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This dissertation consists of three empirical essays on labor, health, and real estate economics. The first essay theoretically and empirically analyzed the effects of the costs of firing an employee and hiring a replacement in a labor market with imperfect information. The theory suggested that increased expected firing or replacement costs contributed to a ``lemons effect" for the fired worker through the negative signal received in the labor market regarding the worker's ability. To test this theory, data from the Displaced Worker's Supplement to the Current Population Survey from 2004 to 2014 was used. The results were mixed, but suggested that workers in the United States who were displaced from their job experienced decreased probabilities of finding reemployment as firing costs increased. The essay also examined whether this ``lemons effect" contributed to larger wage decreases, but the estimates did not support this conclusion. The second essay estimated the impacts of the 2001 elimination of the Medicare 24-month waiting period for non-elderly Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) patients. Using data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey, this essay estimated the effects of the elimination on health insurance coverage and utilization of health care services. By applying a difference-in-difference OLS estimation technique, it was estimated that, as a result of the waiting period elimination, non-elderly ALS patients were more likely to be insured, but there was a significant crowd-out of private insurance. These non-elderly patients who were admitted to the hospital with serious symptoms were also more likely to be transferred to long- or short-term care facilities while non-serious patients were more likely to receive a high (four or more) number of medical services while hospitalized. In the third essay, the effects of a new suburban casino on local housing prices were evaluated. Similar to the second essay, a difference-in-difference approach was applied, but it was combined with a spatial hedonic pricing model. Using data from a GIS product from the Maryland Department of Planning and local-area data from the American Community Survey, the effects that the opening of Maryland Live! Casino had on home sales prices of properties located in primary (one-mile radius) and secondary (one to three miles) impact areas were estimated. The results of the estimations indicated that the opening of the casino had a positive impact on housing prices in the primary impact area and this impact likely began during the construction period. No impacts, however, were evident in the secondary impact area. / Economics

This project uses the archive at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an international Quaker peace and social justice organization headquartered in Philadelphia, PA, in order to shed light on the globalization resistance labor of the Nationwide Women's Program (NWP) and its transnational networks. The NWP was an internal program at the AFSC, initiated by women staff and committee members who challenged the practices of gender discrimination within the organization and initiated external AFSC programs that served women's unique needs in peace and social justice initiatives. By focusing primarily on the serial inserts of the group's newsletter from 1978 to 1988, entitled Women and Global Corporations: Work, Roles, Resistance, this project draws attention to the dense networks of transnational communication and resistance against global economic restructuring during this time. It uses and challenges social movement scholarship by suggesting that the analytical frameworks of transnational advocacy networks and social movement mobilization more accurately capture the antiglobalization activity that took place several decades prior to when it is conventionally identified in 1999. The project highlights the NWP's social movement brokerage and the embodied social movement activities of the activists, scholars, and laborers in its orbit. These social movement activities included boycotts, letter-writing campaigns, labor organizing, and a plethora of other on-the-ground activities and discursive practices against global corporations and the institutions that supported them. An investigation into the sources of the NWP's knowledge production in brokering this movement reveals both Quaker and feminist influences that call into question the conventionally accepted binary between religion and secularity in the Western imaginary. The presence of Quaker and feminist influences on the NWP's understandings of globalization provides the opportunity for thinking through at least two possibilities: how a tacit Protestant secularism within the organization contributed to its own erasure, and how contemporary globalization narratives are infused with a Protestant secularism that insidiously frames globalization resistance as retrograde and fuels a universalizing (and therefore exclusionary) notion of progress and unsustainable growth. / Religion

