration and understanding of the role of social context in economic outcomes through expansion of theoretical and empirical work on the impact of social networks (ties between individuals and/or groups that are not mediated by markets). These ties can have substantial economic impact through their roles as information conduits, and through their influence on decision-making by job seekers and employers. Because social networks vary from person to person, they also play a major distributional role in conferring different opportunities among individuals. This dissertation expands the literature in labor market theory, and in the theory linking economic outcomes and social context, by providing new behavioral microfoundations for the impact of social networks in job search, extending the understanding of social network dynamics beyond the employer-initiated employee referral model introduced by Montgomery in 1989. The theory presented introduces two explanations of social network impact on labor market outcomes, an “early-bird” dynamic, and a “search-efficiency” dynamic. The early-bird effect reconciles survey answers more closely with theory, and fills an important gap in the explanation and interpretation of social network dynamics. The search-efficiency effect highlights another advantage of job-seekers with strong social networks. A unified framework for the conceptualization of job search success, incorporating social network effects, anticipated productivity, and discrimination is subsequently presented in Chapter 4. The dissertation's econometric analysis addresses issues of the absence of direct data on job search networks, and endogenous determination of an explanatory variable. Causal relationships advanced in theories of friendship formation are utilized to provide a necessary alternative structure to two-stage least squares analysis. Although the quality of the available data limits the conclusions that can be drawn from the econometric investigation, the study provides a strong base of theory for future inquiry and suggests that future research may contribute greatly to public policy.

This dissertation empirically investigates the extent of ripple effects associated with changes in mandated wage floors in the United States. Ripple effects are generally theorized to exist because employers provide wage increases beyond those legally required in order to preserve a particular wage hierarchy. This research thus addresses an important policy question: What is the overall impact of mandated wage floors on the wage structure? I examine two types of mandated wage floors: federal and state minimum wage laws and state prevailing wage laws. I use a semi-parametric approach to estimate the wage effect of state and federal minimum wage changes at fourteen different wage percentiles. I find a limited minimum wage ripple effect. Workers earning up to the 15th wage percentile (within 135 percent of the minimum wage prior to the increase) experience a wage effect from minimum wage changes. Although limited in extent, these estimates imply a ripple effect multiplier of approximately 2.40 to 2.50. This expanded effect modestly improves the target efficiency of minimum wage laws. Also, because the wage growth of these lower wage percentiles lag the rest of the wage distribution in the absence of minimum wage changes, they appear to comprise a minimum wage contour. A separate analysis of the retail trade industry produces similar results. To observe prevailing wage law ripple effects, I estimate the wage effect of the repeal of state prevailing wage laws at five different points in the wage distribution using quantile regression. I use mean regression on samples of workers divided by union status and work experience to further specify the location of wage effects. The results suggest that prevailing wage laws produce limited or no ripple effects. The repeal of prevailing wage laws specifically impact the union wage premium of relatively more experienced construction workers and do not appear to spillover significantly to uncovered workers. The pattern of construction premiums across states suggests that prevailing wage laws may substitute as a source of bargaining power for union density.