Cette thèse de doctorat a pour vocation de contribuer au débat sur l'origine de la discrimination ethnique, en se focalisant sur la population des immigrés africains en France et sur celle des Afro-américains aux Etats-Unis. Spécifiquement, en analysant des données microéconomiques françaises et américaines, elle permet d'identifier l'existence de la discrimination fondée sur le principe des préférences des employeurs et des consommateurs et leur effet sur la fragilisation de la situation économique de ces deux groupes minorés. Elle établit l'importance de la discrimination indirecte de la part des consommateurs, et suggère qu'il est primordial de connaître les origines de la discrimination ethnique pour instaurer des politiques publiques à même de lutter efficacement contre ce phénomène. Le premier chapitre propose une analyse descriptive de l'accès des actifs selon leurs origines géographiques aux emplois en contact avec la clientèle en France. Celui-ci révèle le moindre accès des immigrés en France, et des immigrés africains en particulier, aux emplois en contact avec le public. Dans le but d'analyser si les consommateurs jouent un rôle dans cette sous-représentation, le deuxième chapitre formule une stratégie de test destinée à distinguer la discrimination des consommateurs de celle des employeurs. L'existence de ces deux sources de discrimination à l'encontre des immigrés africains est ensuite prouvée à travers l'utilisation du recensement de la population française. A l'aide de la stratégie de test précédente, le troisième chapitre révèle la présence de cette source de discrimination envers les Afro-américains aux Etats-Unis. / This dissertation aims at contributing to the debate on the origins of ethnic discrimination by focusing on the population of African immigrants in France, and of African-Americans in the United States. More specifically, by analyzing French and US microeconomic data, it identifies the existence of discrimination based on the principle of employers' and consumers' tastes, and their impact on the weakening of the economic situation of these two discriminated groups. It establishes the importance of consumer discrimination and suggests that it is essential to understand the origins of ethnic discrimination in order to introduce efficient public policies to overcome this phenomenon. The first chapter provides a descriptive analysis of the access to customer-contact jobs for employed individuals based on their geographic origin. It reveals a lower access for immigrants in France, and African immigrants in particular, everything else being constant. In order to analyze whether consumer discrimination plays a part in this under-representation, the second chapter builds a test strategy to disentangle consumer from employer discrimination. The existence of consumer discrimination against African immigrants is then proved using the French census. Using the aforementioned test strategy, the third chapter reveals the presence of this source of discrimination against African-Americans in the US.

This paper examines the impact on pension generosity on teacher turnover in North Carolina Public School teachers. It specifically focuses on the impacts of vesting, employer contribution, and pension generosity for out-of-state teachers in their first five years of teaching. High rates of teacher turnovers, especially teachers in their early career, have been shown to negatively impact North Carolina students. As states search for solutions to decrease turnover and recruit more qualified teachers, the effects of pension programs on teacher turnover has yet to be thoroughly examined. This paper found that there was a slight negative correlation between teacher turnover and the generosity of pension programs.

This dissertation examines the impact of regulation and public policies on firm performance. Chapter 1, entitled “Political Contributions, Insider Trading, and CEO Compensation”, determines why CEOs from politically-connected firms receive higher pay compared to their non-politically connected peers. We investigate whether insider trading can explain high CEO pay. Using hand-collected firm-level lobbying data, we examine whether politically-connected CEOs engage in insider trading after sponsored bills are introduced and passed in the U.S. legislative bodies. Our results show that politically-connected CEOs commit insider trading, which yields higher compensation packages. In addition, we also find that lobbying benefits firm performance. Politically-connected firms receive more government contracts, which increases firm value. Overall, political contributions benefit both CEOs and shareholders. Chapter 2, entitled “The Impact of Incarceration on Firm Performance” conducts analyses on the impact of incarceration on firms based in the United States. Through time series Granger Causality Vector Autoregression (VAR) tests by state, we find that incarceration can influence labor markets measured by the state’s unemployment rate. We find that firms based in states with high incarceration underperform compared to firms based in states with low incarceration. This also holds true when examining prison reform data from the Pew Charitable Trust. Through differences in differences tests, we find that firms based in states with prison reform outperform firms based in states without prison reform. When controlling for firm and state macroeconomic factors, we find that increases in incarceration rates have a negative effect on firm performance.

