<p>Longitudinal surveys have revolutionized empirical research and our understanding of the dynamic processes that affect the economic prosperity, health and well-being of the population. This dissertation explores and provides evidence, through three empirical applications, on the costs and benefits of designing, implementing and using data from a new, innovative longitudinal survey, the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS). The survey, which is representative of the Mexican population living in Mexico in 2002, is designed to follow movers within Mexico and also those who move to the United States. This design lies at the center of the contributions of my research to the scientific literature.</p><p>Attrition is the Achilles heel of longitudinal surveys. The first essay of the dissertation focuses on the cost of attrition for scientific knowledge. Following the same individual through time allows a researcher to trace the evolution of a respondent's behaviors and outcomes in a dynamic framework; however, if attrition is selected on unobserved characteristics, the advantage of using panel data could be severely hindered. Exploring different methods to adjust for attrition, this essay provides evidence of limitations of standard post-survey adjustments strategies that are the standard in the literature. These approaches, exploit only baseline characteristics of the respondents and, conditional on those characteristics, treat attriters as missing at random. I provide evidence that this assumption is substantively important and rejected in the MxFLS in spite of the fact that attrition in that survey is low relative to other nationally-representative surveys conducted in the United States and abroad. </p><p>The second essay in this dissertation exploits the fact that MxFLS follows movers within Mexico and those who move across the Mexico-US border to provide new insights into the mechanisms that underlie the selectivity of migrants within Mexico, how they differ from migrants who move from Mexico to the U.S. and how those who return contrast with the migrants who remain in the U.S. more permanently. The results provide evidence that human capital is predictive of migration within Mexico and to the United States, but that there is little indication that the decision to stay in the United States is highly correlated with education. In contrast, having relatives in the United States is not only a powerful predictor of migration to the United States, but it is also predictive of successful economic assimilation. </p><p>The third essay exploits a different dimension of the longitudinal survey in order to address an important question regarding the impact of unanticipated crime and violence on population well-being. To wit, the essay rigorously examines the impact of the recent surge in violent crime in Mexico on the labor market outcomes, migration, and wealth of the Mexican population. The timing of the last two waves of the MxFLS paired with the panel nature of the survey, allows the comparison of outcomes of the same individual in periods of low and high violence, which removes the potentially endogenous time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity between respondents. Moreover, due to the fact that the MxFLS was designed to follow migrant respondents, this study is able to directly test whether there is a systematic migratory response to crime. The results from this analysis find that crime predicts migration and it negatively affects the labor outcomes of self-employed individuals. In addition, the negative effects on the labor outcomes have translated into reductions in per capita expenditure at the household level, which suggests that the recent wave of violence in Mexico may have long-term consequences on the wealth and well-being of Mexican households.</p> / Dissertation

Sweden’s social and labor policy have been influenced by strong labor movements. The role of trade unions is of significance, when speaking of labor market integration of refugee immigrants. This study aimed to examine how the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, LO, supports integration of refugee immigrants on the Swedish labor market. Through semi-structured interviews with representatives from LO, reasons of exclusion of refugee immigrants from the labor market, strategies to integrate refugee immigrants on the labor market and current policies regarding integration of refugee immigrants, were investigated. The empirical data was analyzed using theoretical frameworks of social exclusion, empowerment and Esping-Andersen’s categorization of welfare state regimes. According to the LO representatives, refugee immigrants are excluded from the Swedish labor market due to reasons such as lack of language skills, discriminatory unemployment and segregated housing conditions. The results show that there is a lack of strategies used by LO to integrate refugee immigrants on the labor market, although elements of providing information and forms of influence for conscientizing and empowerment have been identified. Removing administrative barriers combined with protection of collective agreements and the solidary welfare state system are identified as important for a successful integration on the labor market. The findings are related to the shift of Sweden’s welfare state, from a universal to a more liberal one.

Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2002. / Some digitised pages may appear illegible due to the condition of the original hard copy. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The recent discussions regarding the relations between the government and industry have highlighted the importance and continuous changes that have been investigated, tried and tested by the tri-part alliance since its inception. A study was conducted of all the current issues and changes in labour legislation and its impact on the labour market. Due to the continuous changes and heated debates, not to mention regular strikes and negotiations by those parties and their representatives, this topic is heated and ever changing. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die onlangse onderhandelinge en besprekings betreffende die verhouding tussen die regering en industrie plaas klem op die belang van en gereelde veranderinge wat ondersoek, geimplimenteer en getoets is deur die drieledige alliansie sedert laasgenoemde se ontstaan. 'n Studie is gedoen van die huidige kwessies en veranderinge in arbeidswetgewing en die impak daarvan op die arbeidsmark. Die gereelde veranderinge in wetgewing en soms hewige debatvoering tussen die betrokke partye, bo en behalwe die gereelde stakings en onderhandelinge deur daardie partye en hul verteenwoordigers, maak hierdie onderwerp baie sensitief en stel dit bloot aan gereelde ondersoek en verandering.

Migracijos reiškinys yra analizuojamas jau seniai. Iki Lietuvos narystės ES (ir po Lietuvos įstojimo į ES) paskelbta daug darbų migracijos tema. Ypač skaudi valstybei bei aktuali yra aukštąjį išsilavinimą turinčių žmonių emigracija, nes tokiu būdu yra ne tik prarandamos lėšos įdėtos į kvalifikuotos darbo jėgos paruošimą, bet ir prastėja valstybės teikiamų paslaugų kokybė, smunka vidutinis šalies kvalifikacijos lygis, o kartu ir šalies konkurencingumas tarptautinėje rinkoje. Darbo objektas – darbo rinkos politikos įtaka aukštos kvalifikacijos specialistų emigracijai. Pagrindiniai uždaviniai - išryškinti emigracijos esmę bei pasekmes; išskirti teorinius aukštos kvalifikacijos specialistams pritaikytus bei su darbo rinka susijusius emigracijos veiksnius; atskleisti Lietuvoje taikomą migracijos politiką; įvertinti aukštos kvalifikacijos specialistų emigracijos veiksnius Lietuvoje, didelį dėmesį skiriant darbo rinkos politikai; atlikti ketinimų emigruoti dėl darbo rinkos situacijos kiekybinį tyrimą bei sukurti jo rezultatus apibendrinantį modelį. Darbas susideda iš trijų pagrindinių dalių. Pirmojoje darbo dalyje išryškinama teoriniai aukštos kvalifikacijos specialistų migracijos aspektai, antrojoje darbo dalyje nagrinėjama statistiniai su emigracija susiję Lietuvos ir emigracijos tikslo šalių duomenys, trečiojoje darbo dalyje atliekamas empirinis tyrimas, siekiant įvertinti ketinimų emigruoti sąryšį su darbo rinkos situaciją. Pagal tyrimų rezultatus, pateikiamos išvados bei... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The subject of the Master work is emigration of highly qualified specialists. Emigration of highly qualified specialists is known for a long period of time, just now the scales of emigration is higher than ever. Economic recession is playing a big part in this, as all the countries are affected by recession at the different level. Due to migration of highly qualified specialists government looses money, which was spend in gaining the qualification, as well country looses tax payers and overall country looses competitiveness in international arena. The object of the study is the influence of labor market policy to the emigration of highly qualified specialists. The main tasks are to highlight the nature and consequences of emigration; to reveal theoretical immigration–related factors; to evaluate Lithuania’s migration policy; focusing on labor market policy to distinguish to high–qualified specialists orientated emigration factors; to perform a quantitative survey and create a model summarizing the results. Work structure: work consists of three main parts: in the first part is made an analysis of theoretical high qualified specialists emigration aspects, in the second part is made a statistical analysis of Lithuania’s and other countries migration related data and in third – an empirical research made to evaluate the influence of labor market factors to the emigration decision. Working volume: 73 pages, 23 tables, 26 figures and 83 references used: 55 Lithuanian and 28... [to full text]

