This paper examines the effect of psychological traits on earnings and furthermore whether it helps explain the gender wage gap. Public-use data collected from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health is used to evaluate the impact on earnings on seven psychological factors: masculine traits, self esteem, analytical problem solving approach, willingness to work hard, impulsiveness, problem avoidance, and self-assessed intelligence. Findings show that gender differences in psychological traits are significant and returns to observable characteristics differ somewhat by gender as well. Among the young sample of U.S. employees evaluated in this study, I find that up to 21 percent of the gender wage gap can be explained, with psychological factors specifically explaining up to 1.5 percent of this gap.

In developing countries, remittances play a key role as a source of external finance. Remittances are a form of aid that migrant workers send back to their families, located in their home countries, in order to support the needs of the household. In about 25% of developing countries, remittances are larger than public and private capital flows combined (International Monetary Fund, 2009). In 2008, the Philippines economy was the 47th largest economy in the world with a GDP of $322 billion dollars (Asian Development Bank, Fact Sheet). Remittances accounted for over 10% of the Philippine economy, making the Philippines one of the world’s highest remittance receiving countries. Using a probit model and an OLS regression model focusing on the Philippines in 2003, this paper will focus on exploring what variables influence the decision to send a household member away for work, what factors contribute to whether or not a household receives a remittance and if they do, how these same characteristics affect the value of the remittance.

Minorities hold a significantly smaller percentage of executive positions in companies within the S&P500. However, whether these minorities are under compensated relative to their non-minority counterparts has not been previously investigated. Using Compustat data, this paper documents the differences in compensation between minorities and non-minorities as a whole, minority and non-minority CEOs, and the differences in compensation for minorities and non-minorities within industries. I show that there is no minority/white wage gap overall, and in some cases, minorities earn a premium compared to non-minorities.

This paper shows that criminality causes a significant decrease in the earning potential of individuals. In addition, there is evidence to support that criminality has the same negative effect on earnings regardless of type of sentencing, whether probation or incarceration. Previous studies indicate that ex-convicts do not benefit from in-prison based programs. The purpose of this paper is to identify the short-term earning differentials between offenders and their law-abiding counter parts and offer insight as to how this can affect recidivism. Research shows that recidivists suffer the largest wage differentials, which significantly lowers their employment utility. This reduction of labor market outcomes may conversely promote the utility an individual receives from a life of crime.

This study aims to measure the wage gap between the white and Mexican population residing in the United States. It also looks at male and female first- and second-and-higher generations in both white and Mexican populations. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) is used for the years 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. This study finds that first-generation white males are negatively affected by the wage gap, while second-and-higher-generation Mexican females have continuously benefited from the wage gap over the past thirty years.

<p>Eating disorders are now considered an epidemic among girls and women throughout the United States. This thesis suggests a study in which the acts and processes of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are positioned as a form of cultural labor undertaken by some Western women in order to embody the myth of the ideal female body. The researcher uses her own lived experience of anorexia and bulimia and her pursuit of embodying femininity in order to raise and guide the major questions concerning femininity and eating disorders in Western culture. </p><p> Keywords: eating disorders, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, pro-ana, pro-mia, femininity, western culture, autoethnography </p>

<p> This study is designed to answer one main research question: How could tertiary education quality be redefined and measured through the education production function model in developing countries. The study will use Indonesia as the target country to carry out research activities. Quality of tertiary education has been one of the most frequently discussed topics in relevant fields in academia and human development. As enrollment continuously increases and education systems expand in many developing countries, quality becomes their biggest concern. The purpose of this dissertation is to provide stakeholders a different and more practical approach to reevaluate tertiary education quality through quantifiable variables and to measure quality through educational input, equity and equality, labor market relevance, and system assurance factors. </p><p> Human capital theory serves as the guiding theoretical framework for this dissertation. The education production function model is the foundation for quality redefinition. Within the four quantifiable variables, benefit incidence analysis is used to measure equity and equality, economic rate of return is used to measure labor market relevance of the tertiary education system, and returns to investment is used to evaluate how education outputs yield from inputs. The study is designed to have an umbrella structure, with tertiary education quality being at the top of the skeleton and educational input, equity and equality, labor market relevance, and system assurance being the four supporting pillars.</p><p> With the redefinition of tertiary education quality, four main research questions will be answered respectively. Educational input in Indonesia has been improving in the past decade; however, it is still behind compared to peer ASEAN countries and countries with similar economic profiles. Indonesia's tertiary education access inequality is mainly caused by socioeconomic differences. The labor market absorbs a majority of tertiary graduates and yields much higher returns at the tertiary level, and it has been responding very positively toward the continuously expanding graduating class. The quality assurance system suffers from shortstaffing, low financial support, low capacity, and weak government support. At its current accrediting pace, Indonesia's tertiary education institutions will not be able to improve as fast as they are willing to.</p>

