This thesis begins with the economic globalization, and uses secondary data analysis to explore the labor structural change and employment conditions in Taiwan under globalization. Then, using the social exclusion theory, through qualitative in-depth interview methods, this study explores the unemployment and re-employment experiences of the long-term unemployed and the marginally employed, as well as the economic, psychological, and social network exclusion in the process of employment to unemployment. This study also discusses the roles of government employment policies, familial and social relationship networks. Finally, policy suggestions are proposed according to related research discoveries. The study finds that: first, in terms of unemployment and re-employment experience, most laborers regard unemployment with a passive and external attribution attitude; this negatively influences emotions, interpersonal relationships, and later re-employment. While unable to return to the original career, unemployed laborers develop different life choices. Those who return to the labor market the earliest return because they succumb to economic pressure, becoming marginal workers who are willing to do any work, and the other kind are those who are continuously accumulate capital and convert it into employment resource; these are the active workers. On the other hand, there are two types of people who remain unemployed. One is the type that becomes waiting unemployed because they are unwilling to budge on employment conditions, and the other is the type that is limited by their own employment abilities and become helplessly unemployed. Additionally, unemployed people with different identities also have different life choices at their inability to return to their original careers. Secondly, from labor market exclusion to social exclusion: 1.Labor market exclusion and economic exclusion: unemployment results in decreased income, which further impairs daily living needs, basic medical care, and educational services, as well as stops one from participating in entertainment and leisure activities; these impact basic life opportunities and makes one feel more and more exclusion. 2. Labor market exclusion and psychological exclusion: emotional changes during unemployment are primarily affected by decreased income, but it is also affected by personal expectations of future re-employment. For the involuntarily unemployed, they feel a greater sense of lack of control and impotence over their lives. 3. Labor market exclusion and social relationship exclusion: as a result of lack of self esteem or economic considerations, the unemployed have significantly less social interaction, in a singularized network structure, which would provide relatively smaller economic or re-employment support. 4. Social networks have a positive influence on alleviating the multifaceted exclusion caused by unemployment, but the majority of unemployment laborers have significantly insufficient social network functions. Those who are unemployed with weak formal and informal social networks would fall into social exclusion, have a bleak outlook on the future and believe that there is no chance to extricate oneself from the various unfavorable situations caused by unemployment. ¡@¡@The end of the thesis also discusses some related issues, such as the unemployment issue (unemployment conceptualization? Who are the unemployed? Work or retire?), social exclusion issues (applicability of social exclusion theories? what is the role of the country in labor market exclusion? Does the employment policy cause social cohesion or social exclusion?), social structures, and individual action interactions. Finally, from labor market intervention, construction to social network, and proposes related policy suggestions to reverse social exclusion.

With globalization and knowledge economy, distance between spaces and obstacles to social and economic activities are reduced, however, R&D activities and technology diffusion of high-tech industry still rely on face-to-face communication. Geographical proximity and social networks are still beneficial to share technology and decrease transaction costs, so clustering of high-tech industry is still popular in the world. The research based on the concept of social embeddedness aims to discuss whether cultural atmosphere and social networks influence the fluidity of labor market, and to know how the fluidity of high-tech personnel and technology learning work on the vertically-integrated optoelectronic system in the Southern Taiwan Science-based Industrial Park. The research compares the results of questionnaire and interview with the existing literature to paint a configuration of the fluid labor market and further to discuss the interaction between the labor market activities and high-tech development in the Southern Taiwan Science-based Industrial Park. At last, it comes to the conclusion of the differences and commons in different industrial districts by comparing labor market activities. The result shows that employees think job-change is an acceptable value and phenomenon in the Southern Taiwan Science-based Industrial Park. Thus the cultural atmosphere will render the fluidity of labor market easy. Due to the industrial cluster forming a labor pooling, job-related information is concentrated and job-change costs are decreased. In addition, workers usually seek and get jobs by strong ties of social networks. So network embeddedness influences labor market activities. The more conveniently job information flows, the higher possibility of workers¡¦ job mobility is. Furthermore, most employees are willing to accumulate technological knowledge and realize ideals by changing jobs. However, some contradictions including wasting educational training, exposing competitors to key technology, and nurturing new competitors coexist with the fluidity of labor market. Consequently, firms are mostly opposed to the fluid labor market. Thanks to the innovations transferred by foreign high-tech personnel, the optoelectronic system is able to escape from the obsolete technology lock-in of the system.

