My dissertation research is motivated by the growing participation of African women in migration streams long dominated by men. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative evidence from my field research on the rural-urban migration of women in Ghana, I explore the role of social norms in shaping migration and remittance behavior in developing countries. Existing studies of the impact of migrant remittances on intra-household allocation are based on datasets that assume that remittances flow to a unified household, in which the household head receives remittances and makes decisions about their use. In contrast, this study makes use of a unique dataset generated during my field research that provides detailed information not only on migration, remittances and household expenditures, but also on the identities of the remitters and recipients of remittances in 181 rural households in northern Ghana. The study also draws on in-depth interviews with migrants, household and community members to understand how social norms influence migration and remittance behavior. I find that gendered social norms play an important role in migration and remittance decisions, so that gender becomes an important determinant of who migrates and who sends remittances, to whom, and why. In particular, I find that female migrants often direct their remittances to other women, thereby creating female-centered networks of remittance flows within the household. To determine the effect of this on intra-household resource allocation, I analyze the impact of remittances from female migrants on education expenditure. I find that migrant households in which women are the primary remitter or recipient of remittances spend significantly more on education per child of school-going age than do other migrant households. By taking an intra-household approach to the analysis of migration and remittances that emphasizes the role of gendered social norms in migration and remittance decisions, this research contributes to the growing body of knowledge of how gender shapes migration outcomes. More importantly, by drawing attention to the positive development outcomes that could result from the migration of women, this research strengthens the case for formulating policies to improve the working and living conditions of women migrants around the world.

The models of racial discrimination developed and the detailed empirical analysis of the post World War II U.S. economy are consistent with the two central hypotheses: (1) there is no dominant tendency within U.S. capitalism towards elimination of racial discrimination, and (2) until the late 1970's, public sector employment increased racial equality. Neoclassical models of racial discrimination and related empirical studies are criticized: (1) for emphasizing one aspect of racial equality, earnings, while de-emphasizing unemployment because of the difficulty of integrating it into neoclassical theory; (2) for incorrectly theorizing production as a purely technical process resulting in a one-sided emphasis on market forces for racial equality while abstracting from tendencies that reproduce inequality; and (3) for failing to analyze the distinct behavior and outcomes between the public and private sector. Blacks are more likely than whites, and increasingly so, to work in the public sector, and their proportion of private sector employment is declining. A social relations theory of production based on cooperation and conflicts among black employees, white employees and employers is constructed. The likely equilibrium is racial inequality in earnings and employment. Other results derived are that improvement in earnings by race decrease black employment, and growth of government employment or affirmative action causes black to white earnings and employment to increase. The implications of the model are consistent with actual trends. It is demonstrated that black to white earnings grew until the mid 1970's for both men and women, and have been stationary since. Further the relation between black and white unemployment has substantially worsened since 1975. Both trends are shown to be statistically significant. A cause of the deterioration in the relation between black and white unemployment rates is the stagnation of government employment. The study concludes with an analysis of present public policy. The author finds that current attacks on affirmative action and cutbacks in human services and public sector employment have halted progress towards racial equality and will increase inequality in earnings and unemployment between blacks and whites, and among blacks.

Executive-level attrition rates from retiring baby boomers may result in a shortage of qualified junior executives to replace the retirees. The purpose of this correlational study was to examine the efficacy of leadership style and organizational commitment in predicting intent to stay among junior executives. The Multifaceted Leadership Questionnaire, Three-Component Model (TCM) Employee Commitment Survey, and Intent to Stay Scale were administered to 147 junior executives employed in the southern region of the United States. Motivation theory served as the theoretical foundation in this study. The results of the bivariate regression were significant, F(1, 105) = 27.82, p < .001, R2 = .21, suggesting that leadership style significantly predicted intent to stay. The results of the multiple linear regression were significant, F(2, 104) = 19.42, p < .001, R2 = .27, suggesting that the model as a whole was able to significantly predict intent to stay. Affective commitment, B = 0.64, p < .001, was the only significant contributor to the model. The implications for positive social change include the potential to provide senior management with a better understanding of factors that relate to junior executive retention. The potential exists to provide senior executives with the necessary tools to increase retention. The social change implications include the potential for senior management to create a more desirable workplace, higher job satisfaction, and overall organization environment, making it more desirable to stay with the organization.

In light of the retirement phenomena, the development and utilization of private pensions may be viewed as a market response based on individual and collective recognition of the need to plan to finance retirement from the labor force. This market response however, is shown to have produced a profusion of independent differential pension schemes which may vary with respect to their administrative mechanisms, the type and adequacy of benefits paid, the level at which contributions are made to the plan by participants and the basis of these contributions, and the adequacy of funding. As a result, it is not only difficult to generalize about the nature of pensions, but the response of private pensions to changing market conditions and the nature of factors affecting the stability of private pensions are variable and diverse.

