This thesis is about exploring the politics within and around research. The starting point is a European project which ran from late 1997 to the end of 2000. It was called "Self-employment activities concerning women and mi­norities: their success or failure in relation to social citizenship policies" and had as its objective to provide the EU-Commission with recommendations for improved self-employment policies. Background material was comple­mented by interviews with "experts", but the main source of information was in the form of biographical interviews with the self-employed, or for­merly self-employed, themselves. The qualitative method was used as a way of researching how individuals' background and experiences influenced their decision to become self-employed as well as their tendency to use labour market policies available for starting businesses. It was also a way to find out how those policies impacted on the individuals' lives. The conse­quent recommendations included a suggestion for broadening existing policies to comprise social aspects as well as financial allowances, and also the caution that self-employment was perhaps not the best solution to labour market and social exclusion. This latter doubt arose during project work, as did questions about methodology, the role of the researcher, and eventually about the politics that inform research. Only briefly touched upon in the project reports, these issues instead became the basis for the thesis. A reflexive rereading of the Final Report led to a critical examination of the political uses of con­cepts and categories, of how stereotypes affect research, and of the embeddedness in ethnocentric discourses of both research and researcher. The use of postcolonial and feminist theory, discourse analysis and a social constructionist perspective broadened the analytical possibilities and fur­thered understanding of the connections between politics and research. A conclusion is that a comprehensive change in the social order as well as in people's conscience is required to stem ethnic discrimination in society and the perpetuation of stereotypes and preconstructed categories in research. / digitalisering@umu

The three chapters of my dissertation examine immigrant assimilation in the Canadian labour market. Through three levels of analysis, which are distinguished by the sample restrictions that are employed, I investigate immigrant labour force and job dynamics, immigrant propensity for self-employment, and immigrant wage assimilation, respectively. In the first chapter, I exploit recently-introduced immigrant identifiers in the Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the longitudinal dimension of these data to compare the labor force and job dynamics of Canada's native-born and immigrant populations. I am particularly interested in the role of job, as opposed to worker, heterogeneity in driving immigrant wage disparities and in how the paths into and out of jobs of varying quality compares between immigrants and the native-born. The main finding is that the disparity in immigrant job quality, which does not appear to diminish with years since arrival, reflects a combination of relatively low transitions into high-wage jobs and high transitions out of these jobs. The former result appears about equally due to difficulties obtaining high-wage jobs directly out of unemployment and in using low-wage jobs as stepping-stones. I find little or no evidence, however, that immigrant jobseekers face barriers to low-wage jobs. We interpret these findings as emphasizing the empirical importance of the quintessential immigrant anecdote of a low-quality "survival job" becoming a "dead-end job". The second chapter analyzes immigrant choice of self-employment versus paid employment. Using the Canadian Census public use microdata files from 1981 to 2006, I update the Canadian literature on immigrant self-employment by examining changes in the likelihood of self-employment across arrival cohorts of immigrants and how self-employment rates evolve in the years following migration to Canada. This study finds that new immigrants, who arrived between 1996 and 2005, turned to self-employment at a faster rate than the earlier cohorts and that immigrants become increasingly likely to be self-employed as they spend more time in Canada. More important, I examine immigrant earnings outcomes relative to the native-born, instead of within, sectors and thus explore the extent to which a comparative advantage in self-employment, captured by the difference in potential earnings between the self- and paid-employment sectors, can explain the tremendous shift toward self-employment in the immigrant population. The results show that the earnings advantage between the self- and the paid-employment sectors accounts for the higher likelihood of self-employment for traditional immigrants in the years following migration. However, the potential earnings difference cannot explain the reason that non-traditional immigrants are more likely to be self-employed as they consistently lose an earnings advantage in the self-employment sector relative to the paid-employment sector. My paper suggests that immigrants may face barriers to accessing paid-employment, or immigrants are attracted to self-employment by non-monetary benefits. Lastly, in the third chapter, studies which estimate separate returns to foreign and host-country sources of human capital have burgeoned in the immigration literature in recent years. In estimating separate returns, analysts are typically forced to make strong assumptions about the timing and exogeneity of human capital investments. Using a particularly rich longitudinal Canadian data source, I consider to what extent the findings of the Canadian literature may be driven by biases arising from errors in measuring foreign and host-country sources of human capital and the endogeneity of post-migration schooling and work experience. The main finding is that the results of the current literature by and large do not appear to be driven by the assumptions needed to estimate separate returns using the standard data sources available.

