Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2006 / "Publication number AAT 3251763."

Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2006 / "Publication number AAT 3251816."

In January of 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson introduced programs to provide education, health, jobs and economic opportunities to those who economically disadvantaged. Job Corps is one of the many programs established under his “War on Poverty.” In this paper, I will be looking at the relevant areas of research studying the impacts of Job Corps on participants and society. I will also evaluate the effects of the existing economic situations within the county on the earnings and job placement of the participants.

<p> There have been widespread reports of an impending teacher shortage crisis in the U.S. for more than 30 years. In the U.S., there are claims of a widespread national shortage while research indicates teacher shortages are specific to certain subjects and schools. Part of the reason for the conflicting accounts is how shortage is identified and what information is used to assess it. In this study, I test whether a uniform teacher shortage exists across the state of Arkansas. I hypothesize that, rather than a universal shortage, teacher shortages are more likely to occur in certain regions and subjects. I examine the characteristics of districts with the most favorable teaching supply and those with the greatest teaching need using descriptive and multivariate analysis of data collected from district surveys along with administrative data. In this study, &ldquo;supply&rdquo; is defined as the ratio of applications to vacancies and &ldquo;need&rdquo; is defined as the ratio of vacancies to full-time equivalent (FTE) certified classroom teachers. This is the third study to use applicants to identify teacher supply, and the first to assess teacher need or shortages in this way. Results indicate teacher supply and need are unequally distributed across the state; there is no uniform teacher shortage statewide. Regarding teacher supply, I find district size, region, and urbanicity appear to drive supply. Teacher supply is most favorable for large districts with student enrollments greater than 3,500, districts in the Northwest, and suburban and city districts. Regarding teacher need, I find urbanicity and region contribute most to need and the need appears greatest for districts in cities, and districts in the Central and Southeast regions. Teacher need does not appear to be significantly influenced by district educational success, teacher salary, or district growth. Looking at the relationship between teacher supply and need, I find three clear relationships. In the Central and Southeast regions, there is lower teacher supply and greater teacher need. In urban districts, there is both greater teacher supply and need. In higher poverty districts, there is significantly less teacher supply and more teacher need.</p><p>

<p> Accelerated courses and programs are becoming more common in higher education institutions. The rapid rate of change in the 21st century requires people to react quickly and adapt to consistent shifts in their environments. This shift toward an accelerated pace of life has caused a growing demand for accelerated and intensive classes in which students still need to achieve deep levels of learning. A gap seems to exist in the literature regarding how to design accelerated learning environments to support deep learning. The published research on accelerated learning contains a variety of studies across a variety of institutions and disciplines using a broad array of methodological approaches that produce variable results as to how accelerated courses impact student learning compared to the impact traditional courses have on learning. The fundamental research questions that guided this study asked, (a) Which instructional design strategies do expert instructional designers utilize to promote deep learning in online accelerated learning environments across various disciplines? and (b) How do expert instructional designers decide which instructional design strategies to utilize to promote deep learning in accelerated learning environments? This study utilized an online modified Delphi method to provide insight into the research questions. Fourteen members of a professional organization focused on educational technology participated in the study. Quantitative data provided descriptive statistics to determine the average consensus per statement per round. Qualitative data identified patterns and themes in written responses from the expert panel. The experts reached consensus on 59 statements (73%) in beliefs about effective instructional design strategies, 30 statements (59%) on deep learning strategies, and 21 statements (70%) on accelerated learning strategies. The study provided clear guidelines on effective strategies to promote deep, accelerated learning. </p><p>

The first chapter explores the link between inequality and longer work hours. It shows that desire to keep up with the consumption standard set by the rich provides a link between inequality and work hour. In an attempt to provide an empirical support for this idea, I find that coefficient of inequality is statistically significant in both OLS and fixed effects estimates and its effects are large and estimates are robust across a variety of specifications. The second chapter further develops the idea of Veblen effect by showing relationship between earnings inequality of men and labor supply decision of their wives. This result not only confirms the proposed effect of earnings inequality on individual labor supply decision, it also discriminates emulation effect from other explanations about the potential link such as rat-race model. The third chapter provides a cost-benefit analysis of relationship banking. When banks can acquire ex post informational monopoly on borrowing firms, banks may increase the number of firms they initially finance by offering lower loan rates. At the same time, banks have an incentive to limit the size of loans granted to young and untested firms, preventing the potential over-investment problem that may arise from the lower loan rates they offer. Therefore, relationship banks can effectively prevent over-investment that has been suggested as a potential problem of relationship banking. Using NSSBF data set, I show that the young and small firms in a concentrated banking market display relatively lower debt-to-asset ratio and less institutional debt while the interest rates offered to them are lower.