For years, corporations in the United States have criticized the native workforce for not having enough qualified workers who are skilled in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Changing the immigration system could solve their problem. Current debates about how to best accomplish this task stem from different perceptions of whether high-skill immigrants adapt to the labor market, suffer from labor market disadvantages or meet rapid earnings growth. This study examines the initial wage gap immigrants working in the scientific research, development and testing services industry face upon entry to the United States as well as their income assimilation patterns. Ultimately, this paper provides evidence of a wage gap in this industry for recently arrived immigrants and otherwise similar natives, as well as confirms that the earnings for male immigrants in the industry tend to converge toward native levels the longer they remain in the country. Therefore, these results can provide valuable perspective on present immigration debates about whether to reduce immigration levels or change the skill composition of new immigrants.

Contemporary militaries depend on volunteer soldiers capable of dealing with advanced technology and complex missions. An important factor in the successful recruiting, retention, and employment of quality personnel is the set of personnel policies which a military has in place. It might be assumed that military policies on personnel derive solely from the functional necessities of the organization's mission, given that the stakes of military effectiveness are generally very high. Unless the survival of the state is in jeopardy, however, it will seek to limit defense costs, which may entail cutting into effectiveness. How a state chooses to make the tradeoffs between effectiveness and economy will be subject to influences other than military necessity. In this study, I argue that military personnel management policies ought to be a function of the interaction between the internal pressures of military mission and the external pressures of the national economic infrastructure surrounding the military. The pressures of military mission should not vary significantly across advanced democratic states, but the national market economic type will. Using written policy and expert interview data from five countries, this study analyzes how military selection, accessions, occupational specialty assignment, and separations policies are related to the country's educational and training system, the significance of skills certification on the labor market, and labor flexibility. I evaluate both officers and enlisted personnel, and I compare them across countries and within countries over time. I find that market economic type is a significant explanatory variable for the key military personnel policies under consideration, although other factors such as the size of the military and the stakes of military effectiveness probably also influence the results. Several other potential explanatory factors such as the ease of recruiting appear to be subordinate to market economic type in predicting policy. / Dissertation

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This dissertation expands on the economic geography literature on how and why innovation clusters spatially by taking a closer look at two correlated phenomena: regional specialization and firm clustering. While existing studies note that innovative regions are often highly specialized and highly clustered, further research is needed on the relative contributions of specialization and clustering to regional innovation. I examine these contributions by focusing on one key element of any regional innovation project: the labor market for scientific and technical professionals. The foundation for this study is a typology of regions based on regional specialization and firm clustering. I use this typology to answer one key research question: how specialization and clustering affect wages and recruitment methods in science-based industries. I create my typology using firm location data from the Photonics Buyers’ Guide, a leading trade publication in the photonics industry; I use the standardized location quotient and the average nearest neighbor distance as metrics of regional specialization and firm clustering, respectively. I investigate small firms’ labor market strategies using job search and wage data from the 2011 and 2012 SPIE salary surveys of employees in the photonics industry. I also examine how people-based and place-based policies for strengthening scientific and technical labor markets change when viewed through the lens of specialization and clustering. I selected the photonics industry as an example of a science-based industry for three reasons: its diversity of applications, its policy importance, and its unique colocation of design and manufacturing. Regional specialization and firm clustering, while correlated, do not always go hand in hand. By disentangling the effects of specialization versus clustering, this dissertation contributes to the literature on the spatial analysis of innovation. It also offers policymakers a heuristic for deciding on the importance of being known for a particular industry (regional specialization) and creating dense innovation districts (firm clusters) through preferential zoning or other mechanisms.

This dissertation consists of three empirical essays on distortions in labor market outcomes in developing countries. Chapter 1 tests for downward nominal wage rigidity in markets for casual daily agricultural labor. It examines responses to rainfall shocks in 500 Indian districts from 1956-2008. First, nominal wages rise in response to positive shocks but do not fall during droughts. Second, after transitory positive shocks have dissipated, nominal wages do not fall back down. Third, inflation moderates these effects. Fourth, rigidities lower employment: landless laborers experience a 6% reduction in employment in the year after positive shocks. Fifth, consistent with separation failures, rationing leads to increased labor supply to small farms. New survey evidence suggests that agricultural workers and employers view nominal wage cuts as unfair and believe that they reduce effort. Chapter 2 (with Michael Kremer and Sendhil Mullainathan) describes the results of a field experiment that tests for self-control problems in labor supply. First, we find that workers will choose dominated contracts—which pay less for every output level but have a steeper slope—to motivate themselves. Second, effort increases significantly as workers’ (randomly assigned) payday gets closer. Third, the demand for dominated contracts (and their benefits) is concentrated amongst those with the highest payday effects. Finally, as workers gain experience, they appear to learn about their self control problems: the correlation between the payday effect and the demand for the dominated contract grows with experience. These results together suggest that self-control, in this context at least, meaningfully alters the firm’s contracting problem. Chapter 3 empirically examines the impact of multiple market failures on allocative efficiency in farm production in poor countries. In years when labor rationing is more likely in villages (due to wage rigidity), there is a 63% increase in sharecropped and leased land by small farmers. This is consistent with the prediction that distortions from a failure in one market can be reduced by reallocating other factors of production. In areas with worse credit access, there is less land adjustment in response to labor rationing. These results provide evidence for separation failures resulting from multiple missing markets.