My dissertation focuses on developing and applying program evaluation techniques to better understanding how public policies affect low-income households and social mobility. In general, my research attempts to address three questions regarding the effect of public policies: (1) What is the long-term effect of the policy? (2) Does the policy foster social mobility? (3) Is there an unintended consequence of the policy? In my view, equality of opportunity is one of the pillars of a free society. I favor the idea that poor children have equal opportunities for success. Since children from low-income families grow up in a relatively disadvantaged environment, public policies that redistribute resources to poor children can foster social mobility. However, as well-documented in the literature, redistribution policies lead to a change in incentives. In some cases, these unintended consequences offset the ``benevolence" of the policy. As a labor economist interested in policy analysis, I focus on evaluating a policy from these three perspectives. In the three essays in my dissertation, I answer the policy-relevant questions using different econometric approaches. When an exogenous policy change is available, a simple econometric model with few assumptions can provide credible answers. If we do not have a natural experiment in the context of the question, I model the selection process so that we can still learn from the data. In the first essay, I investigate whether exam preparatory programs in Taiwan are effective. I set up a Bayesian selection model that formalizes the selection process and explicitly takes into account parameter heterogeneity. In the second essay, I study the effect of the expansions of Medicaid in 1990 on childhood obesity. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act 1990 expanded eligibility to children who were born after September 30, 1983 from families below the poverty line. I employ the birth date discontinuity to study the policy effect. In the third essay, I develop a new test based on the empirical distribution functions of the compliers in the Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) model. This method tests the validity of the LATE model, which is a common empirical strategy when endogeneity is an issue. In my first essay, I estimate the impact of attending exam preparatory programs, in particular “cram schools,” on students’ academic performance. These programs are the product of market system and the Joint Entrance Exam System, which has been in place for decades in Taiwan. I measure the outcome by admission to a public high school and an “elite” high school. Focusing on the problem that students are not randomly assigned to “cram schools,” I approach the issue using propensity score matching and a Bayesian simultaneous-equations model. Using data from a survey of Taiwanese junior high school students in the Taiwan Youth Project, I find evidence that there is an insignificantly negative sorting into exam preparatory programs and attending an exam preparatory program improves a student’s high school placement. Both approaches indicate similar positive treatment effects. The second essay studies the effect of Medicaid expansions on childhood obesity and finds robust evidence of ex-ante moral hazard induced by public insurance. I establish this result by estimating two reduced-form models and a structural model. My reduced-form identification strategy exploits eligibility discontinuity created by the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act 1990, which extended Medicaid eligibility to children from families below the federal poverty threshold and born after October 1983. Drawing on the MEPS, I find offering low-income children public insurance leads to an approximately 10-percentage-point increase in the chances of obesity. Combining the MEPS and the SIPP, I am able to investigate the effects of insurance take-up. I estimate a fuzzy regression discontinuity design using Angrist-Krueger two-sample IV estimator (Angrist and Krueger 1992). The results suggest that early insurance take-up induced by the expansions of Medicaid leads to a roughly 5-percentage-point increase in chances of obesity. I also develop and estimate a two-period structural model that quantifies moral hazard, net-wealth effect, and risk preferences. I use the estimates to study the relative importance of income effect and moral hazard in the childhood obesity problem. The estimates of the choice model suggest that net-wealth effect is a statistically significant avenue to the observed policy effect. In the third essay, I develop a method to test the validity of the Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) model. The LATE model is widely applied to evaluating policies when randomized experiments are impossible. The model relies on two critical assumptions: (1) the existence of a randomly assigned instrument that affects the outcome variable only through the treatment; and (2) the instrument only affects the treatment selection in one direction. The basis for the test is an estimator for the distribution function of the compliers. If the CDFs decrease more than the derived bound, then we reject the assumption of the exclusion restriction. If the CDFs are not completely non-decreasing, then either one of the assumptions fail to hold. To show the applicability, I apply the test to three datasets.

The National Football League’s salary cap constrains the available resources each franchise is allotted to spend on player personnel. I examine the effects of executive management’s compensation allocation strategies on team performance from 2006 to 2013. The findings suggest that spending more than the league-average on offensive lineman hurts overall team performance. Spending above the league average on both the offensive line and quarterback positions negatively affects offensive performance as well. This supports previous research stating that taking a superstar-approach to cap distribution negatively affects team performance. Furthermore, I find evidence of increased compensation inequality among players under the Collective Bargaining Agreement of 2011 compared to that of 1993.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2007. / Thesis directed by David S. Hachen, Jr. for the Department of Sociology. "July 2007." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 205-214).