Thesis (Ph.D.)--Iowa State University, 2005. / (UnM)AAI3200409. Major Professor: Brent Kreider. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-01, Section: A, page: 0272.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Economics, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 13, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4784. Adviser: Gerhard Glomm.

This dissertation examines the employment impacts of investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency in the U.S. A broad expansion of the use of renewable energy in place of carbon-based energy, in addition to investments in energy efficiency, comprise a prominent strategy to slow or reverse the effects of anthropogenic climate change. This study first explores the literature on the employment impacts of these investments. This literature to date consists mainly of input-output (I-O) studies or case studies of renewable energy and energy efficiency (REEE). Researchers are constrained, however, by their ability to use the I-O model to study REEE, since currently industrial codes do not recognize this industry as such. I develop and present two methods to use the I-O framework to overcome this constraint: the synthetic and integrated approaches. In the former, I proxy the REEE industry by creating a vector of final demand based on the industrial spending patterns of REEE firms as found in the secondary literature. In the integrated approach, I collect primary data through a nationwide survey of REEE firms and integrate these data into the existing I-O tables to explicitly identify the REEE industry and estimate the employment impacts resulting from both upstream and downstream linkages with other industries. The size of the REEE employment multiplier is sensitive to the choice of method, and is higher using the synthetic approach than using the integrated approach. I find that using both methods, the employment level per $1 million demand is approximately three times greater for the REEE industry than for fossil fuel (FF) industries. This implies that a shift to clean energy will result in positive net employment impacts. The positive effects stem mainly from the higher labor intensity of REEE in relation to FF, as well as from higher domestic content and lower average wages. The findings suggest that as we transition away from a carbon-based energy system to more sustainable and low-carbon energy sources, approximately three jobs will be created in clean energy sectors for each job lost in the fossil fuel sector.

Although many workers have a private household as their workplace, many household employers are unaware of or fail to meet their state and federal payroll tax obligations, thus undermining the workers’ retirement income security. This dissertation uses sixty interviews with household employers and employees in the Washington, DC, area to investigate the causes and conditions of nanny tax evasion. Ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews indicate that lack of awareness, tax complexity, social norms of noncompliance, and poor personal ethics diminish payroll tax payment; concern over one’s job, personal ethics and altruistic concern for the employee motivate compliance. An analysis of limited IRS data on audits as well as data on Schedule H household employment payroll tax returns reveal that although some unpaid tax was discovered, almost as much tax paid in error was refunded, confirming the importance of complexity as a determinant of compliance. Analysis of results using Kohlberg’s stages of moral development and force field analysis of motives provides insight into employers’ decisions to pay or evade their nanny taxes. Policy recommendations emphasize increasing public awareness, tax simplification, and enforcement.

This study examines how South African labour markets changed during the first decade in the post-Apartheid era. The results show the emergence of a new form of racial inequality, as witnessed by sharply divergent patterns in the returns to education between Whites and Blacks. Moreover, while this has occurred, the incomes of Blacks are shown to have been far more stagnant over the first five years after democracy than typically thought to be the case, with chance events playing a major role in generating changes that are observed. Finally, chance appears to also be strongly related to changes in employment status, though in this case, its effect is mediated through access to parental resources and risk-sharing networks. These findings suggest that without active policy on a variety of fronts, dealing with persistent labour market discrimination, the poor quality of black schooling, and unemployment and social security provision, little change can be expected in the near future for the vast majority of South Africans. Indeed, the results suggest that emerging trends in South African labour markets could possibly even reverse gains made over the past decade in some areas of social service provision.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1987. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 288-316).

Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2006 / "Publication number AAT 3251778."

No description available.

Diss. Univ. Frankfurt am Main, 2006.

Informal sectors in developing countries provide a substantial pool of jobs for some of the world's poorest people. Self-employment comprises a large portion of the job opportunities available to individuals working in these sectors. This thesis is concerned with the factors that drive people to become self-employed and determine their welfare as an entrepreneur, with a special emphasis on differences between women and men. In Chapter 1, we explain the Ghanaian context to which this thesis relates and outline the contribution of each main chapter and the common themes. In Chapters 2 and 3, we examine the trade-off between domestic work, such as caring for children and household chores, and market work. In Chapter 2, we consider the extent to which individuals are able to substitute between these two tasks to adjust to short-run variation in domestic productivity brought about by outages in electricity. We find that self-employed workers adjust non-monotonically to changes in domestic productivity, initially increasing their levels of domestic work to preserve consumption levels, but then substituting towards market work when power outages become more severe. We show that this relationship is heterogeneous by sex, and build a model of time allocation to demonstrate the theoretical mechanisms behind these results. In Chapter 3 we examine whether the factors that drive occupational selection differ by sex. It is often argued that women choose jobs in self-employment because this allows them to balance income-generation with childcare and other domestic work. We test the plausibility of this claim and its implications for labour market outcomes. First, we use a simple model of occupational choice to clarify our ideas about which notions of 'job flexibility' are important for the Ghanaian context. Second, we examine whether differential selection forces between women and men may explain the raw sex earnings gaps that appear to persist in various sectors, using a multinomial logit model to adjust for non-random occupational selection. We find that controlling for selection substantially widens the earnings gap amongst the self-employed, but shrinks it for the wage-employed. Third, we interrogate our selection equations and show that domestic obligations increase women's likelihood of entering low-input self-employment jobs more than men. We assess the importance of endogeneity using a maximum simulated likelihood estimator to couch the idea that selection on observables can be used as a guide for selection on unobservables, focussing on the discrete choice made over occupation. In Chapter 4, we turn to theory to try and resolve some of the empirical puzzles that remain from Chapter 3. In particular, we attempt to reconcile the fact that female participation in self-employment is so high even when the average differences in potential earnings are large. To do this, we construct a search model, which allows for individual heterogeneity and participation in both self- and wage-employment, as well as discrimination against female workers in the wage sector. We numerically solve and simulate this model, using calibrations from the existing literature, to explain a set of stylised facts generated from a longitudinal dataset of workers in urban Ghana. We show that wage sector discrimination leads to average earnings gaps in \emph{all} sectors of the economy, even if the underlying ability distribution is the same for both sexes. We also conduct a series of experiments to examine how women and men may be affected differently by government policy. Finally, in Chapter 5 we connect our main findings to policy and make some suggestions for future work.