China's internal migration has drawn extensive interest since the 1980s, and numerous studies have focused on migrant workers who are employed by the "world’s factories". However, less attention has been paid to migrant workers participating in the informal economy in urban China. In fact, the informal economy, which refers to income-generating activities that are not regulated by the state, has been estimated to have expanded dramatically over the past two decades, and migrant workers comprise the overwhelming majority of participants in the informal sector. These informals are mostly self-employed or paid employees working for informal factories hidden in the urban villages. This study, taking an urban village known as Kangle village in Guangzhou as its research site, adopts an ethnographic method to understand the lives of China's migrant workers engaged in the informal economy. It attempts to (1) examine the institutional environment for the expansion of the informal economy in urban China, (2) understand the individual choices of migrant workers in terms of being formal or informal, (3) explore their economic performance and (4) discover whether the informal economy could represent an alternative for migrant workers to achieve upward mobility in receiving cities. It is found that institutional factors, including policy practices of the state, regulation enforcement by local government and the relative autonomy of the migrant enclave all contribute to the development of the informal economy in urban China. Individual choices in being formal or informal are based primarily on participants' rational calculations comparing costs and benefits; howbeit these choices have actually been largely affected by the social networks of migrant workers. Migrant workers engaged in the informal economy receive relatively higher incomes than their counterparts in the formal sector. However, the higher monthly incomes for the wage employees in the informal economy can also be viewed as compensation for their willingness to undertake the risky, dirty, long-hour informal jobs. Social networks have also played an essential role in the economic performance of migrant workers in the informal economy. For instance, the strong social ties of migrant workers largely facilitate the process of becoming self-employed or migrant entrepreneurs by providing market information, financial support and labor resources. Also, the use of social networks reduces the transaction costs between different business owners in the informal sector where formal contracts are absent. Economic stratification among the migrant workers in the urban village is obvious, and a small number of migrants have achieved economic success by becoming self-employed or migrant entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, migrant entrepreneurship cannot continue to be a sustainable alternative for the majority of migrant workers to achieve upward mobility due to the vulnerability of the informal economy and the absence of institutional inclusion for the participants in the informal economy. It is thus suggested that society and government rethink and adjust current institutional settings to improve work conditions, promote entrepreneurship, and facilitate the formalization of the informal economy on the one hand; meanwhile initiate top-down reforms for the integration of migrant workers in both the formal and informal sectors. / published_or_final_version / Social Work and Social Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

My dissertation focuses on the means through which a new worker-identity is getting crafted in the city of Kolkata in India under the impact of neoliberal economic policies of the state on one hand and the changing modes of capital formation on the other. Kolkata’s position as the pre-eminent city of British India in the nineteenth century had led to a huge influx of industrial capital. However, the post-independence era saw a gradual flight of capital due to a long history of political and social turbulence. With the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s, both national and trans-national capital have started flowing back into Kolkata, especially in sectors such as real-estate, retail and service industries. This has led to a huge proliferation of expensive shopping malls and cafes in the city employing a large urban youth population, usually from under-privileged backgrounds. With the state giving up its former faith in socialist principles and instead strongly committing itself to neoliberal economic reforms, the future of development for Kolkata is getting tied to its capacity to attract corporate capital, particularly in organized retail and service sectors. As such, urban labor is coming under a tremendous scrutiny to delineate an identity according to principles of flexibility, self-discipline and responsiveness to the needs of contemporary private capitalist interests. In spaces like shopping malls and exclusive cafes, workers are repeatedly trained and indoctrinated to show an affective capacity to serve, be cheerful in their work and to display through bodily comportments the signs of a global cosmopolitanism that can sustain consumption. However, with most of the workers themselves coming from low-income backgrounds with little or no knowledge of the roles they are asked to play as part of their work, uncertainties and anxieties exacerbate the already precarious position of these young workers. This study therefore looks at how workers negotiate everyday work environments and how such work environments in turn alter and condition their identity through multiple strategies of discipline and control emanating from both the neoliberal state as well as corporate institutions. / text