Le gouvernement du Québec a adopté en novembre 1999 le projet de loi 47, relatif à la Loi concernant les conditions de travail dans certains secteurs de l’industrie du vêtement et modifiant la Loi sur les normes du travail (1999, c. 57). Son entrée en vigueur eut pour effet d’abroger au 30 juin 2000 les quatre (4) décrets sectoriels de convention collective qui régissaient les conditions d’emploi d’approximativement 23 000 travailleurs affectés à la production de vêtements (gant de cuir, chemise pour hommes et garçons, confection pour hommes et pour dames). Cette recherche démontre que bien qu’inscrit dans une logique étatique de dérégulation du travail visant à favoriser la compétitivité, le maintien de normes de substitution aux décrets dans le cas du vêtement québécois ne dérive pas pour autant d’une déréglementation strictement néolibérale. Au plan plus théorique, l’émergence et le sort du régime de conditions d’emploi étudié dévoilent la nature politique du processus d’élaboration des règles salariales, qu’il soit d’origine législative ou contractuelle. Cette dynamique repose sur le caractère mouvant des relations de pouvoir et d’influence des agents engagés dans la régulation institutionnelle, où l’État est appelé à jouer un rôle de catalyseur ─ et non de tiers arbitre indépendant ─ à l’endroit des tensions qui procèdent du rapport salarial et du mode de production au sein duquel il s’inscrit. / In November 1999, the Government of Quebec has adopted the bill 47 related to the Act respecting conditions of employment in certain sectors of the clothing industry which amended the Act respecting labour standards (1999, c. 57). On June 30 2000, after the bill came into force, the four (4) sectoral decrees regulating the terms of employment of approximately 23,000 workers in apparel production were repealed (leather glove, men’s and boy’s shirt, men’s wear and ladies’s garment). This research demonstrates that even if in line with the deregulation logical of the government aiming to foster competitiveness, the continuation of replacement standards for the decrees in the Quebec’s clothing industry does not stem for all that from a fully neo-liberal deregulation. In a more academic view, the surveyed labour standards plan’s emergence and fate reveal the political nature of the wage rule determination process, legislative or contractual. This dynamics is based on the changeable characteristic of the power relationship and influence of the institutionnal actors involved in the legislative regulation where the State is destined to play an enabler role – and not as an independent referee – in regard of the pressures resulting of the wage labour relationship and the production mode in which this one is embedded.

Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Keith Harris / Inefficiencies in a warehouse that operates multiple zones can create bottlenecks in the order fulfillment process. This study’s focuses on the exploration of potential bottlenecks in an agricultural aftermarket company’s order fulfillment process and its multi-zone warehouse. Order fulfillment includes stages of order processing, SKU picking and staging from the conveyor zone and the “H” zone, and the final packaging and shipping of the order within the Truck Freight Department. A review of the company’s EOP program, and the effects of the program, provides additional insight into our understanding of bottlenecks within a dynamic the system. In doing so, the research will extend the existing knowledge on warehouse management with multiple zones. The conclusion of this paper offers solutions that will alleviate the bottlenecks and improve the overall efficiency of the order fulfillment process within a multi-zone warehouse.

Applied economists and strategy scholars have examined a variety of firm-level factors that may explain the level and direction of firms' innovative effort and performance, including firms' profit incentives. Innovation at the firm level, however, should also depend heavily on the nature of the pecuniary and non-pecuniary incentives driving the efforts of those individuals that are responsible for innovative activities within firms. Drawing on research in economics and social psychology, I examine three questions: 1. What are the motives of individuals engaged in firm innovation? 2. How do individuals' motives and incentives affect their innovative effort and performance? 3. How do individuals' motives and incentives differ between entrepreneurial and established firms, and are any such differences associated with differences in innovative effort and performance? My empirical analysis builds on the National Science Foundation's SESTAT data, which contain survey responses from over 10,000 scientists and engineers employed in U.S. firms. Among others, the data contain measures of individuals' extrinsic, intrinsic, and social motives (e.g., preferences for work benefits such as salary, intellectual challenge, and contribution to society), effort, and innovative performance. In chapter Two ("What makes them tick - Employee motives and firm innovation"), I develop a formal model of the relationships between individuals' motives and incentives, effort, and innovative performance. Econometric analyses using the SESTAT data suggest that individuals' motives have significant effects upon innovative effort, as well as on innovative performance, controlling for effort. Overall, intrinsic motives (in particular, intellectual challenge) appear to be more beneficial for innovation than extrinsic motives. In chapter Three ("Fire in the belly? Individuals' motives and innovative performance in startups and established firms"), I examine differences in motives, effort, and performance between startups and established firms. I find that individuals' extrinsic motives differ significantly between startups and established firms, while their intrinsic motives are surprisingly similar. Startup employees expend more effort and have higher patent application counts than individuals in established firms. Individuals' motives explain only a limited amount of these effort and performance differences across firm types, however, because the intrinsic motives that are most strongly associated with effort and performance differ little between startups and established firms. / Dissertation

