Doctor of Philosophy / Economics / Yang M. Chang / This dissertation consists of three essays in the field of household and family economics. Specifically, the research focuses on the optimal taxation and household behavior, gender inequality in the labor market during economics transition, and fertility choices and female labor supply. Chapter 1 explores the welfare implications of an optimal tax-transfer schedule to dual-earner couples. A non-cooperative model is used to examine labor supply decisions of married couples to both individual- and joint-based taxation, and the results suggest that the impact of income taxation on family labor supply is largely dependent on spouses' relative wage income. I also investigate the welfare effect of a governmental imposed re-distributive program on both spouses, the simulation results of moving from individual to joint taxation improves both spouses' well-beings and the welfare gain is higher for couples when income gap between the husband and the wife is larger. Chapter 2 empirically examines the impact of privatization reform on gender wage gap in urban labor market based on a comprehensive nationwide survey, the Chinese Household Income Projects (CHIP). We observe, between 1995 and 2007, the gender wage gap rises, and the progress of privatization increases women’s productivity. The results of decomposition suggest that the increase in gender discrimination, which is associated with the rapid growth of non-state sector, contributes to widening gender wage gap. Although privatization increase gender segregation in occupational attainments, it is less obvious that segregation can account for the gender wage gap. In Chapter 3, using the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), we find mothers earn less on average even after controlling for other wage determinants. The wage penalty associated with motherhood is insignificant in the early career, and arises partly due to mothers accumulating less work experience. As a result, late mothers experience stronger (weaker) returns to work experience before (after) their transition to motherhood. The differentials in returns to work experience are robust to controlling for occupational skill requirements and time spent out of employment.

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become the most important social policy in Latin America, and their influence has spread to countries around the world. A number of studies provide strong evidence of the positive impacts of these programs on the main targeted outcomes, education and health, and have proved successful in other outcomes such as nutrition, household income, and child labor. As we expect CCT programs to remain a permanent aspect of social policy for the foreseeable future, demand for evidence of the indirect effects of CCT programs has grown beyond the initial emphasis of these programs. My research pays particular attention to these relevant but unintended outcomes, which have been discussed less extensively in the literature. Familias en Accion (FA), a CCT program in Colombia, started operating in 2002 and has benefited approximately 1,500,000 households since its beginning. The results of the program’s evaluation survey, representative of poor rural households in Colombia, are a very good source or investigating not only the unintended effects of the program but also the microeconomic behavior of poor households and social policy issues in the country. Using a panel dataset from FA, I address three empirical policy questions: (i) to what extent is consumption of beneficiary households better insured against income shocks? (ii) has the program displaced child labor as a risk-coping instrument?, and (iii) are there any incentive effects of the cash transfers and the associated conditionalities on the labor supply of adults in recipient households? Each of my research questions is addressed separately; however, the results, taken together, can be informative in understanding the safety net value of the program and their potentialities to reduce poverty in the long term. I find that the program serves as an instrument for consumption smoothing. In particular, FA is effective in protecting food consumption, but not nonfood consumption, and it reduces consumption fluctuations in response to idiosyncratic shocks but not to covariate shocks. Results also reveal that FA works as insurance for the schooling of the poor but is not able to completely displace child labor. Finally, the results also show that beneficiary mothers are devoting more time to household chores and that girls and female adult labor are complementary. Male labor supply has increased while boys have increased leisure time as a response to the program.

