This dissertation consists of three essays in labor economics and contract theory. The first essay examines whether one’s wage is based on information about the performance of one’s personal contacts. I study wage determination under two assumptions about belief formation: individual learning, under which employers observe only one’s own characteristics, and social learning, under which employers also observe those of one’s personal contacts. Using data on siblings in the NLSY79, I test whether a sibling’s characteristics are priced into one’s wage. If learning is social, then an older sibling’s test score should typically have a larger adjusted impact on a younger sibling’s log wage than vice versa. The empirical findings support this prediction. Furthermore, I perform several exercises to rule out other potential factors, such as asymmetric skill formation, human capital transfers, and role model effects. The second essay analyzes the influence of macroeconomic conditions during childhood on the labor market performance of adults. Based on Census data, I document the relationship of unemployment rates in childhood to schooling, employment, and income as an adult. In addition, a sample from the PSID is used to study how the background attributes of parents raising children vary over the business cycle. Finally, information from the NLSY79-CH is examined in order to characterize the impact of economic fluctuations on parental caregiving. Overall, the evidence is consistent with a negative effect of the average unemployment rate in childhood on parental investments in children and the stock of human capital in adulthood. The third essay studies the bilateral trade of divisible goods in the presence of stochastic transaction costs. The first-best solution requires each agent to transfer all of her good to the other agent when the transaction cost reaches a certain threshold value. However, in the absence of court-enforceable contracts, such a policy is not incentive compatible. We solve for the unique maximal symmetric subgame-perfect equilibrium, in which agents can realize some gains from trade by transferring their goods sequentially. Several comparative statics are derived. In some cases, the first-best outcome can be approximated as the agents become infinitely patient. / Economics

Chapter 1 begins with the motivation of my study in teachers' labor market. I employ a monopolistic screening model to show that there exist multiple equilibria in the educational system; a pooling equilibrium and a separating equilibrium. The model predicts that the pooling equilibrium is optimal only when the average quality of teacher applicants is high. Using data from the OECD, I examine the relation between teachers' earnings and teacher quality of the U.S. and Korea. Chapter 2 focuses on teachers and their career dynamics, and the data is at teacher level. Using the Current Population Survey for 2001-2010, I show that public school teachers are paid less compared to other comparable college graduates in non-teaching sectors. By studying the change in earnings after career changes, I find the evidence of positive selection when teachers move into the non-teaching sectors and of negative selection when non-teachers move into the teaching sector, which results in the decrease in the average teacher quality. Chapter 3 looks at both teachers and school districts, and I use district-teacher matched dataset, based on the School and Staffing Survey (SASS) for 2007-2008. I employ a multilevel model and a propensity score matching to identify union effects in states with different legal environments for collective bargaining of teachers. I find that collective bargaining is neither necessary nor sufficient for unions to affect teachers' well-being. I show that meet-and-confer is a popular alternative to collective bargaining and that it is an important mechanism for unions to influence teachers' non-wage benefits. Chapter 4 concerns school districts, and I use SASS district level data. I reevaluate the role of teachers unions on pay structure and districts' financial status. In contrasts to previous findings, I find that the variance of teachers' earnings is higher in more unionized settings. Moreover, I show that the financial status of districts with teachers unions is stronger than that of districts without the unions. I confirm that unionism is associated with less usage of performance pay system. / Economics

This dissertation brings together empirical analyses of the impact of social insurance programs on compensating wage differentials under different institutional frameworks. I study three periods: the late nineteenth century prior to the introduction of Unemployment Insurance, the Great Depression when Unemployment Insurance is introduced, and then the recent period, in which UI has been long established. Initially, late nineteenth century labor markets with no social programs for workers were investigated. Three different data sets were analyzed from two different states, Maine and Kansas, to examine the precautionary saving behavior of workers and the wage premium they received for the expected unemployment prevalent in their industry. Results showed that workers were receiving statistically and economically significant wage premiums in two of the three samples. Also, in two of the three samples, households were able to save against expected unemployment using family resources. In the second chapter, after reviewing the historical backgrounds of social insurance programs, namely Workers' Compensation, Compensation for Occupational Diseases, and Unemployment Insurance (UI), the empirical literature about the impacts of these programs on wages is reviewed. Later in the chapter, hours and earnings data for various manufacturing industries across forty-eight states for the years 1933-1939 are brought together with the state UI, Workers' Compensation, and Compensation for Occupational Diseases provisions to test the impact of these laws on wage rates. The economic history and origins of UI have not been elaborated before and no previous study has analyzed the simultaneous impacts of different social insurance programs. Results showed that higher accident rates, limited working hours and the higher regional cost of living had a positive impact on wages. Workers' Compensation continued to have a negative impact on wages. During its infancy, UI benefits did not have a statistically significant effect on wages. The last chapter analyzes the impact of UI and the unemployment rate for the labor market of the worker on wage rates using micro level modern data. Results from the analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth suggest that expected UI benefits have a negative and statistically significant impact on wages, holding worker and labor market characteristics constant. However, the unemployment rate of the labor market did not have a statistically significant impact on wages.