<p>I examine how employing workers with specific human capital affects capital structure decisions by employers. Based on plant-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I use the opening of new plants as an exogenous reduction in human capital specificity-- the inability to transfer specific skill sets across employers--for incumbent workers in a local labor market. My results indicate that the opening of a new manufacturing plant in a given county leads to a 2.6-3.9% increase in the leverage of existing manufacturing firms in the county, relative to the leverage of manufacturing firms in an otherwise comparable county. Moreover, plant openings have a larger impact on firms that are more likely to share labor with the new plant, that have high labor intensity, and that have high marginal tax benefits of debt. Alternative explanations concerning productivity spillovers, product market competition, and county-wide shocks do not appear to account for the results. I find consistent evidence in a separate sample that contains a broad panel of firms. Overall, these results suggest that human capital specificity raises the cost of debt and thus decreases optimal leverage.</p> / Dissertation

RÉSUMÉ Le gouvernement du Québec a adopté en novembre 1999 le projet de loi 47, relatif à la Loi concernant les conditions de travail dans certains secteurs de l’industrie du vêtement et modifiant la Loi sur les normes du travail (1999, c. 57). Son entrée en vigueur eut pour effet d’abroger au 30 juin 2000 les quatre (4) décrets sectoriels de convention collective qui régissaient les conditions d’emploi d’approximativement 23 000 travailleurs affectés à la production de vêtements (gant de cuir, chemise pour hommes et garçons, confection pour hommes et pour dames). Cette recherche démontre que bien qu’inscrit dans une logique étatique de dérégulation du travail visant à favoriser la compétitivité, le maintien de normes de substitution aux décrets dans le cas du vêtement québécois ne dérive pas pour autant d’une déréglementation strictement néolibérale. Au plan plus théorique, l’émergence et le sort du régime de conditions d’emploi étudié dévoilent la nature politique du processus d’élaboration des règles salariales, qu’il soit d’origine législative ou contractuelle. Cette dynamique repose sur le caractère mouvant des relations de pouvoir et d’influence des agents engagés dans la régulation institutionnelle, où l’État est appelé à jouer un rôle de catalyseur ─ et non de tiers arbitre indépendant ─ à l’endroit des tensions qui procèdent du rapport salarial et du mode de production au sein duquel il s’inscrit. / ABSTRACT In November 1999, the Government of Quebec has adopted the bill 47 related to the Act respecting conditions of employment in certain sectors of the clothing industry which amended the Act respecting labour standards (1999, c. 57). On June 30 2000, after the bill came into force, the four (4) sectoral decrees regulating the terms of employment of approximately 23,000 workers in apparel production were repealed (leather glove, men’s and boy’s shirt, men’s wear and ladies’s garment). This research demonstrates that even if in line with the deregulation logical of the government aiming to foster competitiveness, the continuation of replacement standards for the decrees in the Quebec’s clothing industry does not stem for all that from a fully neo-liberal deregulation. In a more academic view, the surveyed labour standards plan’s emergence and fate reveal the political nature of the wage rule determination process, legislative or contractual. This dynamics is based on the changeable characteristic of the power relationship and influence of the institutionnal actors involved in the legislative regulation where the State is destined to play an enabler role – and not as an independent referee – in regard of the pressures resulting of the wage labour relationship and the production mode in which this one is embedded.

Diss. Univ. Frankfurt am Main, 2006.