Thesis (PH.D.)--Syracuse University, 2003. / "Publication number AAT 3091405."

Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2004. / "Publication number AAT 3135877."

The equal split is a widely observed outcome in experimental studies of two-person bargaining. We report on an experiment that controls for the preferences of subjects and therefore sheds light on the social orientation of those proposers who offer the equal split. The data suggest that when the bargaining environment is personal and the cost of conflict is high, both egoists and fairmen (i.e. bargainers that demonstrate other-regarding preferences) make 50–50 proposals. However, as the interaction becomes more anonymous and as the cost of conflict falls, egoists experiment with more demanding proposals while fairmen stick to the equal split. When responding to offers, the data suggest that egoistic and competitive individuals are responsible for most rejections. Chapter three develops a model of the egalitarian conventions seen regularly in field studies of sharecropping contracts, in more general ethnographic reports on small-scale political structures, and in the experimental lab. We develop an evolutionary bargaining model incorporating systemic perturbations to derive stable equilibria in an environment where agents are allowed to experiment with different demands. The first major result is that using a minimal set of assumptions, the only systemically stable bargaining convention is the equal split. The second result demonstrates that other unequal conventions are also robust to systemic perturbations if the asymmetry of equilibrium demands is great enough. Monitoring by peers in work teams, local commons situations, and residential neighborhoods is often an effective means of attenuating incentive problems. Most explanations of the incentives to engage in mutual monitoring rely either on small group size or on a version of the Folk theorem. In chapter four we provide an explanation of mutual monitoring in single shot interactions among members of large teams. A key element of our approach is that when team members are residual claimants, some members are motivated by reciprocity to punish fellow members that shirk. To test the model's predictions about the role of reciprocity and the informational effects of team size we conduct an experiment that varies the residual claim of teams and information about other members of the team.

This dissertation presents an analysis of coordination problems which are not solved by competitive markets. I argue that a variety of coordination failures occur if relations between a firm and its employees, and between a firm and other firms, are market mediated. In the first essay I consider the profit maximizing choice of the individual firm over a continuous job security variable. I argue that competitive markets yield Pareto suboptimal levels of job security due to agency problems, and the negative externality of aggregate demand instability generated by those firms that hire and fire over the cycle. I develop a model incorporating these features to generate reaction functions for the optimal level of job security in an individual firm in the light of the decisions of other firms. In the second essay I model the equilibrium composition of a population of firms faced with decisions over a discrete job security variable. Firms either offer no security against cyclical dismissal, or total security (long term employment arrangements). This model is not about how firms select the optimal level of tenure, but about how the distribution of firms between the two extremes is selected on the basis of profitability. I develop a model of a two-way relationship between the percentage of firms offering long term employment arrangements and demand instability. I show that it is possible to have multiple equilibria. In the third essay I argue that cooperative inter-firm relations, represent a solution to coordination failures that may take the form of both Prisoner's Dilemma and Hawk-Dove games. Inter-firm cooperation therefore facilitates the realization of potential Marshallian external economies, that would not be realized in the absence of such cooperation. I extend the Hawk-Dove game by considering both iteration and non-random pairing of agents to show that the viability and stability of cooperation are enhanced under conditions which are considered as impediments under the Walrasian model of market exchange. This model is then applied to the British and Italian furniture sectors. I present conclusions in Chapter 4.

This dissertation examines how Victorian fiction accommodated and abetted generosity's shift from a public to a private virtue in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Chapter One contextualizes the mid-nineteenth-century ideology of giving within gender and class relationships shaped by debates leading to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Joseph Townsend's Dissertation on the Poor Laws (1786) and the report of two assistant poor law commissioners (1833) frame the public debate concerning government giving and signal a cultural movement that was transforming generosity into a modern, apolitical, private, feminine ideal. I draw on Jacques Derrida and anthropology to define the ideology of the free gift, whose main tenet is an insistence that true gifts exist only outside economies of time and reciprocity. Literary texts, inevitably bound to time and reciprocity, disclose tenuous but persistent maintenance of this ideology. Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848) condemned laissez-faire economic doctrines while validating the social divisions that characterized the New Poor Law era. Chapter Two focuses on Dickens's Little Dorrit (1855–57), in which Amy, a middle-class heroine in prison rags, a model of feminine self-sacrifice who expects no reward, occupies the problematic space of perfect giver, receiver, and gift. Structured as a romance of giving, the novel reveals both the gendered terms of the free gift and the contradictory nature of a middle-class construction of itself as generous benefactor of the poor. Chapters Three and Four consider novels that do not directly focus on issues of poverty but are nonetheless shaped by this ideological shift. In George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72), the narrator mediates through rational dissection and generous hermeneutics a bond between the reader and Dorothea intended to, on the one hand, elide the degree to which private acts of kindness have political import, and, on the other, suggest that such acts can lead to a radical way of knowing. In contrast to Dickens and Eliot, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) explicitly fixates on the problems of reception and reveals the violence not only of uncivilized passion but of civilized giving itself.

This study of the relation between education and earnings in South Africa in 1993 concludes that the private labor-market rate of return to investment in primary and secondary education for Africans is about 15 to 21%. This figure is about half the average for sub-Saharan Africa and does not reflect a large absolute effect of schooling on earnings so much as a very low labor-market opportunity cost, which cost is depressed by widespread youth unemployment. The decision to drop out after only a few years of school may be economically justifiable for students from poor families, who, out of necessity, are constrained by short time horizons. Policies designed to lower the direct costs of education may have little effect on the poorest households. As a result, it may prove quite difficult to achieve a more equal distribution of educational capital. Furthermore, log expected earnings are convex in years of schooling, with the implication that even if schooling does become more equally distributed, increases in mean educational attainment for Africans are likely to be associated with greater economic inequality among Africans (but less inequality between the races).

This DPhil thesis is a collection of three theoretical and empirical papers studying labor markets in several advanced economies. Two chapters examine the relationship between the banking sector and the labor market in the US and the UK, while one evaluates a policy that has been proposed to help labor markets in the Euro Area adjust to economic shocks. In the first chapter, I develop a New Keynesian DSGE model that integrates a banking sector subject to moral hazard with a standard random search model of the labor market. I estimate the model using US data and study the role of the banking sector in determining labor market fluctuations. In the second chapter, I estimate a structural VAR model of the UK and US economies and identify bank lending shocks using a mix of sign and short-run exclusion restrictions. Consistent with the predictions of the DSGE model, an expansionary loan supply shock decreases job-destruction and increases job-creation, reducing the unemployment rate persistently. Bank lending shocks are also important drivers of labor market fluctuations, particularly during the Great Recession. Lastly, in the third chapter, I calibrate to the Euro Area a currency union DSGE model to evaluate the aggregate properties of European Unemployment Insurance (EUI). I find that EUI cannot contemporaneously stabilize the monetary union and achieve convergence in regional unemployment and inflation rates.