<p> This dissertation is comprised of three essays. In the first essay we develop a price-setting model that explains the gap between the effect of nominal shock in real activity and the frequency of price change through the interplay of menu costs and uncertainty about productivity. Uncertainty arises from firms' inability to distinguish between permanent and transitory changes in their idiosyncratic productivity. Upon the arrival of a productivity shock, a firm's uncertainty spikes up and then fades with learning until the arrival of the next shock. These uncertainty cycles, when paired with menu costs, generate recurrent episodes of high frequency of price adjustment followed by episodes of low frequency of adjustment at the firm level. This time variation in the individual adjustment frequency is consistent with empirical patterns, in particular a decreasing hazard rate of adjustment, and it is key to understand the sluggish propagation of nominal shocks. </p><p> The second essays studies a model where the relevant asset that affects a firm's financial conditions is her workers. To achieve this, we extend a standard labor market model as in Pissarides (1985) to incorporate default risk. Because it is costly to engage new workers in production, firms attach a value to be matched with a worker and, consequently, their decision to default and leave the economy is affected by this value. We show that fluctuations in the value of a worker generate and significantly propagate fluctuations in financial markets. We find that, absent any fluctuation in the labor market, credit spreads and default rates would be 68% and 80% less volatile, respectively. Finally, we argue that this two sided interaction between labor and financial markets can be an important propagation mechanism of business cycle fluctuations. </p><p> In the third essay I study the optimal inflation target in a menu cost model with an occasionally binding zero lower bound on interest rates. I find that the optimal inflation target is 5%, much larger than the rates currently targeted by the Fed and the ECB, and also larger than in other time- and state-dependent pricing models. In my model resource misallocation does not increase greatly with inflation, unlike in previous sticky price models. The critical additions for this result are firms' idiosyncratic shocks. Higher inflation does indeed increase the gap between old and new prices, but it also increases firms' responsiveness to idiosyncratic shocks. These two effects are balanced using idiosyncratic shocks consistent with micro-price statistics. By increasing the inflation target, policymakers can reduce the probability of hitting the zero lower bound, avoiding costly recessionary episodes.</p>

<p> Women comprise over 57% of all U.S. mortuary school students, yet less than 20% of all funeral directors employed in this country are women. As such, women are underrepresented as funeral directors in the funeral industry. Research to date has not established clear differences between perceived gender roles and occupations in the funeral service industry. The research questions examined the perceived differences of gender role characteristics of masculine, feminine, and androgyny between the occupations of funeral service providers and nursing. Bem&rsquo;s gender role theory was the theoretical framework of this study. The research compared the mean scores of male and female funeral service professionals and nursing professionals as measured by the validated Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI). A sample consisted of 214 randomly selected male (n = 88) and female (n = 25) funeral service professionals and male (n = 37) and female (n = 64) nurse professionals. Data scores were analyzed using the factorial multivariate analysis of variance method. Results indicated nonsignificant gender role differences between male and female funeral directors. Funeral directors appear more androgynous compared to nurses. The present study contributed to the development of this important and neglected area of research by quantitatively examining the gender role perceptions of men and women in the funeral service industry for the first time. This study results highlighted the complexity in self-perceived gender role characteristics as measured by BSRI. When the funeral profession begins to dispel gender stereotypes and discrimination issues, positive social change can occur.</p>

The process of accumulating human capital formally begins when individuals enter the education system. It is widely accepted that tracking students plays an important role in human capital production. This dissertation focuses on the practice and consequences of tracking students at the high school level. I use a variety of methods to analyze how students are assigned to tracks, the effects of tracks on the human capital stock, the flow of services from that stock, and to explore whether tracking affects the decision to drop out of high school. The analysis provides new perspectives in the economics of human capital and has important implications for education policy. Although tracking students by perceived ability is a long-standing practice, its merits have been hotly debated over the years. Chapter 3 explores one of the four tenants of tracking, whether or not it is a fair and accurate process. I analyze the possibility of racial or gender discrimination in track assignment and find that there is evidence of some racial discrimination in the case of African Americans and Latinos. The evidence of discrimination leads me to question whether tracking is indeed an accurate process. This has direct implications for education policy, as accuracy in track assignment is critical for the pedagogical goals of tracking. Chapter 4 considers whether or not tracking students in high school affects their productivity, as measured by their wages, once they enter the labor force. I present the school and work profiles of individuals in the different tracks, develop several stylized facts, and analyze the effect of tracking on the wage rate. I conclude that the value of an additional year of schooling is different across tracks. The decision to drop out of high school is both a private decision and a social decision. In chapter 5, I examine how peer effects can influence the decision to drop out for both high ability and low ability students. The model and evidence suggest that students already at risk for dropping out might be more likely to do so if they are placed in a track with similarly at-risk students.