The main aim in this study is to criticize the prevalent method of approach of the mainstream economics to women&rsquo / s problems. The mainstream approach to women&rsquo / s problems is to emphasize exclusively the significance of education, and participation in work-force, and which defines issues of equality/inequality in terms of economic advantages and externalities. Ensuring gender equality has historically never been the mainspring agenda of governments / and the problems of women have mainly been considered in terms of bringing women into the public sphere. This document examines the situation of women in the Turkish labor market, to see to what extent education helps women exceed their roles of the conventional sexual division of labor in the labor market. The limits of the effect of higher educational degree on the improvement of women&rsquo / s position within the market mechanism are discussed. We found that despite its importance, education on its own is inadequate to secure gender equality in both private and public sphere.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Title from first page of PDF file (viewed February 9, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 85-88). Issued in print and online. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 121-125).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University. 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-91) and index.

Föreliggande studie tar sin utgångspunkt i att diskriminerande mekanismer försvårar etnisk inkludering på arbetsmarknaden. Undersökningen söker empiriskt belysa attityder och praktiker inom den privata finans- och IT-sektorn vad avser rekryteringav personer med utländsk bakgrund, samt undersöka resultatet i ljuset av tre diskrimineringsteorier: Stigmatisering, preferensbaserad diskriminering och strukturell diskriminering. Studien bygger på 18 intervjuer och 6 policydokument från 16 olika företag. Studien visar att mångfald och antidiskrimineringsarbete ses som självklarheter. Det är också en förklaring till varför ett aktivt arbete med dessa frågor inte förekommer i större utsträckning än vad diskrimineringslagstiftningen anger i termer om diskrimineringsförbud. Vad som skulle driva ett aktivt arbete med dessa frågor är att företagsledningar ser kopplingen till vinstskapande. Resultatet stärker även tidigare forskning om att arbetsgivare kan fungera som grindvakter. Det yttrar sig genom att de i större utsträckning anställer via nätverksrekrytering och genom att ge mindre prioritet åt mångfald- och diskrimineringsfrågor i jämförelse med jämställdhetsfrågor. Resultatet pekar även på att det finns en grad av preferensdriven diskriminering där arbetsgivare har en så kallad smak för att anställa en spegling av sig själv. Detta sker omedvetet men även på grund av en subtil rädsla för repressalierför att bryta mot den rådande normen som upplevs som ett säkert kort. Tendensen från företagen att överlåta stora delar av anställningsprocessen till bemanningsföretag kan medföra svårigheter med att säkerställa att innehållet i deras policydokument efterföljs. / The present study has its starting point in that discriminatory mechanisms complicates ethnic inclusion in the swedish labor market. The study wants to empirically illuminate attitudes and practices in finance and IT sectors in the private sector with regard to recruitment of person with foreign origin and examine the results in light of three discrimination theories: Stigma, preference-based and structural discrimination. The study is based on 18 interviews and 6 policy documents. The study shows that work concerning diversity and anti discrimination are seen as certainties. This also explain why an active work on these issues are not concerned to a greater extent that what the anti discrimination legacy states in terms of prohibition of discrimination. What would encourage an active work on these issues is that the companies management are able to see the connection to profit. The results also strengthen previous research that employers may act as gatekeepers. This appears by the fact that they to greater extent hire through network recruitment and by giving less priority to diversity and discrimination issues compared to gender equality. The results also indicate that there is a degree of preference-driven discrimination where employers have a taste for hiring a reflection of themselves. This occurs unconsciously but also because of a subtle fear for reprisals for breaking the current norm which is perceived as a safe card. The tendency of the companies to leave great parts of the hiring process to recruitment agencies may induce difficulties in ensuring that the content in their policy documents are followed.

