This dissertation consists of three essays investigating the role of early life events, family environment and personal choices in shaping a child’s chances for human capital accumulation. The first essay examines how physical stature of a child measured in terms of age standardized height influences his/her selection for family labor activities vs. schooling in rural Ethiopia using malnutrition caused by exposure to significant weather shocks in early childhood as sources of identification for the child’s physical stature. We find no evidence that better physical stature of the child leads to his/her positive selection for full-time child labor activities. On the other hand we found reasonably strong and consistent evidence that physically more robust children are more likely to combine child labor and schooling than physically weaker children. The findings indicate that, although better early childhood nutrition leads to higher chances of attending school, it may also put the child at additional pressure to participate in family labor activities which may be reflected in poor performance in schooling. The second essay empirically investigates whether the quantity deficit in the children of the mother’s preferred gender is compensated through their favorable treatment in terms of investment in schooling and nutrition (referred to as compensating hypothesis) and to what extent the mother uses her bargaining power in the family to influence this process. We use data from siblings and twins in two rounds of the demographic and health surveys of Ethiopia with robustness checks using a similar but larger data set from India. We find the mother’s bargaining power working in the opposite direction to that of the compensating hypothesis in the case of child schooling and having no substantive role in the case of child nutritional health. Our findings for child schooling imply that mother’s empowerment could turn out to be unfavorable to a child’s attendance of schooling in the circumstances where the child is needed to help out with family activities. In the third essay we use date from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of the Youth (NLSY97) to examine the extent to which high school completion (and to a limited extent college enrollment) are influenced by the choice teenagers make as to when to start dating and/or engage in sex, how many dating and/or sex partners to maintain, and how frequently to engage in sexual and/or dating activities. We use indicators of parental and peer religiosity as instruments for teenager’s involvement in sex and dating activities. While our results for teenage dating are generally weaker than those for teenage sex, the overall pattern of our estimates suggests that teenage sex and dating could have significant effects not only on high school completion but also the subsequent enrollment in a college.

A historical overview of the collective bargaining process in the three major American sports, and a comparative analysis of the current collective bargaining agreements.

It has been ingrained into the American consciousness that our public schools are failing and our students are underachieving. This is something we all know. What is less clear is why American schools are failing. Time and time again, we come back to teachers, who have been identified as the single greatest factor in determining the success of the student. Teachers can make the difference in the lives of students and help secure our economic future. Teachers unions speak for these teachers, thus, in our search for a scapegoat, teachers unions often rank at the top. Right or wrong, it is a serious accusation to say that teachers unions are responsible for the failure of the American education system. Teachers, and consequently teachers unions, have the power to greatly impact education reform. After assessing the state of education in the United States and establishing teachers unions’ role in the bigger picture of education, I will first explore the source of teachers unions political power: their large membership and their money. Teachers unions are among the largest unions in the country and the NEA (National Education Association), specifically, is the highest political contributor of all public sector unions. To assess their political influence, I will show where and how they use their money with the intention of evaluating whether or not they overstep their boundaries as a typical labor union. The next important variable to consider when evaluating the impact of teachers unions is their classification as a public sector union. Private and public sector unions operate under different sets of laws and thus have different rules and strategies for collective bargaining. I will examine how their public sector status impacts their influence on hotly contested education reform issues, such as teacher performance pay, teacher evaluations based on student achievement, school vouchers, and charter schools. What makes teachers unions different from other labor unions? And do these differences give teachers unions a detrimental amount of control over education reform?

The problem of the investigation was to determine the legal status of public sector school oriented professional negotiations in the fifty states of the United States. Available data dealing with the status of public sector school oriented professional negotiations between boards of education and teacher organizations proved to be disorganized in terms of providing readily available, complete, and accurate information.The attorney general of each state was contacted by letter for the purpose of completing a questionnaire. The secondary source of information was the executive secretary of each state school board association.Thirty states have statutes mandating negotiations between boards of education and teacher organization representatives. Within each state statute information was gathered concerning (1) statutory inclusion, (2) impasse procedures, (3) grievance procedures, (4) scope of negotiations, (5) employee rights, (6) employer rights, and (7) strikes and penalties.Findings included:1. Thirty state legislatures have mandated negotiations between boards of education and teacher organizations.2. All state legislatures in the Northwest area of the United States mandate professional negotiations between boards of education and teacher organizations.3. One state legislature in the Southeast area of the United States mandates professional negotiations between boards of education and teacher organizations.4. One state statute prohibits boards of education from recognizing teacher organization representatives for the purpose of collective bargaining.5. All thirty state statutes mandating collective bargaining between boards of education and teacher organizations provide teachers with exclusive representation,6. All thirty state statutes mandating collective bargaining between boards of education and teacher organizations provide as negotiable items such matters as salaries, hours, and working conditions.7. All thirty state statutes mandating collective bargaining between boards of education and teacher organizations provide for settlement of impasse by mediation, factfinding, or arbitration.Conclusions were:1. Negotiation rights for teachers have come about more slowly than for most government employees.2. Increased organized efforts to formalize the negotiation procedures have continued to be faced by boards of education in all states.3. Teacher strikes are increasing in spite of anti-strike legislation in most states.4. Statutes have given priority to teacher rights in terms of the rights of teachers and boards of education.5. The passage of legislation is no panacea for problems stemming from board of education and teacher organization relationships and legislation will not eliminate the possibility of court cases, attorneys general opinions, and teacher strikes.Recommendations are:1. Periodic studies should be undertaken in order to update professional negotiation procedures.2. Specific statutory provisions should be studied in depth to determine if such provisions are fulfilling the needs of both parties.3. Attention should be given to professional negotiations within states to determine how legislation is being implemented and how the legal status is developing in states where no guidelines are provided.4. Further study should take place to determine the impact of statutory enactments on both parties.