This dissertation explores the impact of the “threat effects” of foreign direct investment on labor markets in the United States. In this context, the term “threat effect” refers to the use by employers of the implicit or explicit threat that they will move all or part of their production to a different location, even if they do not actually do so. Some economists have argued that increased capital mobility, by making such threats more credible, enhances the bargaining power of employers relative to workers through this threat effect channel. Using game theoretic and econometric analysis I found that the threat effect of capital mobility exerts a large and statistically significant negative influence on wages.

A common theme in the analysis of the contemporary Chinese economy is that the Chinese state owned enterprises fail to operate efficiently because of ambiguous property rights, soft budget constraints, and government intervention. These authors advocate an economic reform program based on large-scale privatization. This dissertation advances an alternative perspective on the state owned enterprises. In the first essay, I argue that the state owned enterprises have made an important contribution to China's macroeconomic stability. This view draws from Hyman Minsky's argument that a large government sector is indispensable for a capitalist market economy to maintain macroeconomic stability and avoid deep recessions. I argue that in the Chinese context, the state owned enterprise sector must be sufficiently large so that public sector investment accounts for about 50 percent of the total capital formation. In the second essay, I argue that the performance of the state owned enterprises can be enhanced by promoting workers' participation in management. I conducted a survey of workers' participation in management in large and medium-sized industrial enterprises in China's Henan province. Using the data collected from this survey, I performed econometric analyses to explore the relationship between workers' participation and firm performance, finding evidence that participation does improve performance. The third essay addresses what is now termed “disguised unemployment” in the state owned enterprises. The existing literature argues that the state owned enterprises fail to use their labor force efficiently. In this view, a high percentage of workers in state owned enterprises are redundant and unemployed in a disguised manner. These workers have to be laid off for the sake of efficiency. I argue that much of the disguised unemployment in the state sector may be due to insufficient aggregate demand rather than technical inefficiency. My econometric analyses find that an increase in aggregate demand leads to substantially higher productivity in the state owned enterprises, allowing a substantial part of the redundant labor force to be efficiently employed. I argue for active aggregate demand policy rather than layoff of workers as the primary solution to the problem of disguised unemployment.

This dissertation inspects the underlying reasons of demand for social protection policies. It investigates the relationship between labor market risks and preferences for social insurance with a particular emphasis on unemployment insurance. Redistributive and social insurance motives are analyzed jointly. To that end, income, and occupational unemployment risk are considered as the key determinants. The occupational unemployment rate is treated as an estimate of labor market risk, and it is concluded that this explains the political preferences towards social protection policies. A model of optimal choice with heterogeneous workers, which encompasses both redistribution and social insurance incentives, has been presented. It has been showed that the direction of the relationship between the desired levels of transfer payments and each key determinant depends on the transition probabilities. The claimed positive link between specific human capital investment and social insurance holds only with several restrictions on transition probabilities. Moreover, income inequality, measured as deviation from mean income, has a direct impact on preferences for transfer payments. Then, by employing an ordered-probit estimation procedure, empirical tests both examining cross-country and over time developments have been conducted. The results suggest that risk exposure measured as occupational unemployment rate along with income levels is explanatory for preferences for social insurance, and hence the cross-country variations and developments over time in social protection policies cannot be attributed to the differences in types of human capital investment.