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In this dissertation, I present three essays on matching and assignment in labor economics. The first chapter presents an integrated model of occupation choice, spouse choice, family labor supply, and fertility. Two key features of the model are that occupations differ both in wages and in an amenity termed flexibility, and that children require a nontrivial amount of parental time that has no market substitute. I show that occupations with more costly flexibility, modeled as a nonlinearity in wages, have a lower fraction of women, less positive assortative mating on earnings, and lower fertility among dual-career couples. Costly flexibility may induce high-earning couples to share home production, which rewards husbands who are simultaneously high-earning and productive in child care. Empirical evidence broadly supports the main theoretical predictions with respect to the tradeoffs between marriage market and career outcomes. In the second chapter, I use the University of Michigan Law School Alumni Survey to investigate the interaction between assortative mating and the career and family outcomes of high-ability women. Women with higher earnings potential at the time of law school graduation have higher-earning spouses and more children 15 years after graduation. As the earnings penalty from reduced labor supply decreased over the sample, women with higher-earning spouses and more children reported shorter work weeks and were less likely to be in the labor force. Decreasing the career cost of non-work may have the unintended result of reducing the labor supply of the highest-ability women, as their high-earning spouses give them the option to temporarily exit the labor force. The third chapter addresses specification choice in empirical peer effects models. Predicting the impact of altering composition on student outcomes has proven an unexpected challenge in the experimental literature. I use the experimental data of Duflo et al. (2011) to evaluate the out-of-sample predictive accuracy of popular reduced form peer effects specifications. I find that predictions of the impact of ability tracking on outcomes are highly sensitive to the choice of peer group summary statistics and functional form assumptions. Standard model selection criteria provide some guidance in selecting among peer effect specifications.

The labor market matches agents with work, but uncertainty over the type and location of available work reduces the efficiency with which skill can be allocated to its best use. The essays in this dissertation examine the impact of uncertainty on the optimal division of work into jobs and allocation of agents to those jobs using applied economic theory.

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

This dissertation consists of three essays in applied microeconomics. The first essay investigates the effects of generic entry on post-patent price competition in the prescription drug market using NDC Health data on 18 oral solids that lost their patent sometime between February 1998 and 2002. I am able to characterize the impact of endogenous generic entry on branded and generic prices, conditional on payment type (i.e., cash, Medicaid, third party). Based on the findings in this paper, the overall, long-term impacts of the 1984 Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act (Waxman-Hatch Act) are yet to be determined. The second essay develops a theoretical model of earnings where human capital is the central explanatory variable. The analysis and estimation strategy stems from the Mincerian simple schooling model. Human capital investments (i.e., schooling) are incorporated into a model based on individual wealth maximization. We utilize the conventional economic models of supply and demand to derive an optimal level of schooling function. Using the NLSY79, we stratify our sample into one-year work experience intervals for 1985-1989 to identify the "overtaking" cohort (i.e., the years of work experience at which an individual's observed earnings approximately equal what they would have been based on schooling and ability alone). We employ the AFQT score as an ability proxy and consider its possible endogeneity for several estimation strategies. The third essay attempts to address the bias inherent in the use of potential, as opposed to actual, work experience measures in human capital models. While such a proxy is often deemed reasonable for males, problems still exist---specifically, unemployment spells manifesting themselves as active job searches or withdrawal from the labor market. Presumably, such activities have different effects on one's work experience. Potential work experience measures also abstract away from employment status, over-time work, moonlighting, and multiple-job holding. We employ actual work experience data from the NLSY79 and the PSID and extend our findings to a data set in which actual measures of work experience are not available---specifically, the IPUMS, with the creation of predicted work experience measures.