This dissertation examines the impacts of family policies on the economic position of women in East and West Germany in 1989-90. Chapter I reviews and critiques neoclassical and Marxian theories of women's subordination, focussing on the neoclassical postulate of a joint household utility function and the absence of a Marxian analysis of reproduction. Chapter II describes and analyzes the specific family policies and policy climates of East and West Germany prior to unification in 1990, providing a brief overview of the history of family policy, women's employment, and fertility from World War I to the present. Chapter III models the costs of childrearing, state subsidies of childrearing, and the shares of the remaining costs distributed to men and women, using 1989-90 data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. Estimated costs include the opportunity costs of women's earnings and men's and women's leisure. Chapter IV uses the same data to compare the effects of family policies on the childbearing choices of women of different marital status, educational backgrounds, incomes, and levels of labor force attachment within each country. Chapter V models the allocation of household work, with a focus on male/female bargaining power in East and West Germany, again using cross-sectional analysis. Chapter VI summarizes the results of the dissertation as a whole.

This dissertation examines how Victorian fiction accommodated and abetted generosity's shift from a public to a private virtue in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Chapter One contextualizes the mid-nineteenth-century ideology of giving within gender and class relationships shaped by debates leading to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Joseph Townsend's Dissertation on the Poor Laws (1786) and the report of two assistant poor law commissioners (1833) frame the public debate concerning government giving and signal a cultural movement that was transforming generosity into a modern, apolitical, private, feminine ideal. I draw on Jacques Derrida and anthropology to define the ideology of the free gift, whose main tenet is an insistence that true gifts exist only outside economies of time and reciprocity. Literary texts, inevitably bound to time and reciprocity, disclose tenuous but persistent maintenance of this ideology. Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848) condemned laissez-faire economic doctrines while validating the social divisions that characterized the New Poor Law era. Chapter Two focuses on Dickens's Little Dorrit (1855–57), in which Amy, a middle-class heroine in prison rags, a model of feminine self-sacrifice who expects no reward, occupies the problematic space of perfect giver, receiver, and gift. Structured as a romance of giving, the novel reveals both the gendered terms of the free gift and the contradictory nature of a middle-class construction of itself as generous benefactor of the poor. Chapters Three and Four consider novels that do not directly focus on issues of poverty but are nonetheless shaped by this ideological shift. In George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72), the narrator mediates through rational dissection and generous hermeneutics a bond between the reader and Dorothea intended to, on the one hand, elide the degree to which private acts of kindness have political import, and, on the other, suggest that such acts can lead to a radical way of knowing. In contrast to Dickens and Eliot, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) explicitly fixates on the problems of reception and reveals the violence not only of uncivilized passion but of civilized giving itself.

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.

Since Badgett's (1995a) landmark study on the wage effects of sexual orientation, interest in and production of scholarly work addressing the economics of sexual orientation has grown tremendously. Curious puzzles have emerged in the literature on the economics of same-sex couple households, three of which are addressed in detail in this dissertation. Most studies of the wages of women in same-sex couples versus different-sex couples find that the former earn more, even controlling for differences in present labor market supply, education, experience, area of residence, and occupation. However, most previous studies of the sexual orientation wage gap omit the role of motherhood in the lesbian-straight women wage gap, and most take the sample of lesbians to be a homogenous group compared to straight women. Chapter 1 uses American Community Survey data from 2010 to study the wage gap between lesbians and straight women, putting motherhood in intra-household differences at the center of the analysis. The analysis shows that in terms of earnings, lesbian couples are quite heterogeneous; one partner has a large wage premium over straight women, and the other faces a large wage penalty. These findings are enhanced when a child is present in the lesbians' home, possibly suggesting a household division of labor in lesbian homes. Chapter 2 considers the possibility that same-sex couples, like many different-sex couples, have one person who specializes in paid work while the other specializes in unpaid work for the household, such as housework and childcare. Chapter 2 presents a study which uses American Time Use Survey Data pooled from 2003-2011 to analyze the time spent in household, care, and paid work for members of different couple types and finds that in same-sex as well as different-sex couple households, some personal characteristics, such as being the lower earner in the household, are correlated with spending more time in household and care work. Chapter 3 offers a study of poverty in same-sex versus different-sex couple households, exploring which characteristics are correlated with poverty for same-sex and different-sex couple households. When controlling for a couple's education level, area of residence, race and ethnicity, age, and household composition, same-sex couples are more likely to be in poverty than their different-sex counterparts.

Deploying a surplus-labor theoretical framework, I incorporate results from interviews with South Asian families in Chicago to investigate how immigrants juggle and assume a variety of revenue positions: in nuclear and extended families, as full-time wage earners, as home-based independent producers, in retail stores, in 'family councils,' etc. Family councils will be defines as an important institution inside immigrant households in which potentially all family members partake, making a series of financial and non-financial decisions that affect all the class and nonclass processes in which household members participate. In addition, the chapter on the household also explores a class analysis of extended families, a particularly important institution for US-bound immigrants since the majority of contemporary entrants arrive on family reunification visas. By examining how immigrants actively seek out multiple revenue positions, not only does this thesis map their survival strategies but also emphasizes changes in the acceptable living standard and more specifically the private value of labor power as reasons why immigrants take on new economic positions. This thesis examines the evolution of the immigrant's private value of labor power, and the many effects generated for immigrant-employing capitalists, non-immigrant-employing capitalists, immigrant households, and non-immigrant consumers of commodities produced by immigrants, and, of course, for immigrants themselves.