This dissertation is composed of two essays that relate topics in the fields of labor economics, migration, experimental economics and entrepreneurship, taking into account a gender perspective. The first essay examines collective remittances, those sent by migrants' associations to be invested in community projects in their hometowns, matched by governmental funds through the Mexican program 3x1 Para Migrantes. This study evaluates the effect of collective remittances on the probability of wanting to migrate, being employed and in the labor force, and on the amount of hours worked of adult men and women in 2002 and 2005 in Mexico. Collective remittances have a positive, albeit modest, impact on the employment and labor force participation of adults in participant municipalities, but no effect on the preferences to migrate. Important differences are observed by type of project executed and by gender and age cohort, with younger men and women benefiting the most from investments in schools and sports facilities. The second essay conducts a series of laboratory experiments to test the hypothesis that, while stress worsens entrepreneurial choices and outcomes for all, it does so more for women than men. Results show that the effects of stress on choice and performance are more negative for women. Experimentally-induced stress causes more long-lasting productivity losses for women, and additional losses for making choices that do not maximize income given one's productivity. The negative treatment effect on women's productivity, choice quality, and earnings is driven by women who experienced negative life events. The mechanisms that affect choices also differ by gender. Men are more likely to present inconsistencies during a series of entrepreneurial decisions, and women to have inaccurate beliefs about their performance.

<p>In 2010, approximately 84% of the American population lives in a metropolitan area. Different metropolitan areas are characterized by distinct labor markets and economies, housing markets and residential patterns, socioeconomic and demographic factors, and according to some, even distinct 'spirits.' The nature and influence of such structural factors lie at the heart of urban sociology, and have particularly profound effects on patterns of racial and ethnic stratification. This dissertation examines new urban structural changes arising within recent decades, and their implications for racial/ethnic stratification. Specifically, I study the transition to the 'new economy' and racial/ethnic wage inequality; increases in the level and inequality of housing prices and racial/ethnic stratification in homeownership; and increased income inequality, combined with population aging, and racial/ethnic disparities in disability and poor health. I measure metropolitan-level structural factors and racial/ethnic inequalities with data from 5% samples of the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Censuses; the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS); and the 1999-2001 and 2009-2011 Current Population Surveys (CPS). Cross-sectional multilevel regression models examine the spatial distributions of structural factors and racial/ethnic inequality, and the fixed-effects regression models identify the impact of changes in structural factors over time on observed trends in racial stratification. Additionally, I distinguish between effects on minority-white gaps in resource access, and minorities' levels of resource access. This dissertation also makes novel contributions to the field by empirically documenting complex patterns of inequalities among the country's four largest racial and ethnic groups. Perhaps most relevant to theories of racial stratification, this dissertation demonstrates seemingly race-neutral structural changes can have racially stratified effects. </p><p>Chapter 1 describes the foundational literature in urban sociology and racial/ethnic stratification, and provides an overview of the subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 measures the transition to the `new economy' with six structural factors of labor markets: skill-biased technological change, financialization, the rise of the creative class, employment casualization, immigration, and deunionization. Overall, the results indicate the observed Latino-white wage gap may be up to 40% larger in 2010 than in the theoretical absence of the new economy, and the black-white wage gap may be up to 31% larger. Chapter 3 focuses on the long-term trend toward higher and more unequally distributed home prices within local housing markets, epitomized by the housing crisis of the late 2000s. Increases in housing market inequality worsen the Asian-white homeownership gap, but narrow the black-white and Latino-white gaps. However, the level of homeownership is reduced for all groups. Chapter 4 empirically tests the frequently-debated Income Inequality Hypothesis, that macro-level income inequality undermines population health, and hypothesizes any negative effect on health is stronger in areas with greater population aging. The results provide no support for the Income Inequality Hypothesis or any of its proposed extensions, but the chapter's analytic approach may be fruitfully applied to future examinations of structural determinants of health. The theoretical and substantive conclusion of the dissertation is that metropolitan areas represent salient, and changing structural contexts that significantly shape patterns racial/ethnic stratification in America.</p> / Dissertation