The overriding theme of my dissertation is the use of short-term weather fluctuations to study how people allocate their time across activities. In Chapter 1, a theoretical model is developed to distinguish malfeasant from legitimate forms of employee sickness absenteeism. In this model, individuals' marginal utility of indoor leisure is increasing in their sickness levels, while their marginal utility of outdoor leisure is an increasing function of the interaction of their health and the quality of outdoor weather. In equilibrium, sickness absenteeism occurs at both ends of the sickness distribution -- among the relatively sick and among the most healthy facing the best weather. The positive relation between marginal changes in weather quality and levels of sickness absenteeism in the workplace reflects the substitution of the inframarginal employees who are the least sick away from work activities towards outdoor leisure activities. The model in Chapter 1 suggests an empirical strategy to identify a shirking component in overall reported sickness absenteeism. Not only does this approach avoid attributing entirely legitimate forms of absenteeism to shirking, but unlike previous studies using employee dismissal rates, it is able to distinguish shirking activity whether or not that activity is detected by employers. In order to exploit exogenous weather fluctuations to identify shirking activity, we need a one-dimensional measure of weather “quality”. The primary objective of Chapter 2 is to construct a weather quality index that captures the influence of the weather on workers' preferences for outdoor leisure activity. The weather quality index takes into account the multifaceted nature of weather conditions, and measures how various weather elements -- temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind speed, and cloud cover -- come together to affect the propensity of employees to engage in high-utility outdoor recreational activities. The resulting index provides a ranking of different weather conditions in terms of their outdoor recreational values, which can then be used to capture the incentives of employees to shirk contractual work hours in response to purely exogenous weather changes. Chapter 3 empirically tests the existence of weather-induced substitution between work and outdoor leisure activities and examines how this type of behaviour varies across workers facing different shirking incentives. Linking 12 years of employee data from Canada's monthly Labour Force Survey (LFS), which queries reasons for employees' absences, to weather quality measured using the index constructed in Chapter 2, a clear positive relationship is found between the quality of outside weather conditions and short-term reported sickness absenteeism. Moreover, consistent with a key proposition of the theoretical model in Chapter 1, the empirical relation between weather and sickness absenteeism tends to be larger when existing shirking incentives are low, such as when sick pay is less generous and when probability of getting fired if caught shirking is high. There is, however, little evidence that firms are able to adjust shirking incentives through the payment of efficiency wages. Finally, Chapter 4 examines another type of substitution induced by weather shocks -- the substitution between outdoor and indoor physical activities. The Chapter begins with a theoretical model of the decision to participate in physical activities, which assumes that when adverse weather shocks deter outdoor physical activities, indoor physical activities are the only viable option for individuals to stay physically active. However, because the indoor options are more costly, substituting from outdoor to indoor physical activities is easier for higher-income individuals. This suggests an explanation for the stylized fact that rates of physical activity participation are low among lower socioeconomic groups. Linking time-use data from Canadian General Social Survey with archival weather data, the results of the empirical analysis in this chapter provides evidence of a positive income effect enabling substitution from outdoor to indoor physical activities when outside weather is not conducive for participating in outdoor activities. By exploiting the role that income plays in maintaining physical activity levels when less costly outdoor options are limited, this chapter formally illustrates a credible causal link between people's income levels and their participation in leisure time physical activities and provides direct evidence of this link. The results have important policy implications for promoting physical activities, especially among lower income population.

The aggressive evolution of the semiconductor industry smaller process geometries, higher densities, and greater chip complexity has provided design engineers the means to create complex, high-performance System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs. Such SoC designs typically have more than one processor and huge (tens of Mega Bytes) amount of memory, all on the same chip. Dealing with the global on-chip memory allocation/deallocation in a dynamic yet deterministic way is an important issue for upcoming billion transistor multiprocessor SoC designs. To achieve this, we propose a memory management hierarchy we call Two-Level Memory Management. To implement this memory management scheme which presents a shift in the way designers look at on-chip dynamic memory allocation we present the System-on-a-Chip Dynamic Memory Management Unit (SoCDMMU) for allocation of the global on-chip memory, which we refer to as Level Two memory management (Level One is the management of memory allocated to a particular on-chip Processing Element, e.g., an operating systems management of memory allocated to a particular processor). In this way, processing elements (heterogeneous or non-heterogeneous hardware or software) in an SoC can request and be granted portions of the global memory in a fast and deterministic time. A new tool is introduced to generate a custom optimized version of the SoCDMMU hardware. Also, a real-time operating system is modified support the new proposed SoCDMMU. We show an example where shared memory multiprocessor SoC that employs the Two-Level Memory Management and utilizes the SoCDMMU has an overall average speedup in application transition time as well as normal execution time.