The stock of human capital plays an important role for a sustained economic development, both at the individual and the country level. In order to prosper as a middle income country Vietnam need to increase the nation ́s human capital stock and this thesis shows that human capital theory holds for investments in years of education, knowledge of a foreign language and experience. Human capital investments, such as educational attainment and knowledge of a foreign language, are estimated to have significant impact on earnings in year 2012. Subjective evidence through interviews and observations are used to understand the underlying interpretation of these results in order to see how the labor market actually works in Vietnam.

In the first chapter, I study the effects of innovations in information technology on the housing market. Specifically, I focus on the improved ability of lenders to assess the credit risk of home buyers, which has become possible with the emergence of automated underwriting systems in the United States in the mid-1990s. I develop a standard life-cycle model with incomplete markets and idiosyncratic income uncertainty. I explicitly model the housing tenure choice of the households: rent/purchase decision for renters and stay/sell/default decision for homeowners. Risk-free lenders offer mortgage contracts to prospective home buyers and the terms of these contracts depend on the observable characteristics of households. Households are born as either good credit risk types--having a high time discount factor--or bad types--having a low time discount factor. The type of the household is the only source of asymmetric information between households and lenders. I find that as lenders have better information about the type of households, the average down payment fraction decreases together with an increase in the average mortgage premium, the foreclosure rate, and the dispersions of mortgage interest rates and down payment fractions, which are consistent with the trends in the housing market in the last 15 years. From a welfare perspective, I find that better information, on average, makes households better off. In the second chapter, I focus on the labor market behavior of couples. Search theory routinely assumes that decisions about the acceptance/rejection of job offers (and, hence, about labor market movements between jobs or across employment states) are made by individuals acting in isolation. In reality, the vast majority of workers are somewhat tied to their partners--in couples and families--and decisions are made jointly. This chapter studies, from a theoretical viewpoint, the joint job-search and location problem of a household formed by a couple (e.g., husband and wife) who perfectly pool income. The objective of the exercise, very much in the spirit of standard search theory, is to characterize the reservation wage behavior of the couple and compare it to the single-agent search model in order to understand the ramifications of partnerships for individual labor market outcomes and wage dynamics. We focus on two main cases. First, when couples are risk averse and pool income, joint-search yields new opportunities--similar to on-the job search--relative to the single-agent search. Second, when couples face offers from multiple locations and a cost of living apart, joint-search features new frictions and can lead to significantly worse outcomes than single-agent search. Finally, in the third chapter, I focus on the relation between house prices and interest rates. Although interest rates and housing prices seem mostly to have a negative relation in the data, the relation does not seem to be stable. For example, the recent run up in the global housing prices is generally explained by globally low interest rates. On the other hand, there have been periods where housing prices and interest rates moved together. Motivated by these observations, I formulate a two period OLG model to find out the form of the relationship between interest rates and housing prices. It appears that the distribution of homeownership is also important for housing price dynamics. I show that housing prices in the equilibrium do not always have a negative relation with interest rates. / text

Alcohol consumption may affect labor market outcomes directly through a reduction in productivity and indirectly through human capital accumulation. However, empirical results from previous studies in the economics literature are mixed and inconclusive. While some researchers found negative effects of alcohol use on labor market outcomes, quite a few studies found either positive or insignificant effects. The purpose of this dissertation is to estimate causal effects of alcohol consumption on employment status. It uses three data sets previously unexploited for this purpose and attempts to eliminate any potential estimation problems from previous studies. The results show that previous problematic heavy drinking, i.e. clinically-defined alcohol abuse and/or dependence, has no significant direct effects, but has significant indirect effects on current employment propensity for both genders through human capital components, specifically educational attainment and health status. While general alcohol consumption has only an indirect effect on employment status for females, it has both direct and indirect effects on employment status for males, though the direct effect is very small.