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 dissertation develops theoretical and econometric models of investment and labor demand in South Africa in order to shed light on the decline in the rate of fixed investment beginning in the mid 1970s, the nature of business compliance with racebased labor market policies, and the emergence of “jobless growth” in a period of heightened political and social conflict. I develop a model of investment and choice of factor intensity that incorporates roles for both bargained wages and political unrest. Building from this theoretical base, the dissertation investigates the hypothesis that social conflict depresses investment. An index of political unrest in South Africa is created using data on strike activity, prison populations, and detentions under the apartheid security laws. Estimates using a panel data set show significant effects on investment of the after-tax rate of profits, an accelerator term, and the index of political unrest. Increases in political instability explain the largest portion of the decline in the rate of investment in South Africa over this period. The following chapter explores whether political unrest contributes to non-wage “hassle costs” of employing labor that can lead, in a labor surplus/capital-poor economy, to higher levels of capital-intensity. Econometric estimates show significant negative effects of higher average product wages and greater political unrest on the labor-capital ratio. The fifth chapter creates a model of business compliance with apartheid labor market policies—in particular, job reservations and controls over urban influx. Apartheid labor market policies are modeled as a multiple-player prisoner's dilemma in which the incentive to defect on the part of individual firms (by employing more low-wage black workers than apartheid policies allowed) threatens the collective benefits of the racist policies in providing a disciplined labor force at low cost. Renewable contractual relationships and conformist behavior provide the incentives to comply with the apartheid regulations. The model's predictions—that the level of non-compliance climbs as the ability of the state to police the cartel and maintain incentives falls—are shown to be reflected in the historical record.

The proliferation of the American music business has created a power elite which shapes and controls the popular music industry. For American blues and jazz musicians in the 20th century, becoming an expatriate served as an alternative to that subjugation. That alternative existed in the 1990s in some degree, though Europe too has fallen under the influence of American marketing of artists popular in the United States. This dissertation discusses the community of American expatriate jazz musicians currently living in Paris. These musicians derive the bulk of their income working in Parisian nightclubs and restaurants. Paris is often the focal point of a myth that Europe celebrates its blues and jazz musicians. The myth's logical conclusion is that expatriate American musicians find easy success in Europe. The community of working American musicians in Paris, however, must struggle to live, thereby replicating the existence of many of their counterparts in America. For a musician to now increase their European stature, and to increase their personal stature and fulfillment as a musician, building a career in the States prior to relocating to Europe is a more practical career plan. In the present, nightclub capitalism is international in scope and contributes to the shaping of the careers and, more fully, the lives of American expatriate jazz musicians.

This study of the relation between education and earnings in South Africa in 1993 concludes that the private labor-market rate of return to investment in primary and secondary education for Africans is about 15 to 21%. This figure is about half the average for sub-Saharan Africa and does not reflect a large absolute effect of schooling on earnings so much as a very low labor-market opportunity cost, which cost is depressed by widespread youth unemployment. The decision to drop out after only a few years of school may be economically justifiable for students from poor families, who, out of necessity, are constrained by short time horizons. Policies designed to lower the direct costs of education may have little effect on the poorest households. As a result, it may prove quite difficult to achieve a more equal distribution of educational capital. Furthermore, log expected earnings are convex in years of schooling, with the implication that even if schooling does become more equally distributed, increases in mean educational attainment for Africans are likely to be associated with greater economic inequality among Africans (but less inequality between the races).

This dissertation conducts a class analysis of prostitution using the class analytical framework developed over recent years by AESA (the Association of Economic and Social Analysis). It remedies the neglect of class analyses of sex work in the literature on this industry, and demonstrates the very different insights such an analysis makes possible. It moves beyond the debates on prostitution that interrogate the buying and selling (or commodification) of sex on the market, to analyze the very high rates of profit (or surplus extraction) circulating within some sectors of this industry. It argues that there exist different class structures of prostitution (slave, feudal, independent, capitalist, and communal), which differently impact the rates of surplus extraction, the services produced by sex workers, and their working conditions in general. More specifically, the dissertation argues that the class relations of prostitution affect the extent to which sex workers are able to choose their clients, the number of clients they see, the services they provide, and thus their ability to protect themselves from unsafe, dangerous, or degrading work. The dissertation also demonstrates the unique influence of culture, politics, and the law in shaping the economics of prostitution, and thereby offers a new kind of economic analysis of the contemporary sex industry. The various moral judgments, laws, social policies, court decisions, enforcement standards, informal policing practices, and industry self-regulation shape and constrain in particular ways the earnings obtained by sex workers, the prices of prostitution services, and generally the cost and revenue flows within the sex industry. The dissertation draws on a comparison of the different regulatory climate in the U.S. and in the Netherlands to show how different moral and regulatory regimes prohibiting or permitting prostitution activities can contribute to the emergence of new class structures of prostitution and the suppression of others. The dissertation thereby contributes to the current rethinking and debates over prostitution as a contemporary industry with powerful social effects.