This is a comparative study of intergovernmental relations in labour market policy in Canada and the United Kingdom (UK) between 1996 and 2006, the first phase of devolution in each country. The study focuses primarily on relations between the central government and a single sub-state in each country (Alberta in Canada and Scotland in the UK) and addresses three research questions: 1) to what extent were there differences in intergovernmental relations between the countries?2) what accounted for these differences? 3) what impact did these differences have on the character and workability of the intergovernmental relations system in each country? Workability was assessed based upon the degree to which trust ties developed between senior officials. The analysis concludes that the structure of the state, the structure of the policy domain, and the presence of two important accommodation mechanisms in the UK not found in Canada (the party system and the civil service) made intergovernmental relations in labour market policy in the two countries fundamentally different. In Canada, intergovernmental relations were multilateral, interprovincial and bilateral, whereas in the United Kingdom they were only bilateral. Despite devolution, the UK Government retained control of most policy levers, whereas in Canada devolution has limited federal control and influence and any notion of a national labour market system. Trust ties were enhanced by consistency between the key players, routinized engagement, reliability, honesty, respect, capacity and willingness to engage, and transparency. Although shared objectives made engagement easier, they were not a prerequisite for a positive relationship. Bilateral relationships that took place within the geographic boundaries of Alberta and Scotland were considered as positive and highly workable. Difficulties arose when relationships became multilateral or bilateral relations were managed at a distance. Despite devolution, multilateral relations in the historically conflicted labour market policy domain in Canada remained competitive, with a low degree of workability. Relationships with respect to disability and immigration issues were more positive. In the UK relationships in the welfare to work policy area were cooperative and highly workable. Relationships in skills and immigration did not fare as positively.

This thesis explores the social realities of working in a minority language labour market through a case-study of the Gaelic language in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.  In this study, the ‘Gaelic labour market’ refers to a group of jobs for which knowledge of Gaelic is a condition of employment. By conceptualising language as situated in social practices, this study draws on in-depth interviews with people who work in this labour market, to research the ways in which personal identities, values and meanings associated with the language can be asserted, formed and contested through working practices.  The research found a multiplicity of motives for working in the Gaelic labour market which included both ‘mercenary’ and ‘crusading’ elements.  Gaelic language practice in the Gaelic labour market is not necessarily stable or habitual, but is contested practice given that there is no single ideology of language which workers bring to bear on upon their working situations. Whilst for some participation in the Gaelic labour market profoundly affected how they identified with the language, for others this involvement had little consequence for their identity.  The dominant outcome was one of ambivalence over what membership of the Gaelic labour market meant and in which ways it could have implications for how workers lived their lives.  The results show how the labour market is one space through which different ideologies of the language are contested, as well as being a contested concept in and of itself.

The importance of a well-functioning housing market has been proposed for long within economics, economic geography and urban planning.  A high mobility on the housing market most likely positively affects the dynamics of the labor market, a dynamic important for economic growth. Mobility defined as the link between the worker and the workplace in terms of transportation and housing are most likely essential components of a dynamic and well-functioning labor market. The Oswald hypothesis states that positive relationship between homeownership and unemployment exists, the lower mobility in the homeownership housing stock compared to the rental housing stock affects labor market mobility in a negative way which can be noted if European countries are compared. My thesis explores this relationship in a Swedish context by mobilizing a quantitative approach with aggregate data on municipal level ranging from 1998 to 2013. The Swedish housing market is in a deregulation process since 1992, a conversion process from public rental housing to homeownership co-op apartments has taken place and public policies now favor homeownership over renting. Municipal data on unemployment, homeownership of apartment, rental tenant and control variables for economy and personal characteristics are applied in Pooled OLS, random effects and fixed effects regression models. The results from the Pooled OLS and the Random effects model confirms the positive relationship proposed by Oswald for homeownership of apartment but not for homeownership of detached housing. Also rental tenant show a positive relationship. The results from the fixed effect estimation rejects the hypothesis altogether and show a negative relationship.