This dissertation contributes to three major issues in Labor Economics and Econometrics literature. The first contribution is providing new insights into panel-data techniques, the second is new findings on the relationship of women's and men's productivity and pay, and the third is a picture of the remuneration process for professors involved in research and teaching at a Research I University which is based on the detailed data set created for this study. Developing econometric panel data methodology, time-static information is added to a standard fixed effects model. In a setting where no suitable time-varying instruments for the time-static information can be found, it is necessary to calculate the estimates for those in a "second stage" fixed effects estimate. It will be shown that these second stage estimates are exactly equal to the pooled OLS estimates for the same model specification, but that the standard errors are different, and the second stage estimates are biased and inconsistent. Later, new tests for various components of the individual effects are conducted as well as tests to choose the best panel estimation method. Empirically, this work contributes to research on gender discrimination in pay, and its results affect more than the academic environment. So far, most studies were not able to include direct measures of productivity, and have assumed that the estimated gender gap represents an upper bound or overestimation of the real discrimination in pay. The results of this study show that this assumption is not necessarily correct. Looking specifically at the pay structure for university professors involved in teaching and research in a Research I University, several trends have been established. First, structural pay differences between colleges became very apparent, making a strong point against the usage of university-wide regression analysis. For the colleges of Business and Education, seniority lost much of its explanatory power in predicting salaries when publications were added to the analysis. Teaching awards were not rewarded at all in either college, but professors who did not teach were financially penalized.

Since the copper boom of the late nineteenth century, mining companies have been riding "the copper roller coaster." The well being of miners and their families appears to be tied to international market forces beyond their control. This dissertation uses a case study of miners in Cananea, Sonora, to analyze the relationships between changes in Mexican mineral policy from 1960 to 1998 and Mexico's economic connections with the United States. It employs Immanuel Wallerstein's framework of a world-system linked through hegemonic relationships between a core country, a semiperiphery and periphery (C-SP-P), and looks at the economic and political circumstances under which shifts in this system occur. Within this world-system Kondratieff waves are used to depict periods of stagnation and growth. Policy changes are reflected in economic cycles, and policy also shapes copper extraction, production and marketing. Until the 1970s American multinational corporations under privatization extracted surplus copper from Sonora as a peripheral region. However, once Mexico embarked on a policy of nationalization of the mineral industry (1971-1989), the country intentionally delinked from the U.S. In 1990 the Cananea mine was again privatized as part of Mexico's economic restructuring, with production directed toward international markets. Policy changes are evaluated in terms of Mexican development and the well being of the miners. This analysis is based upon the concept of articulation between capitalist modes of production within the world-system. The concept "articulation" includes confrontations and alliances between classes within each region or country as well as the relations between the C-SP-P. In particular, the miners use political linkages with the national union to defend their interests. However, with economic restructuring and privatization in the 1980s and 1990s, the government-labor alliance is supplanted by government-business alliance, and labor conflict and workforce transformation result. Policy turnovers influence everyday practices in gender relations as families face economic crises. Miners' wives form a political front to support their husbands' struggles with the company and to maintain access to potable water. Furthermore, attitudes toward environmental resource use are caught between maintaining the miners' job source and securing a safe and reliable source of water for the region.