Abstract Unemployment rate had steadily kept under 3.0% with an average of 1.84% from 1978 to 1994 in Taiwan. It may not go below 3.0% again till the labor market adapting to the large changes in the structure of domestic production that has made significantly impact on the labor force, especially a peak unemployment rate 5.17% has been seen in 2002. Computerization and network infrastructure have made small firms more competitive. In addition, changes in industrial structure have favored the industries in which small firms are viable and scale economics are relatively unimportant. The changes also left one problem behind. The time of high unemployment rate is coming. The released workers would probably hind in the self-employment sector or become members of inadequate utilization of labor force, such as low paid, mismatches between educational attainment and occupation, and inadequate working hours. The main purpose of this paper is to contrast the characteristics of the relatively weak group, especially the self-employed, before and after the change. The raw data been used was from Manpower Surveys and Manpower Utilization Surveys by Census Bureau, DGBAS. The study reveals the following findings: 1. High unemployment rate becomes regular, 3.0% or above will be considered as normal. 2. Male is always having a large proportion up to 70% of the self-employed, but the female increase much faster than the male did. Age distribution shifted to an older range. Marital status distribution did not change much- the married still keep about 90%. In the other hand, industrial structure distribution has been changed. Service industry has been increased by 4.3% and the up trend is still going up. There¡¦s a very large change in occupational location, the secondary labor market shares over half of the self-employed in 2003 comparing with 0.1% in 1991, they are forced by the industrial changes not to only the lower occupational location but the lower social status. The self-employed are shifting toward the non-urban area too, and the uncertainty of future coming with the high unemployment rate has made self-employed need to have an extra job or to change his/her job. 3. The small and medium enterprise have historically provided large proportion of employment labor market and non-agriculture self-employment sector, but industrial changes is slacking the trend for those employees to become a self-employed. 4. Over 70% out of the married female samples have kids, and ages of children have affected women employment choices. The older their children are, the higher possibilities are women to be self-employed. 5. Considering with the whole employed, although the mean monthly income of the self-employed increased, the quantity was relatively lower than others did. Education had a better performance in both the mean and the standardized mean score, but a fatal drop of occupational location strongly pulled down the Social-Economic index of the self-employed. Keyword: Self-Employment, Own-Account Worker, the Structure of Domestic Production, Knowledge-Based Economy and Social-Economic Index.

<p>This licentiate’s thesis consists of two essays on immigrant self-employment and labour supply.</p><p>The first essay (co-author Mats Hammarstedt), Intergenerational transmissions in immigrant self-employment: Evidence from three generations, reviews intergenerational transmissions in immigrant self-employment over three generations. More precisely, we study whether self-employment is transferred both from grandfather to grandson and from father to son, as well as if there are any differences between immigrant groups and differences between immigrants and natives. In addition, we investigate the importance of the intergenerational transfer of general and specific human capital for choice of business line. The results show that having a self-employed father and self-employed grandfather have a strong positive effect on self-employment propensities for male third-generation immigrants. On the other hand, natives were found to transfer self-employment from father to son, but not from grandfather to grandson. The results also indicate that immigrants inherit self-employment abilities from their self-employed fathers increasing the self-employment propensity, but not necessarily in the same business line. In contrast, native self-employed fathers transfer human capital to their sons making them more prone to become self-employed in the same business line as the father is in.</p><p>The second essay, Female immigrant labour supply: The effect of an in-work benefit, focuses on immigrant labour supply, and evaluates the effect of a recently introduced in-work benefit, the so called job deduction, on the labour supply of single immigrant women. In this study, we address the following questions: What is the effect of the in-work benefit on the labour supply of single immigrant women? Does the effect of the in-work benefit on working hours differ between immigrant groups? The results show that, on average, there is no major effect of the in-work benefit on the labour supply of single immigrant women. However, households with the lowest incomes increase their working hours quite strongly. Furthermore, on average, there appears to be no difference in the effect of the in-work benefit between immigrant groups. In the low-income households, though, immigrants from non-European countries and from Southern and Eastern European countries, increase their labour supply relatively more than immigrants from Nordic countries and Western Europe. Finally, the relatively large increase in working hours for single immigrant women with the lowest incomes appears, above all, to be a result of increased participation in the labour market. However, part of the effect is related to an increase in the number of working hours of already employed women.</p>

We analyse the characteristics of workers who provide work on the basis of a civil or commercial contract, but who are dependent on or integrated into the firm for which they work. We argue that these dependent self-employed lose their rights under labour law, receive less favourable benefits from social security protection and are often beyond trade union representation and collective bargaining. Using data from the British Labour Force Survey we test two hypotheses: (1) Dependent self-employed workers are significantly different from both employees and (independent) self-employed individuals, thus forming a distinct group. (2) Dependent selfemployed workers have lower labour market skills, less labour market attachment and, thus, less autonomy than self-employed workers. The data support our hypothesis that dependent selfemployed workers are a distinct labour market group which differs from both employees and independent self-employed individuals. Men, older workers, those with low education and a low job tenure have greater odds of working in dependent self-employment than their counterparts. Our results suggest that dependent forms of self-employment are used by firms to increase labour flexibility. (author's abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