The purpose of this study is to assess the extent to which affiliation with a university research center affects how university scientists allocate their work time across their many academic tasks and responsibilities, including research, teaching, student advising, grants and contracts work, and service and committee duties. The key proposition is that institutional variation across university research centers can affect greatly how center affiliated university scientists allocate their work time insofar as some center level characteristics are more conducive than are others to role strain, which is the structural circumstance (Merton 1957) wherein an individual is beholden to center and departments norms and expectations that are divergent. The concept of role strain befits analysis of the impact of center affiliation on university scientists time allocations insofar as it provides a structural framework with which to characterize the time constraints that center scientists face as a result of being dually obligated to a center and an academic department. Moreover, study at the organizational level of analysis emphasizes competition and even conflict between university research centers and academic departments over the scarce resource of faculty time (Geiger 1990, Stahler and Tash 1994, Mallon 2004). This study uses data from a national survey of university scientists as well as data from interviews with university scientists who affiliate with National Science Foundation Engineering Research Centers or Science and Technology Centers. Survey results demonstrate that a centers size, multidisciplinarity, organization within the university, programmatic ties, and external relations increase the time allocated to research, grants and contracts work, and service and committee duties. These findings constitute objective evidence of center induced role strain (Pandey and Kumar 1997, Rizzo et al. 1970) insofar as they identify components of center scientists work environments suggestive of center and department norms and expectations being divergent and even conflicting. Interview results demonstrate similarly that when a center has no ties to an academic department and when its research focus is applied or commercially relevant, workload increases. These findings constitute subjective evidence of center induced role strain (Pandey and Kumar 1997, Kahn et al. 1964) insofar as it is the center scientists themselves observing these divergent norms and expectations. Implications for policy and theory are discussed.

The overriding theme of my dissertation is the use of short-term weather fluctuations to study how people allocate their time across activities. In Chapter 1, a theoretical model is developed to distinguish malfeasant from legitimate forms of employee sickness absenteeism. In this model, individuals' marginal utility of indoor leisure is increasing in their sickness levels, while their marginal utility of outdoor leisure is an increasing function of the interaction of their health and the quality of outdoor weather. In equilibrium, sickness absenteeism occurs at both ends of the sickness distribution -- among the relatively sick and among the most healthy facing the best weather. The positive relation between marginal changes in weather quality and levels of sickness absenteeism in the workplace reflects the substitution of the inframarginal employees who are the least sick away from work activities towards outdoor leisure activities. The model in Chapter 1 suggests an empirical strategy to identify a shirking component in overall reported sickness absenteeism. Not only does this approach avoid attributing entirely legitimate forms of absenteeism to shirking, but unlike previous studies using employee dismissal rates, it is able to distinguish shirking activity whether or not that activity is detected by employers. In order to exploit exogenous weather fluctuations to identify shirking activity, we need a one-dimensional measure of weather “quality”. The primary objective of Chapter 2 is to construct a weather quality index that captures the influence of the weather on workers' preferences for outdoor leisure activity. The weather quality index takes into account the multifaceted nature of weather conditions, and measures how various weather elements -- temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind speed, and cloud cover -- come together to affect the propensity of employees to engage in high-utility outdoor recreational activities. The resulting index provides a ranking of different weather conditions in terms of their outdoor recreational values, which can then be used to capture the incentives of employees to shirk contractual work hours in response to purely exogenous weather changes. Chapter 3 empirically tests the existence of weather-induced substitution between work and outdoor leisure activities and examines how this type of behaviour varies across workers facing different shirking incentives. Linking 12 years of employee data from Canada's monthly Labour Force Survey (LFS), which queries reasons for employees' absences, to weather quality measured using the index constructed in Chapter 2, a clear positive relationship is found between the quality of outside weather conditions and short-term reported sickness absenteeism. Moreover, consistent with a key proposition of the theoretical model in Chapter 1, the empirical relation between weather and sickness absenteeism tends to be larger when existing shirking incentives are low, such as when sick pay is less generous and when probability of getting fired if caught shirking is high. There is, however, little evidence that firms are able to adjust shirking incentives through the payment of efficiency wages. Finally, Chapter 4 examines another type of substitution induced by weather shocks -- the substitution between outdoor and indoor physical activities. The Chapter begins with a theoretical model of the decision to participate in physical activities, which assumes that when adverse weather shocks deter outdoor physical activities, indoor physical activities are the only viable option for individuals to stay physically active. However, because the indoor options are more costly, substituting from outdoor to indoor physical activities is easier for higher-income individuals. This suggests an explanation for the stylized fact that rates of physical activity participation are low among lower socioeconomic groups. Linking time-use data from Canadian General Social Survey with archival weather data, the results of the empirical analysis in this chapter provides evidence of a positive income effect enabling substitution from outdoor to indoor physical activities when outside weather is not conducive for participating in outdoor activities. By exploiting the role that income plays in maintaining physical activity levels when less costly outdoor options are limited, this chapter formally illustrates a credible causal link between people's income levels and their participation in leisure time physical activities and provides direct evidence of this link. The results have important policy implications for promoting physical activities, especially among lower income population.