<p>This dissertation consists of three essays on the topic of education policy. In the first essay, I evaluate the impacts of a teacher quality equity law that was enacted in California in the fall of 2006 prohibiting superintendents from transferring a teacher into a school in the bottom three performance deciles of the state's academic performance index if the principal refuses the transfer. The primary mechanism through which the policy should affect student outcomes is through the mix of the quality of teachers in the school. Using publicly available statewide administrative education data, and two quasi-experimental methodologies, I assess whether the policy had an effect on the district-wide distribution of teachers with varying levels of experience, education and licensure and on student academic performance. I extend the analysis by examining whether the policy has differential effects on subgroups of schools classified as having high-poverty or high-minority student populations. I find that, as a result of the teacher quality equity law, low-performing schools experienced a relative increase in fully-credentialed teachers and more highly educated teachers, but that did not necessarily translate to an increase in academic performance. I also find evidence that the dimension along which the policy was most effective was in improving teacher pre-service qualifications in schools with high minority student populations.</p><p>In the second essay, I estimate racial, ethnic, gender and socioeconomic differences in teacher reports of student absenteeism and tardiness while controlling for administrative records of actual absences. Subjective perceptions that teachers form about students' classroom behaviors matter for student academic outcomes. Given this potential impact, it is important to identify any biases in these perceptions that would disadvantage subgroups of students. I use longitudinal data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 in conjunction with longitudinal, student-level data from the North Carolina Education Data Research Center to employ a variation of a two sample instrumental variables approach in which I instrument for actual eighth grade absences with simulated measures of eight grade absences. I find consistent evidence that teacher reports of the attendance of poor students are negatively biased and that math teacher reports of male attendance are positively biased. There is mixed evidence with regard to student race and ethnicity.</p><p>The third essay is a co-authored work in which we employ a quasi-experimental estimation strategy to examine the effects of state-level job losses on fourth- and eighth-grade test scores, using federal Mass Layoff Statistics and 1996-2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Results indicate that job losses decrease scores. Effects are larger for eighth than fourth graders and for math than reading assessments, and are robust to specification checks. Job losses to 1 percent of a state's working-age population lead to a .076 standard deviation decrease in the state's eighth-grade math scores. This result is an order of magnitude larger than those found in previous studies that have compared students whose parents lose employment to otherwise similar students, suggesting that downturns affect all students, not just students who experience parental job loss. Our findings have important implications for accountability schemes: we calculate that a state experiencing one-year job losses to 2 percent of its workers (a magnitude observed in seven states) likely sees a 16 percent increase in the share of its schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation consists of three separate essays that use dynamic models to better understand the human capital accumulation process. First, I analyze the role of migration in human capital accumulation and how migration varies over the business cycle. An interesting trend in the data is that, over the period of the Great Recession, overall migration rates in the US remained close to their respective long-term trends. However, migration evolved differently by employment status: unemployed workers were more likely to migrate during the recession and employed workers less likely. To isolate mechanisms explaining this divergence, I estimate a dynamic, non-stationary search model of migration using a national longitudinal survey from 2004-2013. I focus on the role of employment frictions on migration decisions in addition to other explanations in the literature. My results show that a divergence in job offer and job destruction rates caused differing migration incentives by employment status. I also find that migration rates were muted because of the national scope of the Great Recession. Model simulations show that spatial unemployment insurance in the form of a moving subsidy can help workers move to more favorable markets.</p><p>In the second essay, my coauthors and I explore the role of information frictions in the acquisition of human capital. Specifically, we investigate the determinants of college attrition in a setting where individuals have imperfect information about their schooling ability and labor market productivity. We estimate a dynamic structural model of schooling and work decisions, where high school graduates choose a bundle of education and work combinations. We take into account the heterogeneity in schooling investments by distinguishing between two- and four-year colleges and graduate school, as well as science and non-science majors for four-year colleges. Individuals may also choose whether to work full-time, part-time, or not at all. A key feature of our approach is to account for correlated learning through college grades and wages, thus implying that individuals may leave or re-enter college as a result of the arrival of new information on their ability and/or productivity. We use our results to quantify the importance of informational frictions in explaining the observed school-to-work transitions and to examine sorting patterns.</p><p>In the third essay, my coauthors and I investigate the evolution over the last two decades in the wage returns to schooling and early work experience. </p><p>Using data from the 1979 and 1997 panels of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we isolate changes in skill prices from changes in composition by estimating a dynamic model of schooling and work decisions. Importantly, this allows us to account for the endogenous nature of the changes in educational and accumulated work experience over this time period. We find an increase over this period in the returns to working in high school, but a decrease in the returns to working while in college. We also find an increase in the incidence of working in college, but that any detrimental impact of in-college work experience is offset by changes in other observable characteristics. Overall, our decomposition of the evolution in skill premia suggests that both price and composition effects play an important role. The role of unobserved ability is also important.</p> / Dissertation