Household food budgets offer a window on consumers' demand for convenience. During the 1980s and 1990s, three shifts likely promoted an increase in the share of the food budget devoted to convenient meal options, namely meals out and prepared foods: the growing number of hours that women spent in paid work, the growing opportunity cost of women's time spent doing housework, and the drop in the price of food relative to all other goods. I test whether the impact of these economic trends (on food budget allocation) was mediated by a change in the impact of children on household meal allocation. I find support for this hypothesis in a model of food away expenditures, which likely reflects two unmeasured shifts. First, (own) child care and household production of meals apparently became substitutes rather than complements. Second, a range of both prepared foods and family-friendly restaurants became available. The growing demand for time-saving meal options, including frozen food and meals out, has important implications for a core determinant of living standards: the ability to harness scale economies from home production of meals. I test whether greater reliance on convenient meals reduced household-level economies of scale. Other factors could mediate against, or even offset such a loss, including technological advances in the production and distribution of food. Using Engel curve analyses, I find that scale economies fell from 1980 to 2000, thereby reducing living standards; my lower- and upper-bound estimates of the drop are 44 percent and 110 percent respectively. Economies of scale are not simply a function of household size and composition, as standard equivalence scaling techniques suggest; they are affected by the ways that households trade non-market work and market substitutes. This dissertation contributes to the small literature that challenges the validity of fixed-parameter equivalence scales, such as the per capita scale, which ignore household production. I first attach plausible values to scale parameters and then compare equivalent-income trajectories of parents and non-parents across (standard) fixed parameter and (non-standard) time-varying equivalence scales. I present plausible lower- and upper-bound estimates of the rise in income inequality between parents and non-parents.

This dissertation claims that from 1879 until the early 1970s organized baseball players labored under a unique form of slavery. An analysis is provided of the economics surrounding organized baseball, the culture interpreting and describing the treatment of players, and the laws and rules structuring organized baseball to argue that the baseball industry resembled slavery more than it resembled any other social structure. The dissertation also discusses the struggle that took place within and outside of this slavery to liberate the “boys of summer” from their contractual bondage. This struggle culminated in 1976 with the introduction of free agency and the elimination of the reserve clause in organized baseball, setting in motion a transition to capitalism from this slavery. Ironically, ballplayers had previously labored under capitalism in the nineteenth century until escalating labor costs and player movement from team to team led to a transition to the slavery from which the players would not be liberated until 1976. Following this discussion, the dissertation turns to a careful analysis of this new capitalist economic structure that emerged after 1976. It examines how clubs become complex sites of revenue flows not only from baseball, but also from broadcasting, the state, concessions, luxury seating, etc. The dissertation then examines the impact of these flows on the actors and structures inside and outside of organized baseball. Through its study of organized baseball, this dissertation allows for a new way of thinking about the organization of an industry and the struggles between labor and management within that industry. It also offers a new way to conceptualize the relationship between the law, culture, and economics. By studying organized baseball, this dissertation provides a new and unique understanding of the labor struggles in organized baseball, the relationship between baseball and the state, and the relationships between individual clubs. It thus allows for a more generalized understanding of labor-management conflicts as well as conflicts between industry and the state.

This dissertation research examines the influence of personality and behavioral traits on economic success using the National Longitudinal Surveys and the National Child Development Study. The first essay investigates the ability of personality to explain why apparently similar people have varied success in the labor market. Results suggest that personality is a significant determinant of labor market success and offers a unique and valuable contribution to our explanation of labor market outcomes. The second essay designs and estimates a behavioral model of the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status. This model allows me to estimate the magnitude of the contribution of personality to the intergenerational transmission of earnings and to elucidate the process by which personality helps to explain social mobility. The final essay investigates how the returns to personality differ according to sex, or position in the occupational hierarchy. The results suggest that while personality traits are important for both men and women, the reward structures are distinct.

Although there has been growing interest in the social impacts of financial deregulation in economies across the world, a large research gap persists. Despite voluminous literature, there has been very little empirical work addressing the distributional consequences of a liberal financial regime. This dissertation seeks to make such an assessment. Developing a theoretical model and a new and improved index of deregulation, this dissertation uses panel data analysis to test the effects of international capital mobility on the share of labor in national income. The results suggest that capital account openness reduces the labor share of national income, thereby providing evidence for the thesis that capital mobility alters the bargaining power of labor and capital to the detriment of the former. The cross country study is supplemented by two case studies of India and Indonesia which assess the impacts of both international and domestic deregulation on other aspects of distribution. The results suggest that despite the contrasting approaches to financial liberalization, in both economies it has considerably reduced the scope for policy makers to undertake egalitarian developmental policies and to protect vulnerable sections of society.