Economists typically understand the firm as an organization comprised of a series of incomplete contracts among input suppliers (e.g. Coase, (1937), Williamson, (1985)). The ultimate right to make decisions that are not subject to a pre-existing contractual arrangement - hereafter referred to as decision-control rights, are assigned to some person or group associated with the enterprise. The entity with decision-control rights has the final say over how to organize essential firm operations that range from the determination of production techniques, to deciding how to monitor or compensate the firm's members. To the extent that firm members have competing interests or are asymmetrically affected by such decisions, those members with decision-control rights may be confronted with important normative issues regarding which firm objectives should be pursued. In my dissertation, I employ a behavioral economic perspective in order to examine how workplace governance practices interact with both the level of satisfaction and motivation of workers. In the first essay of the dissertation, I collected data from a real-effort experiment to compare changes in the performance of research participants that were subjected to an identical set of wage incentives that were either implemented (1) endogenously by the group to which subjects belong through a simple majority vote, (2) endogenously by only one member of the group who had all decision-control rights, or (3) a random process completely exogenous to the group. The 3 (3 distinct decision-control rights regimes) X 2 (2 distinct incentive contracts) between-subjects design allows for a clean comparison of performance under different decision-control rights treatments. I report evidence suggesting that the decision-control rights arrangement used to select the compensation contract can significantly influence the subsequent level of performance of research subjects. The second essay (co-authored with Michael Carr), analyzes the relative effects of voice, autonomy, and wages in explaining job satisfaction using subjective evaluations of work conditions and satisfaction recorded in the 2004 wave of the Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS). We show that the amount of autonomy and voice that a worker has over the firm is an important omitted variable, biasing the estimated coefficient on the wage upwards. And, conditional upon having a job, voice and autonomy are considerably more important determinants of job satisfaction than the wage. The final essay offers a critique of the traditional economics of work organization in consideration of the literature developed in behavioral and experimental economics. I argue that many models of worker motivation developed using the rational choice model (RCM) carry the cost of ignoring common sentiments and behaviors that have been systematically demonstrated in experimental studies. After providing an extensive review of the experimental economics literature as it may inform various workplace organizational faculties, I conclude that the literature suggests that establishment of work teams and incentive schemes that reward teams for collective success would carry the expectation of sustained satisfaction and productivity of workers more than firm environments that rely on employee competition as a motivational device.

Since Badgett's (1995a) landmark study on the wage effects of sexual orientation, interest in and production of scholarly work addressing the economics of sexual orientation has grown tremendously. Curious puzzles have emerged in the literature on the economics of same-sex couple households, three of which are addressed in detail in this dissertation. Most studies of the wages of women in same-sex couples versus different-sex couples find that the former earn more, even controlling for differences in present labor market supply, education, experience, area of residence, and occupation. However, most previous studies of the sexual orientation wage gap omit the role of motherhood in the lesbian-straight women wage gap, and most take the sample of lesbians to be a homogenous group compared to straight women. Chapter 1 uses American Community Survey data from 2010 to study the wage gap between lesbians and straight women, putting motherhood in intra-household differences at the center of the analysis. The analysis shows that in terms of earnings, lesbian couples are quite heterogeneous; one partner has a large wage premium over straight women, and the other faces a large wage penalty. These findings are enhanced when a child is present in the lesbians' home, possibly suggesting a household division of labor in lesbian homes. Chapter 2 considers the possibility that same-sex couples, like many different-sex couples, have one person who specializes in paid work while the other specializes in unpaid work for the household, such as housework and childcare. Chapter 2 presents a study which uses American Time Use Survey Data pooled from 2003-2011 to analyze the time spent in household, care, and paid work for members of different couple types and finds that in same-sex as well as different-sex couple households, some personal characteristics, such as being the lower earner in the household, are correlated with spending more time in household and care work. Chapter 3 offers a study of poverty in same-sex versus different-sex couple households, exploring which characteristics are correlated with poverty for same-sex and different-sex couple households. When controlling for a couple's education level, area of residence, race and ethnicity, age, and household composition, same-sex couples are more likely to be in poverty than their different-sex counterparts.

The temporary help supply (THS) industry is an ideal prism through which to view the labor market. As one of the fastest growing industries in the United States it is an important phenomenon in its own right. As a labor market intermediary which weakens the attachment between employer and employee the industry is indicative of larger changes in the organization of labor relations. Finally, as an industry two thirds of whose employees are female, it captures some of the dynamics of the way in which gender operates in the labor market. The dissertation considers three aspects of the temporary help industry. First, the relationship between the temporary help industry and the increase in female labor force participation rates is considered. A common argument in the literature is that women with family responsibilities choose THS employment because of the flexibility it affords. Using Current Population Survey microdata tapes, this hypothesis is tested and rejected. Instead, I argue that the gender of the worker is a salient feature in the determination of occupational characteristics. This is in contrast to other political economy models which view the labor market as divided into good jobs and bad jobs, with workers then allocated according to their position in a social hierarchy. Second, if growth in the industry is not being driven by employee preferences, what is driving it? Explicitly incorporating conflict into the labor market, I argue that part of the markup, i.e. the difference between what the THS firm pays the worker and what it charges its client firms, is the cost of disciplining a worker who otherwise has little stake in the company's future and therefore might incur productivity problems for the client firm. Finally, I discuss the conditions under which reliance on a temporary help firm is a viable option for employers. Using annual data from County Business Patterns I demonstrate that neither cyclical nor secular variability in demand nor the growth of service employment fully explain the growth of THS employment. Rather, THS employment reflects structural change in the system of labor relations.