The three chapters of my dissertation examine immigrant assimilation in the Canadian labour market. Through three levels of analysis, which are distinguished by the sample restrictions that are employed, I investigate immigrant labour force and job dynamics, immigrant propensity for self-employment, and immigrant wage assimilation, respectively. In the first chapter, I exploit recently-introduced immigrant identifiers in the Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the longitudinal dimension of these data to compare the labor force and job dynamics of Canada's native-born and immigrant populations. I am particularly interested in the role of job, as opposed to worker, heterogeneity in driving immigrant wage disparities and in how the paths into and out of jobs of varying quality compares between immigrants and the native-born. The main finding is that the disparity in immigrant job quality, which does not appear to diminish with years since arrival, reflects a combination of relatively low transitions into high-wage jobs and high transitions out of these jobs. The former result appears about equally due to difficulties obtaining high-wage jobs directly out of unemployment and in using low-wage jobs as stepping-stones. I find little or no evidence, however, that immigrant jobseekers face barriers to low-wage jobs. We interpret these findings as emphasizing the empirical importance of the quintessential immigrant anecdote of a low-quality "survival job" becoming a "dead-end job". The second chapter analyzes immigrant choice of self-employment versus paid employment. Using the Canadian Census public use microdata files from 1981 to 2006, I update the Canadian literature on immigrant self-employment by examining changes in the likelihood of self-employment across arrival cohorts of immigrants and how self-employment rates evolve in the years following migration to Canada. This study finds that new immigrants, who arrived between 1996 and 2005, turned to self-employment at a faster rate than the earlier cohorts and that immigrants become increasingly likely to be self-employed as they spend more time in Canada. More important, I examine immigrant earnings outcomes relative to the native-born, instead of within, sectors and thus explore the extent to which a comparative advantage in self-employment, captured by the difference in potential earnings between the self- and paid-employment sectors, can explain the tremendous shift toward self-employment in the immigrant population. The results show that the earnings advantage between the self- and the paid-employment sectors accounts for the higher likelihood of self-employment for traditional immigrants in the years following migration. However, the potential earnings difference cannot explain the reason that non-traditional immigrants are more likely to be self-employed as they consistently lose an earnings advantage in the self-employment sector relative to the paid-employment sector. My paper suggests that immigrants may face barriers to accessing paid-employment, or immigrants are attracted to self-employment by non-monetary benefits. Lastly, in the third chapter, studies which estimate separate returns to foreign and host-country sources of human capital have burgeoned in the immigration literature in recent years. In estimating separate returns, analysts are typically forced to make strong assumptions about the timing and exogeneity of human capital investments. Using a particularly rich longitudinal Canadian data source, I consider to what extent the findings of the Canadian literature may be driven by biases arising from errors in measuring foreign and host-country sources of human capital and the endogeneity of post-migration schooling and work experience. The main finding is that the results of the current literature by and large do not appear to be driven by the assumptions needed to estimate separate returns using the standard data sources available.

This thesis analyzes the pecuniary aspects of education in Turkey. It consists of three essays. The first essay deals with the demand for education, focusing on private tutoring expenditures of households. The study investigates the determinants of private tutoring expenditures of households using a Tobit model as the estimation method. It is found that wealthier households with higher levels of parental education are more likely to participate in private tutoring. The second essay concerns the wage inequality in the male wages in 1994 and 2002. The study found that the differences in the educational attainment levels are a major determinant of wage inequality. However, returns to education declined at each school level from 1994 to 2002. Wage inequality is also found to exist within the same educational categories. The study shows that differences in returns to the same level of education at distinct points of wage distribution became more pronounced in 2002 compared to 1994. Secondary schooling is found to benefit the least able more compared to those positioned in the middle quantiles of ability distribution. The last study in this thesis attempts to elucidate the determinants of self-employment versus wage employment choice and earnings in the two employment states. The study concludes that financial wealth and risk factor are important determinants of self-employment activity. As the educational attainment levels of individuals increase, the likelihood of becoming self-employed decrease. Education increases the earnings of both self-employed and wage earners. However, education returns are higher for the sub-group of wage employees compared to self-employed.

Who enters self-employment in the labor market? This is a question that has been extensively researched. To find answers, studies have been concerned with what characterizes the individuals who make the different employment choices. This dissertation takes another approach to the issue and shows how self-employment, just as any other type of employment, is socially preconditioned. Rather than focusing on what characterizes the individuals who enter self-employment, this study looks at what characterizes the social structures of particular fields, as well as at what position the self-employed individuals hold within these structures. We then gain an understanding of how social positions are related to employment possibilities, and which social groups enter self-employment. The study builds on the theories of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. This dissertation examines two social fields: management consulting and artistic production. The results show that what characterizes the group of individuals who are self-employed is quite different depending on the social context. Among management consultants, self-employment is foremost related to social origin, while in artistic production it is related to investments made in the field itself. However, in both fields, the self-employed individuals hold a similar social position.

