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Thesis advisor: Heather Cox Richardson / Between the 1850s and World War II, millions of workers participated in a system of continuous labor migration that drove the development of the Pacific Northwest. Western industries relied on short-term workers because of their seasonal and economic cycles. These industries were often located far from urban centers and thus relied on a highly mobile pool of North American, European, and Asian workers to turn the Northwest’s abundant natural resources into wealth, an arrangement I call the footloose labor system. In order to manage workers’ movement within and across United States borders, employers turned to immigrant labor contractors and employment agencies to bring order to this chaotic labor market. But those agencies did little to settle the high labor turnover, and instead, exerted increasing control over migrant workers. By the mid-twentieth century, white workers had largely risen out of the system, leaving migrant labor to Asian, and increasingly, Latinx workers who have come to represent “migrant workers” in today’s America.This dissertation argues that the presence of both hobos and Asian workers in the footloose labor system dynamically shaped the conditions of the labor market, and together, cemented a racialized migrant labor system in the Pacific Northwest that would come to be dominated by Latinx workers in the second half of the twentieth century. Placing labor migration—and the labor brokers who engineered the footloose labor system—at the center of the story shifts our perspective to see that hobos and Asian immigrant workers existed in the same labor market dominated by employers who relied on footloose workers. From the point of Northwestern employers and labor brokers, migrant workers, whether they were born in Kansas, Greece, China, or the Philippines, proved useful only if they made a business profitable. Employers continued to hire both white and Asian workers through labor brokers into the 1920s. But white migrant workers increasingly sought jobs outside of the footloose labor system as new technology in agriculture reduced the number of available jobs and post-World War I politics put a greater emphasis on homeownership and conformity. White workers' departure left the most precarious and exploitative jobs to Japanese, Filipinx and eventually Latinx workers. The footloose labor system always depended upon a highly mobile pool of workers who were kept on the fringes of society to do the difficult, cheapened, and necessary work of turning natural resources into wealth. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Hypotheses drawn from labor segmentation literature concerning wage determination and the labor force characteristics of the secondary labor segment are tested on three local labor markets. Samples are constructed from Current Population Surveys from 1978 and 1985 for three metropolitan areas--Los Angeles-Long Beach, Philadelphia, and San Francisco-Oakland--and the procedure of David Gordon (1986) is used to identify the secondary segment. Estimation of a model predicting segment location produced mixed results. Controlling for a number of individual characteristics, there was evidence that African-American and Hispanic workers and youth were over-represented in the secondary segment. As the secondary segment was identified in this study, there was not evidence that women were over-represented in secondary employment, but women's wages were estimated to be substantially lower in both non-secondary and secondary employment. Ordinary least squares estimation of earnings determination showed mixed support for the existence of labor segmentation with estimated returns to education significantly lower in the secondary sector in five of the six metropolitan samples and estimated returns to labor market experience significantly lower in four. However, the return to the head-of-household variable--a proxy for labor force attachment--was only significantly lower in one of the samples. Comparisons of estimated relative wages for various demographic groups indicated generally lower earnings for secondary jobs, but there were notable anomalies in the 1978 Philadelphia sample. A switching model with known regimes was employed to test and correct for potential selection bias in ordinary least squares estimation of the earnings structure. Estimates obtained from a conventional modelling of selectivity provided limited and inconsistent evidence of selection bias and suggested the limited appropriateness of the model. The study includes consideration of factors which may have contributed to the inconsistency of the results, including data limitations, segment misclassification, and the conceptualization of race and ethnicity and gender relations within a static model of labor segmentation.

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Every decade between 1970 and 2010 opened with a recession with all decades except the 1990s experiencing a second recession. Young adults are often hardest hit by a recession in terms of job losses. Young adulthood is a critical time to get an education and educational opportunities lost during this period may not be fully made up in subsequent years. In this dissertation, I explore the effects of adverse economic conditions during the traditional college-age years (18-24) on short, medium and long run educational outcomes. This dissertation consist of one theoretical chapter and three empirical essays. In the theoretical chapter, I show the complexity of business cycle effects on college outcomes. The main issue is that opportunity costs move countercyclically while ability-to-pay moves procyclically, thus these two factors counteract each other over the business cycle. Due to the confounding effects of opportunity cost and ability-to-pay, there is a theoretical ambiguity. In the theoretical framework, I outline the conditions under which downturns may improve educational outcomes and the conditions under which downturns may hurt educational outcomes. The ambiguity and complexity displayed in the theoretical framework underlies the importance of an empirical determination. Essay 1 examines whether economic conditions affect college participation among different demographic groups differently. The main or average effect of an economic downturn on enrollment is well studied. However, research on how a downturn affects individuals from different backgrounds is rare. Using a class of logit models that account for interaction effects, I find that individuals who are black or Hispanic and individuals from low education maternal backgrounds are more likely to enroll in college during high unemployment periods compared to individuals from other demographic backgrounds. Essay 2 picks up where essay 1 leaves off by investigating college outcomes for individuals who enrolled during a recession. While many studies consider the enrollment decisions, little evidence exists on whether enrollment is successfully transformed into completed education for recession era enrollees. Employing an innovative competing risk model, I estimate the completion and drop-out probabilities for individuals who enrolled during a downturn. I find that individuals who enrolled in college at 18 and who experience a recession at enrollment, are less likely to complete a 4-year degree by age 24, are more likely to complete a 2-year degree, are more likely to drop out of college and are more likely to experience inactivity. Essay 3 builds upon the negative effects of a recession on college-aged youths found in essay 2. In essay 3, I study educational attainment after individuals have exited their college-aged years. I investigate whether cohorts who experienced adverse economic conditions during young adulthood eventually caught up with their luckier counterparts who experienced more prosperous years. I find that individuals who experience adverse economic conditions during parts of the college-aged years (18-21) experience lower educational attainment than those who experience more prosperous college-aged years and these negative effects are still present up to ten years post college-age. / Economics