The aim of this paper is to estimate the effect of FDI and trade openness on wages in the CEECs in the post-transition era. We utilize a cross-country sector-specific eceonometric analysis based on one-digit level panel data for manufacturing industry in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, for the period of 2000-2004. The results suggest that the increases in productivity are reflected in wages only to a modest extent, even in the long-term, leading to a steady decline in the share of labor in manufacturing industry in almost all sub-sectors in all countries. Meanwhile, the high significant and negative effect of unemployment on wages shows that the labor market is flexible in terms of wage flexibility. FDI has a positive effect on wages only in the capital and skill intensive sectors. The results also show that the increase in trade with EU did not lead to positive prospects for wages in manufacturing industry, contrary to the expectations of pro-market policies and traditional trade theory. The long-term net effect of exports and imports is negative, suggesting that integration of CEECs to EU via trade liberalization have worked at the expense of labor. (author's abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

In previous research on pricing mortality-linked securities, the no-arbitrage approach is often used. However, this method, which takes market prices as given, is difficult to implement in today's embryonic market where there are few traded securities. In particular, with limited market price data, identifying a risk neutral measure requires strong assumptions. In this thesis, we approach the pricing problem from a different angle by considering economic methods. We propose pricing approaches in both competitive market and non-competitive market. In the competitive market, we treat the pricing work as a Walrasian tâtonnement process, in which prices are determined through a gradual calibration of supply and demand. Such a pricing framework provides with us a pair of supply and demand curves. From these curves we can tell if there will be any trade between the counterparties, and if there will, at what price the mortality-linked security will be traded. This method does not require the market prices of other mortality-linked securities as input. This can spare us from the problems associated with the lack of market price data. We extend the pricing framework to incorporate population basis risk, which arises when a pension plan relies on standardized instruments to hedge its longevity risk exposure. This extension allows us to obtain the price and trading quantity of mortality-linked securities in the presence of population basis risk. The resulting supply and demand curves help us understand how population basis risk would affect the behaviors of agents. We apply the method to a hypothetical longevity bond, using real mortality data from different populations. Our illustrations show that, interestingly, population basis risk can affect the price of a mortality-linked security in different directions, depending on the properties of the populations involved. We have also examined the impact of transitory mortality jumps on trading in a competitive market. Mortality dynamics are subject to jumps, which are due to events such as the Spanish flu in 1918. Such jumps can have a significant impact on prices of mortality-linked securities, and therefore should be taken into account in modeling. Although several single-population mortality models with jump effects have been developed, they are not adequate for trades in which population basis risk exists. We first develop a two-population mortality model with transitory jump effects, and then we use the proposed mortality model to examine how mortality jumps may affect the supply and demand of mortality-linked securities. Finally, we model the pricing process in a non-competitive market as a bargaining game. Nash's bargaining solution is applied to obtain a unique trading contract. With no requirement of a competitive market, this approach is more appropriate for the current mortality-linked security market. We compare this approach with the other proposed pricing method. It is found that both pricing methods lead to Pareto optimal outcomes.

Networked Control Systems (NCS) are distributed control systems where the sensor signals to the controllers and the control data to the actuators are enclosed in messages and sent over a communication network. On the one hand, the design of an NCS requires ensuring the stability of the control system and achieving system response that is as close as possible to that of an ideal system which demands network resources. On the other hand, these resources are limited and have to be allocated efficiently to accommodate for future system extensions as well as applications other than control purpose. Furthermore the NCS design parameters for the control system messages and the message transmission over the network are interdependent. In this thesis, we propose &ldquo / Integrated NCS Design (INtERCEDE: Integrated NEtwoRked Control systEm DEsign)&rdquo / a novel algorithmic approach for the design of NCS which ensures the stability of the control system, brings system response to that of an ideal system v as close as desired and conserves network bandwidth at the same time. The core of INtERCEDE is a bargaining game approach which iteratively calculates the message parameters and network service parameters. Our experimental results demonstrate the operation of INtERCEDE and how it computes the optimal design parameters for the example NCS.

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This dissertation explores the interactive effects of domestic audience costs and strategic interests on state behavior in international crises. I argue that the magnitude of a leader’s audience costs is influenced by the level of strategic interests, which leads to several predictions of crisis behavior in terms of (1) decisions to issue threats, including bluffs, (2) the credibility of these threats and the willingness of opponents to resist, and (3) crisis outcomes, including war. In the theoretical chapters, a formal model of crisis bargaining is stylized under conditions of complete and incomplete information. Based on this model, several novel predictions are derived regarding crisis behavior. These predictions are quantitatively tested through a series of monadic and dyadic probit and multinomial logit models using a dataset of deterrence crises for the period 1895-1985. The results lend strong validity to the approach advanced here that does not consider endogenous and exogenous factors in isolation, but rather models their interplay to predict the dynamics of crisis behavior. With respect to dispute initiation, the results show that strategic interests have a much stronger influence on authoritarian leaders’ willingness to initiate disputes than they do for democracies. Moreover, the formal stylization and empirical analyses show that democracies can and do bluff, which is in contrast to the conventional expectations from audience cost research. Relatedly, this study specifies if and when democratic threats are credible and how the interplay between variable domestic costs and strategic interests can lead to deterrence success, failure, or war. While there is little difference between the credibility of democratic and authoritarian threats at the lower level of interests, democratic threats become more credible and less likely to be resisted as the interests at stake increase. As for crisis outcomes, among others, war is more likely between opponents with vital interests involved; yet even here, the predictions are not straightforward but rather the probability of war is increasing at a differential rate for democratic and authoritarian initiators. Whereas the formal models in this study provide the logical rationale for these and other expectations, the quantitative findings demonstrate their empirical validity as well.