This study was conducted in order to determine how mathematics teachers allocate their time in the classroom and the factors that influence teacher priorities in that time allocation. Research has indicated that math teachers may choose not to do certain activities in their classroom because of the amount of time that they take, but other underlying reasons may exist. In order to study this idea, six math teachers were interviewed on their current time allocation and rationale for that allocation, and the results from these interviews were used to create a survey that was sent to 581 math teachers in Utah. The results from the 224 completed surveys showed that many teachers allocate their classroom time in a fairly traditional manner, with an average of about 10% of class time being spent on student-centered activities. 40.63% of teachers spent 0% of their class time on student-centered activities. There is variation in time allocation and influencing factors based on a teacher's schedule, level of teaching, experience, and how student-centered their teaching methods are. Also, the results support the claim that there are factors, other than limited class time, that affect how teachers choose whether or not to do certain activities. Some of the most significant deciding factors found are whether the activities will help students with their end of level tests, if they will keep students working hard mathematically, whether others are using those activities or not, how the activities affect classroom rowdiness. It was also found that teachers who are more teacher-centered tended to choose activities based on how easy they were to implement, including their personal comfort level, ease of preparation, and ease of management with student behavior. More student-centered teachers tended to care more about keeping the students working hard mathematically.

No description available.

No / Surprisingly, the field of leisure economics is not, thus far, a particularly integrated or coherent one. In this Handbook a wide ranging body of international scholars get to grips with the core issues, taking in the traditional income/leisure choice model of textbook microeconomics and Becker’s allocation of time model along the way. They expertly apply economics to some usually neglected topics, such as boredom and sleeping, work–life balance, dating, tourism, health and fitness, sport, video games, social networking, music festivals and sex. Contributions from further afield by Veblen, Sctivosky and Bourdieu also feature prominently.

Time, the one educational resource educators desire most, is so often in short supply in America 's schools. The ability of the school administrator to schedule teachers' and students' time so that both groups can maximize opportunities for teaching and learning each day has become an essential skill. Changing the structure of the school day to extend learning opportunities requires that administrators, teachers, and students have a firm commitment and clear understanding of the educational resources and processes of time. Successful practices regarding the use of time include: (a) careful planning and design, (b) adequate staff preparation and training, (c) effective use of extended time, and (d) a focus on equal access for students to multiple learning opportunities. Schools are under enormous pressure to show, through improved test scores, that they are providing every student with a thorough and efficient education. A review of the literature on alternative scheduling practices that use specified and structured blocks of learning time, focuses, overwhelmingly, on high school alternative scheduling models. However, there is a paucity of current research on the effects of alternative scheduling practices on elementary school cultures even though the elements of one particular method, parallel block scheduling, have been employed for over 30 years in elementary schools. This lack of research points to the necessity of exploring the benefits of alternative scheduling practices for delivery of instruction as well as changes in elementary school scheduling since the implementation of the No Child Left Behind mandate. / Ed. D.