<p>This thesis consists of five essays in the discipline of labour economics. The first essay uses cross-section time series analysis to estimate the impact of mandatory votes and card check on union certification success. The second examines the behaviour of Canadian union density from 1980 to 1998 and uses projections to look at the future of the Canadian union movement. The third investigates the decline of private sector U.S. union density from 1983 to 1999. The fourth essay considers the impact of three factors on the Canada-U.S. union density gap from 1980 to 1999: the difference in overall economic performance between the U.S. and Canada; structural change; and union recognition procedures. The fifth essay describes the behaviour of earnings per week, wages per hour and hours per week of prime-aged males by skill-group (identified by earnings quintile) in the U.S. and Canada from 1981 to 1997. This essay also provides evidence on relative downward wage rigidity in Canada.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation explores labor movement political division under Brazilian democracy. The study traces the evolution of labor movement political division from the transition to democratic rule during the early 1980s to the development of the bitter dispute between the rival Central Unica dos Trabalhadores (CUT) and Forca Sindical labor centrals during the early 1990s. This examination of divided labor focuses upon these national labor leadership organizations and the collective action strategies they promoted within the labor movement and the workforce. The dissertation challenges conventional explanations of labor movement political division based exclusively upon labor leadership rivalry, organizational competition or political party contestation. This examination argues that the bitter dispute from 1991-1994 was fundamentally a conflict about the optimum collective action strategy for conceiving and pursuing workers' interests under capitalist democracy in Brazil. This type of political division, expressed by the elaboration and coordination of competing collective action strategies, emerged from three interrelated conditions. First, the structure of Brazilian capitalism intensified class conflict between workers and their employers under democracy. Second, the rising tide of class conflict was mediated through labor market segmentation. Labor market segmentation shaped the structure of choices confronting Brazilian workers. Third, the intensification of class conflict under democracy propelled the organization of a working class political threat, demonstrated by the growth of both the CUT and the Partido dos Trabalhadores. This threat to employers induced many of them to exchange immediate benefits to their employees for their political cooperation. This political exchange was promoted and coordinated by the Forca Sindical. Thus, this dissertation concludes that the bitter dispute arose from the clash between the organization and promotion of a class based strategy and one linked to political cooperation with employers. This study suggests that theories of labor movement political division be linked to the type of division in question. Also, that labor movement division based upon competition between alternative strategies be explained as the result of the interaction between economic and political variables, particularly as they impact the structures of choice facing workers under capitalist democracy.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1983. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2006 / "Publication number AAT 3251772."

Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2006 / "Publication number AAT 3242505."

Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2006 / "Publication number AAT 3241868."

Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2006 / "Publication number AAT 3241854."

This dissertation consists of three essays in applied econometrics. The first two explore how students and parents respond to changes in educational policies. The last one implements bias corrections for nonlinear panel data models with fixed effects. The first essay addresses the effect of decreasing the age at which compulsory schooling begins in Mexico. A policy change in 2002 required all children between ages 3 and 5 to attend preschool before entering first grade. School entry laws create a discontinuity that induces a sharp increase in preschool enrollment at the expected birthday cutoff. Using this sharp increase, I find that requiring children to attend preschool increases their achievement in elementary and middle school. There is also an increase in parental investments during elementary school. Only parents who would not send their kids to preschool influence the results, as access to preschool was free and universal prior to this policy change. The second essay uses an experiment in Mexican high schools to analyze how estimates of peer effects change under different types of monetary incentives aimed at increasing math achievement. I find that the estimated peer effect differs between incentivized and non-incentivized groups, and across incentivized groups. I argue that changes in the impact of classroom peers' ability (measured by their individual fixed effects) resulting from the experimental intervention should be interpreted as evidence of peer effects. The third essay (with Ivan Fernandez-Val and Martin Weidner) develops two Stata commands that provide bias-corrected estimates of panel probit and logit models with two-way fixed effects. Nonlinear panel data models with individual fixed effects can be severely biased because of the incidental parameter problem, and yet these models are used in many empirical applications. The commands developed in this essay correct for both the bias arising from the inclusion of individual fixed effects and the additional bias arising from the inclusion of time fixed effects. They also provide corrected estimates of the average partial effects.

<p> Major depression is common, deleterious, and persistent across generations, thus making depression a crucial link between the economic fortunes of parents and children &ndash; albeit one that economists have largely neglected. A biological literature indicates that stressors causing depression in parents also cause depression in offspring through two mechanisms: parenting behaviors caused by parental depression and, potentially, epigenetic endowments. In this thesis, I explore these mechanisms and their relevance for the young adult outcomes of offspring. I utilize the Avon Longitudinal Study of Adults and Children (ALSPAC), which uniquely contains epigenetic data at birth of currently adult children. Furthermore, I develop an economic model of intergenerational mobility featuring depression as a facet of human capital, which aids interpretation of my findings and clarifies potential implications. My empirical findings indicate that parental depression, depression-associated parenting behaviors, and biological endowments play a key role in determining the young-adult outcomes of children. The child's adolescent depression mediates this relationship. Conditional on depression and other covariates, parental household income plays either a more modest role or no role, depending on the outcome variable considered. Meanwhile, child epigenetic data at birth explains twice the variance in the child's adolescent depression as does maternal depression in the subsample for which I have epigenetic data, providing suggestive evidence that biological endowments very early in life may establish a component of depression risk. </p><p> To interpret my findings, I crystalize ideas from the biological literature in a simple economic framework. I treat the mechanisms generating depression as a technology of preference formation. Stress, parenting behaviors, and direct biological endowments form <i>affective capital</i>, where low affective capital manifests as depression. Affective capital enters directly into the utility function to reduce disutility of effortful actions, including labor market effort and parenting effort. Thus, high affective capital both increases earnings and increases parental investment in the affective capital of children. In this way, my model resembles a Becker-Tomes/habit formation hybrid. This model highlights how investments in the child's human capital may be income inelastic. I discuss additional implications of this model.</p><p>

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.