Abstract of Making Their Way—Making Art and Making Money: The working lives of visual artists with disabilities Susan Agatha Maley People with disabilities have marked lower rates of employment than people without disabilities in both Australia and the United States, the countries chosen for this research inquiry. That this is the case decades after the introduction of anti-discrimination laws in these developed democratic countries highlights the continuum of constraints people with disabilities still experience in securing work. Some of these constraints include socially discriminatory attitudes and perceptions, the lack of available accommodations and adaptations in work settings (and the misconception that they will be onerous and expensive to implement), lack of accessible transportation, the unavailability of work within established job markets and the restrictions of vocational rehabilitation and disability employment programs’ past focus on existing jobs in organisational settings. These constraints have a negative impact on the overall quality of life for many people with disabilities as employment is a key component to individual self-sufficiency and personal fulfilment and also crucial to inclusion in community and social settings. Among the notable initiatives to address these persistent inequities are research-informed projects focusing on self-employment as a viable alternative mode of employment to the established job market. Within the last decade, myriad research reports, model demonstration projects, and a US national research program, funded by the Office of Disability Employment Policy, have been demonstrating the success of self-employment in expanding self-determined income generation. Within this burgeoning and productive investigation on self-employment, one gap is that there has been little focused inquiry on creative work. Such a void is significant since the predominant work mode among visual artists is self-employment, albeit sometimes supplemented with other arts, and non-arts related work. This study addresses the lack of investigation of artists’ modes of work by examining the working lives of practicing professional visual artists with a range of significant physical, sensory and neurological disabilities. There are a number of reasons for this research study’s focus on the area of visual arts. Visual arts has been documented to be one of the largest groups among artistic disciplines in studies in both Australia and the US, as well as European countries. Within this sizable arts arena, there are established and emerging markets for sale of visual arts products. This discipline can also offer flexible work locations, hours and adaptations in art making. Thus, there may be numerous benefits to pursuing careers in the visual arts for creative people with disabilities. Yet, little is known about the lived work experience of practicing visual artists with disabilities and their career strategies. Thus, an exploration of visual artists with disabilities working in a range of mediums such as this research study can reveal new, and potentially useful, knowledge about their methods of art-making and marketing, adaptations in the design and execution of their work, their experiences of disability and the facilitators and obstacles they face when preparing for and pursuing their working lives as artists. This research study is based on the results of in-depth, face-to-face interviews of twenty-one visual artists, eleven in Australia and ten in the US, who used multiple artistic mediums. The conceptual lens for the analysis is intersectionality with an underlying critical realism foundation. These theories were used to explore the intersecting social positions of being a person with a disability and a practicing artist and the related interplay of agency and structure in shaping the careers of these artists. The main findings from this research focus on how the artists in this study made their way, made art and made money. These findings commence with an examination of the early shaping and continued sustaining influences in their artistic development and education. It continues with an exploration of the influence of their disability experiences on making art including their adaptive methods and conceptual process. The analysis continues with a focus on factors involving their means of making money, marketing and self-promotion methods and professional progressions. The findings conclude with an analysis of aids and obstacles these artists with disabilities experienced during interactions with a range of organisations including disability employment and vocational rehabilitation counselling and financial support agencies, arts educational institutions, art galleries and arts and disability agencies. Highlights of the findings are that the majority of the artists in the study earned their income from arts and arts related work, that they made active use of their own personal and collective agency to meet their artistic and professional goals and that their actions influenced structural change. They also positioned aspects of their social and personal identity to best suit their career progressions and some made artistic use of their conceptions of disability with innovative impact on social conceptions of disability. Implications of these findings are that artists experiencing disability developed strategic skills to negotiate difficult terrain while forging an income-producing arts practice. In addition, their creation of new options for themselves, and other artists with disabilities, has wider implications for improving equity for artists with disabilities.

The phenomenon of job-lock in the United States may be caused by a major non-portable fringe benefit provided by employers: health insurance. Would-be entrepreneurs and other self-employed individuals may not be achieving their full potential due to being “locked” in their wage-employment. With data from the Survey of Consumer Finances in years 2004, 2007, and 2009, this study explores this effect, whether it exists, and whether it is lessened by worse health status. Amongst married households, there is evidence that husbands are 9.2% more likely to be entrepreneurs if their spouses have employer coverage, whereas wives are not. Somewhat surprisingly, this effect is not associated with health care demand. Amongst non-married individuals, employer coverage restricts transitions into self-employment by 3.6%. Both of these results provide evidence for job lock, and have loose implications on how universal healthcare may free individuals to pursue entrepreneurship.