Much debate surrounds the effect the minimum wage has on employment. Economic theory suggests that the minimum wage acts as a price floor in the labor market and thus leads to disemployment. However, empirical evidence from a variety of industries, states, and age groups suggests that the minimum wage has negative, negligible, and even positive effect on employment. This Economics/Public Policy Analysis thesis is the first study to analyze the effect the minimum wage has on employment in the informal sector. I apply four OLS regressions with various levels of specifications on five dependent variables: hourly wage, log hourly wages, hours worked, log daily income, and percentage working. My results suggest that economic theory holds true in the informal sector with regards to the California minimum wage mandate of 2016: the minimum wage had a positive and statistically significant effect on hourly wage, with average hourly wages increasing by $1.88; the minimum wage had a negative and statistically significant effect on percentage working, with average number of workers dispatched to jobs decreasing by 15%.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Economics / Dong Li / Wayne Nafziger / The dissertation includes three essays on development and regional economics. Son preference prevails among Indian couples. I test the hypothesis that women who bear sons experience an elevated status within the household, which translates into their increased role in decision-making. The first essay empirically examines the issue. Using data from the Indian Human Development Survey, I find that women who have given birth to at least one son show greater participation in the household’s financial decisions as well as other decisions in a household. Presence of a senior member in the household, however, reduces the women’s relative household bargaining strength. The second essay examines the wage differentials of natives, naturalized citizens, and immigrants on the basis of gender, and for the latter two categories, on the basis of region of origin. This paper argues that the assimilation effect for naturalized citizens should be stronger than that for immigrants since a naturalized citizen, on an average, spends more than 15 years in the country, much higher than immigrants. I find that immigrants experience higher increase in wages than naturalized citizens with longer stay in the United States. The essay concludes that this trend in wages cannot be explained by the assimilation argument alone. We also report that naturalized citizens command higher returns to higher education than immigrants. The third essay explores issues in regional economics. Kansas has the third largest public highway miles and one of the highest miles per person in the country. Due to declining rural population, counties lack the required tax base and fiscal health to support their large ailing rural road infrastructure. The average farm size is increasing and so is the size of vehicles using the rural roads. This paper suggests removing some rural low volume roads from the county road network as one option. I study three Kansas counties to analyze the cost-benefit of reducing low volume road miles. I find that rural counties will be able to save money by closing some low volume roads.

Os três artigos desta tese focam no mercado de trabalho. O primeiro artigo calculou a probabilidade com que um trabalhador deixa o emprego e a probabilidade com que um desempregado encontra trabalho no Brasil. A metodologia utilizada foi a desenvolvida por Shimer (2012). O objetivo foi determinar qual destes dois fatores seria o mais importante para explicar as flutuações da taxa de desemprego no Brasil. Os resultados mostraram que é a dinâmica da probabilidade com que um desempregado encontra emprego que explica o comportamento da taxa de desemprego. Este resultado é distinto daquele encontrado normalmente na literatura. No segundo artigo, log-linearizamos e estimados o modelo de Christiano, Eichenbaum e Trabandt (2013) para o Brasil. Este modelo difere dos modelos novos keynesianos tradicionais ao colocar uma estrutura de searching (busca) para o mercado de trabalho. A ideia foi comparar este modelo com o modelo de rigidez de preços e salários tradicional e analisar se esta estrutura para o mercado de trabalho é capaz de fazer o papel das rigidezes tradicionais, no que se refere a propagação dos choques na economia. As funções impulso resposta a um choque contracionista de política monetária mostraram que o modelo explicou o comportamento esperado para variáveis como PIB, inflação e taxa de desemprego. Ainda, a estimação do modelo mostrou, no geral, que os preços no Brasil são reajustados com uma frequência menor do que a frequência indicada pelos modelos novos keynesianos com rigidez de preços e salários. Por