<p>Gregory (2003) demonstrated that for the past thirty-five years small steps of progress have been made towards women's equality. However, he stated that sex discrimination is still blatant, subtle and covert and it continues to plague working women. He continued to argue that nearly all the population of women in the U.S. encounter obstacles in job advancement, whether the obstacles are glass or cement ceilings or ordinary brick walls. (p.5). The researcher will attempt to elaborate on disparate treatment women have endured for generations. With the current pay scale between women and men, women receive 23 cents less than their male colleagues out of every dollar earned. Because this system exist, it impedes a woman's holistic growth and functionality. For example, there are some women who are trapped in abusive relationships but cannot leave because they lack adequate financial resources. </p><p> Gregory (2003) pointed out that employer retaliation comes in various forms, although employers tend to favor discharge over other options. (p.162). He also stated that other forms of retaliation employers use to punish their employees for having engaged in protected activities include denials of promotion and demotions (p.163). The fear of retaliation prevents a woman from reporting the perpetrator. In addition, some of the political realm is working night and day against the improvement and progress of the women's population. With the above argument made about the disparate treatments towards women, the researcher will apply the qualitative method in this thesis to breakdown problems women face. Plus, the researcher makes suggestions how the nation can be involved in resolving and eliminating these issues, individually and collectively, to moving women's rights and progress forward and permanently. </p>

<p>This dissertation consists of two related essays on the economics of immigration. The first chapter presents new evidence on whether the earnings of foreign-born workers grow faster than that of similarly educated natives. We compare cross-sectional and panel analyses of assimilation in the U.S. context. The panel data allow us to control for fixed unobserved heterogeneity in earnings. As others have found for earlier entry cohorts, we find that immigrants with less than a college education start at an earnings disadvantage but converge toward native earnings with time in the U.S. in the cross-section. Lower earning immigrants selectively leave on-the-books jobs. We also find substantial selection among low earnings natives who also tend to work less and leave the labor force earlier. Both groups display selection and the net result is that controlling for fixed unobserved heterogeneity has little effect on the relative earnings growth of low-skilled immigrants.</p><p>We find very different results for high-skilled workers. In the cross-sectional analysis, immigrants whose highest level of education is a bachelor's degree exhibit a decline in relative earnings with time in the U.S. However, for these immigrants, the inclusion of an individual fixed effect reveals faster earnings growth relative to natives. Among both immigrants and natives, lower earners selectively leave the covered sector. However, because low earning immigrants who remain in the sample become more likely to work with time in the U.S., the net result is that the average earnings of immigrants diminish. These results indicate that controlling for individual heterogeneity is important in estimating the economic assimilation of immigrants.</p><p>The second chapter examines the role of the workplace in earnings assimilation. Using an earnings panel much like in the first chapter, we consider whether job characteristics such as firm size, industry, and firm specific tenure can account for earnings differences between native and foreign-born workers. We focus on workers with less than a college education and find that the job characteristics considered account for almost all of the faster earnings growth of high school dropouts and half of the faster earnings growth of high school graduate immigrants. Rising relative job tenure of immigrants is the most important factor.</p> / Dissertation

<p> There is a limited knowledge on the meanings, experiences, and perceptions of organizational members regarding performance appraisal and how the various experiences and perceptions are perceived to bear on organizational outcomes. With this qualitative study, I explored the experiences and perceptions of organizational personnel regarding performance appraisal systems and how these are perceived to bear on work outcomes. Using case study as research design, a detailed analysis of semi-structured interview involving organizational personnel (leaders, managers, and frontline employees) who lived in northeastern New York, and working in various disciplines and professions was conducted and recorded. NVivo software was used in generating the major thematic links and invariant constituents of the study. Results of the study revealed five significant themes: (a) essential descriptions of performance appraisal, (b) perceived rewards of performance appraisal, (c) differences and similarities of performance appraisal systems across different organizations, (d) perceived association of performance appraisal systems and work outcomes, and (e) recommended changes in performance appraisal systems. Employees who have positive experiences with the system associate performance appraisal with something equally beneficial to employees&rsquo; improvement and the operational performance of the organization. These employees reported experiences of motivation, loyalty, commitment, and productivity as they received their feedback. The study identified human resource development activities that could further achieve the real and genuine objectives of performance appraisal system.</p>