Thesis advisor: Theodore TP Papageorgiou / This dissertation contains three independent chapters on topics in labor economics. In the first chapter, I examine the sources of decline in the job-finding rate over the spell of unemployment. In particular, I distinguish between dynamic selection and the adverse effect of longer unemployment durations. In the second chapter, Carter Bryson and I explore the role of broad sectoral shifts in labor demand in explaining the divergence of employment outcomes of Black and White men during the second half of the 20th century. Finally, in the third chapter, I propose a nonparametric estimator for the discrete-time version of the Mixed Proportional Hazard (MPH). In the first chapter, "Duration Dependence and Heterogeneity: Learning from Early Notice of Layoff,'' I disentangle the sources of decline in the observed job-finding rate over the spell of unemployment. It is possible that an individual worker's likelihood of exiting unemployment declines with the duration of unemployment (e.g., due to employers discriminating against long-term unemployed). However, workers also differ in their employability, their desperation to find a job, or perhaps their ability to look for jobs. Such heterogeneity across workers, which is often unobserved, implies that the observed job-finding rate declines even when an individual worker's exit probability does not. As the more employable workers exit early, the still unemployed workers are increasingly the less employable ones. A long literature tries to disentangle the role of structural duration dependence from heterogeneity, but it has proved to be quite challenging. I develop and implement a novel approach to answer this question by leveraging variation in the length of notice an individual receives from their previous employer before being laid off. The key idea behind my approach is that workers with longer notice start searching earlier and are more likely to exit unemployment early. If workers are heterogeneous, then the composition of long-notice workers should be worse at later durations as the more employable workers from this group have already left. This observation enables me to pin down the extent of heterogeneity and estimate structural duration dependence. My estimates imply that there is substantial heterogeneity in the likelihood of exiting unemployment across workers. I find that roughly 40% of the decline in the observed job-finding rate over the first five months is due to dynamic selection. Further, an individual's exit probability increases up to unemployment insurance (UI) exhaustion and remains constant after that. This is in contrast to the observed exit rate, which continues to decline even after benefit exhaustion. Recently, researchers have tried to explain this decline in the observed exit rate after UI exhaustion. For instance, it can be rationalized with storable offers (Boone and van Ours, 2012) or reference-dependent utility (DellaVigna et. al., 2017). My estimates suggest that most of the decline in the observed exit rate after UI exhaustion is due to changes in the composition of workers. In the second chapter which is joint work with Carter Bryson, "Understanding the Racial Employment Gap: The Role of Sectoral Shifts,'' we quantify the extent to which sectoral reallocation can explain the divergence in employment outcomes of Black and White men during the last three decades of the 20th century. Using a shift-share strategy, we document that local employment-to-population ratios for Black men are relatively more responsive to local labor demand shocks. We also document substantial population responses for both groups of workers. Finally, we provide a framework incorporating frictional unemployment and imperfect mobility across locations to aggregate these local responses. We find that sectoral shifts can explain roughly half of the observed exacerbation in the employment-to-population ratio differential between Black and White workers from 1970 to 2000. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the increase in the differential due to sectoral shifts results from the greater responsiveness of Black workers to local labor demand shifts rather than a higher concentration of these shifts in areas or sectors with a higher share of Black workers. In the final chapter, "The Discrete-Time Mixed Proportional Hazard Model'', I propose a nonparametric estimator for the discrete-time MPH model. Hazard models of event durations are widely employed in economics to analyze unemployment spells, retirement decisions, and an array of other topics. As the findings from the first chapter highlight, ignoring unobserved heterogeneity while analyzing duration data can lead to inaccurate inferences. The MPH model explicitly accounts for such heterogeneity but estimating this model can be challenging. I set up a discrete-time MPH model and propose an estimator for it that is based on the Generalized Method of Moments and is easy to implement. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

This study investigates employees' perceptions of the quality of work life in a large northeastern university. Two issues are central to the investigation, organizational commitment and job satisfaction. The latter indicator is examined on two levels--global job satisfaction and facet-specific satisfaction. Interest in the area of Quality of Work Life has increased in the past several years. The literature in this area, however, does not provide comprehensive guidance to implement such a program. Furthermore, studies on organizational commitment and job satisfaction hve tended to focus on samples of only a few occupations or broad national surveys. Thus, the literature is lacking in intraorganizational studies which compare occupational levels. The research in this study is presented in two sections. Part 1 examines the organizational commitment of the employees in two ways: (1) the sample as a whole and (2) separate analyses for each of eight occupational levels. Part 2 gauges satisfaction among this organization's employees. This is done using the same dual strategy mentioned above. The results indicate that the perceptions of the quality of life among these employees is not very positive. Immediate, job-related aspects, such as relations with coworkers, and the amount of comfort associated with jobs, are perceived favorably. The more distant areas of work, promotions and financial rewards, receive less desirable ratings. Similarly, the commitment of the employees was only slightly above the neutral point. Neither satisfaction nor commitment reveal positive perceptions of the quality of work life experienced. This holds true for sample wide as well as occupational groups. Examination of the standard organizational commitment model fails to provide empirical support for it. Suggestions are made for improving the measurement of commitment. Additionally, future areas of research are identified for the study of the quality of work life.

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