sua vez, ao desligar a rigidez da utilização do capital e a do working capital channel, este modelo mais completo, maior e mais detalhado para mercado de trabalho pareceu não ser capaz de dar conta do movimento inercial e persistente observado para as variáveis macroeconômicas como PIB e inflação. Por fim, no terceiro artigo, estimamos novamente o modelo Christiano, Eichenbaum e Trabandt (2013), mas agora para os Estados Unidos. Entretanto, adotamos uma estratégia de estimação diferente: optamos por primeiro log-linearizar o modelo para depois fazer a estimação, para dois períodos: até 2008, assim como no artigo original, e até 2014. O objetivo principal foi comparar os resultados da nossa estimativa com os resultados de Christiano, Eichenbaum e Trabandt (2013). Para o conjunto de dados até 2008, os resultados indicam que os valores estimados estão em linha com os encontrados na literatura e, no geral, não estão muito distantes das estimações do artigo original. Mas, os parâmetros estimados apontaram para um modelo com um pouco mais de rigidez de preços, uma maior persistência de consumo e com uma regra de política monetária um pouco menos inercial em relação à do artigo original. Entretanto, esta regra mostrou uma reação muito maior à inflação do que ao produto, assim como em Christiano, Eichenbaum e Trabandt (2013). Considerando a amostra toda, isto é, até o final de 2014, observamos que o modelo estimado continuou a ter uma maior rigidez de preço em relação ao modelo original e uma regra de política monetária menos inercial. Além disso, os dados mais recentes afetaram de modo mais expressivo os valores estimados para variáveis do mercado de trabalho. Por sua vez, as funções impulso resposta refletiram esta menor inércia da política monetária e, no geral, apresentaram as trajetórias esperadas. / The three articles of this thesis focus on the labor market. The first article calculated the probability of a worker leaving his job and the probability of an unemployed person finding a job in Brazil, using the methodology developed by Shimer (2012). The aim was to determine which of these factors was the most important to explain the unemployment rate fluctuations. The results showed that the probability of an unemployed worker finding a job is more important to explain the dynamic of the unemployment rate. Commonly, the literature has found an opposite result in Brazil. In the second article, we log linearized and estimated the model built by Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans (2013) for Brazil. This model is different from the traditional New Keynesian models because it has a structure of searching in the labor market. The idea was to compare this model with the traditional one with sticky wage and sticky prices. Moreover, the idea was to analyze if this model with searching structure in the labor market was able to substitute some traditional rigidity when the concern is the propagation of shocks. The impulse response functions to a contractionist monetary policy shock showed that this model explains the dynamic that is normally found in GDP, inflation and unemployment rate. Furthermore, the estimation showed that, in general, the prices are readjusted less frequently than the frequency estimated by New Keynesian models with sticky wage and sticky prices. Besides, when the rigidities (capital utilization and working capital channel) are eliminated, this model did not properly explain the inertial and persistence dynamic of the macroeconomics variables, such as GDP and inflation. Finally, in the last article, we estimated the Christiano, Eichenbaum and Trabandt (2013) model for the United States, but we adopted a different estimation strategy. We log linearized the model and estimated it with Bayesian methods. Moreover, we estimated for two different periods. The aim was to compare our results with the original model. When the model was estimated with data up to 2008, the results showed that the estimations were in line with the values found in the literature and, in general, they were not too far from the values estimated in the original article. However, the parameters estimated showed a model in which the prices are more rigid, the consumption habit is higher and the monetary rule is less inertial than observed in the original model. However, the monetary authority reacted much more to inflation than GDP, as it happened in the original article. When we considered the data until 2014, we observed that the estimated model remained with more sticky prices and a more inertial monetary rule. Moreover, we noted that this more recent data affected more expressively the estimated values of the labor market. The analysis of impulse response function showed this less inertial dynamic of the monetary rule and, overall, they followed the expected dynamics