abstract: Previous studies of turnover have focused mainly on factors influencing turnover intention or turnover behavior. Fewer studies delve into career outcomes after individuals’ turnover. However, turnover is not the end of the decision-making process. Due to the boundaryless career (Arthur, 1994) and extensive job mobility in the modern workforce (Stewart, 2002), it is timely to know the effect of turnover on individual career evolvement. The three essays in this dissertation will delve into turnover and career outcomes using data of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) personnel in the United States. The first essay explores the effect of past voluntary and involuntary turnover on individuals’ job satisfaction, salary, and number of people supervised. The second essay compares gender differences in voluntary turnover patterns and the effects of voluntary turnover on career outcomes. The third essay delves into STEM personnel job mobility across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, with a focus on sector switch and job satisfaction change. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Public Administration and Policy 2020

This dissertation is composed of three essays on labor economics. First, I examine the effect of the rapid rise in binge watching on reported crime. I use conditionally exogenous variation in the runtime of newly released Netflix Originals to identify the effect of binge watching on reported crime. I find that binge watching reduces crime contemporaneously and in the first three days that the new content is available. I find no evidence that binge watching reduces total crime reported over a nearly two week period after new content becomes available. Second, I replicate a well-known paper by Card and Dahl (2011) which examines the effect of emotional cues on violent crime. I confirm their baseline result while using their original study design from 1995–2006. I expand on their analysis by expanding the time series of their original data and using new data. I find their baseline result is not robust using out-of-sample data from 2007–2019. Third, I estimate the effect of cell phones on traffic accidents by using the expansion of the Lifeline Assistance Program as an exogenous shock to the stock of cell phones, I use a difference-in-differences quasi-experimental design to find that cell phones causally increase traffic fatalities when those cell phones are made available in states with no restrictions to cell phone use while driving and states that ban texting while driving and require hands-free calling. In addition, I find that additional cell phones have no effect when states have only one restriction on cell phone use while driving—implying that the optimal policy to reduce traffic fatalities is to ban texting while driving.

<div>My dissertation consists of three independent chapters in the field of labor economics. The first chapter studies the economic forces underlying employment declines and skill upgrading in the U.S. manufacturing sector around the turn of the 21st century. The second chapter assesses the role of Japanese import competition in explaining stalled racial progress in the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s. The third chapter explores end-of-life medical spending for dogs who have been diagnosed with cancer. </div><div><br></div><div>In the first chapter, I propose a new method to decompose employment changes by skill type into changes caused by output, labor supply, production task concentration, and labor-augmenting technology, using market equilibrium conditions within a constant elasticity of substitution production framework. I apply this method to manufacturing industries between 1990 and 2007, a period of steep employment declines for non-college workers. I find that labor-augmenting technology, by reducing labor per unit of output, is the leading source of displacement overall. However, a shift toward high-skill tasks is even more important in displacing non-college workers, who represent a majority of employment. In contrast, output changes have little influence on upskilling or aggregate job loss. In applications, I explore the impacts of import penetration from China and susceptibility to automation and offshoring. Of these, only offshoring is associated with some task upgrading, suggesting these mechanisms are not the primary drivers of this source of employment loss.</div><div><br></div><div>The second chapter is written with Timothy N. Bond. We assess the impact of the rapid rise in imports from Japan in the 1970s and 1980s on domestic labor markets. We use commuting zone level variation in exposure and stratify our outcomes by racial groups. We find it decreased black manufacturing employment, labor force participation, and median earnings, and increased public assistance recipiency. However these manufacturing losses for blacks were offset by increased white manufacturing employment. This compositional shift appears to have been caused by skill upgrading in the manufacturing sector. Losses were concentrated among black high school dropouts and gains among college educated whites. We also see a shifting of manufacturing employment towards professionals, engineers, and college educated production workers. We find no evidence the heterogeneous effects of import competition can be explained by unionization, prejudice, or changes in spatial mismatch. Our results can explain 66-86% of the relative decrease in black manufacturing employment, 17-23% of the relative rise in black non-labor force participation, and 34-44% of the relative decline in black median male earnings from 1970-1990. </div><div><br></div><div>The third chapter, written with Kevin Mumford, contributes to the literature on the causal effect of end-of-life medical spending by focusing on the pet health care industry. Using administrative records and an identification strategy based on the timing of pet health insurance benefit renewal, we create an environment in which arrival of insurance benefits is quasi-random. We focus on how the availability of health insurance reimbursement funds affects spending, veterinary visits, and mortality over a two-year period after a serious cancer diagnosis. Increases in the generosity of health insurance reimbursement causes increases in both spending and veterinary visits, but we do not find evidence of a causal effect on mortality.</div>

This dissertation is constituted by three distinctive chapters or essays, but the unifying theme is how a more careful consideration of female labor supply may better inform assessments of economic growth and structural change. In chapter I, I use the insights of both cooperative and noncooperative bargaining theory to develop a household model of female labor supply. Particular attention is given to how this model applies to the developing world, including how the effects of larger social shifts such as technological change and fertility decline are mediated by bargaining and inequality in the family. In chapter II, I develop a theoretical foundation for analyzing how gender roles in the household affect foreign direct investment in a developing country context. It is argued that the extent to which women and men share the costs of social reproduction at the household level is a central determinant of female labor supply and the profitability of investment. I combine a model of family structure with a structuralist macromodel to investigate the effects of various public policies on women's wages and employment. A major goal is to specify the constraints imposed by international capital mobility on the prospects for increased equality and living standards for women. In chapter III, I reevaluate economic growth in Taiwan between 1965 and 1995 by developing an alternative measure of economic production that accounts for both market and nonmarket production in the form of domestic services provided by women in the home. I find that social services, a category that includes social services provided in the market and the home, is the lead employer of Taiwanese labor between 1965 and 1995. Another key finding is that many of the factors driving growth in the market sector also shape growth in the nonmarket sector. Despite trend declines in the relative size of the nonmarket domestic sector, it has probably continued to grow throughout this period, primarily because of productivity gains in household production and the effects of demographic change.

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The practice of using the labor of inmates in state and Federal prisons to produce commodities has expanded rapidly in recent years, paralleling the growth of the number of people incarcerated. Last year, prisoners in state and Federal institutions in the U.S. produced over $2 billion worth of commodities, both goods and services. In addition, prisoners performed various acts of labor such as food preparation, maintenance, laundry, and cleaning—forms of labor which, though necessary for the operation of every prison—do not produce commodities with market prices. A conservative estimate places the value of these goods and services at $9 billion. This dissertation analyzes the organization of prison labor and the increasingly important prison industries producing saleable commodities; in particular, we focus on the division between the products of prison labor consumed by the inmates and that appropriated from them by the prison authorities for other uses. This research yields the striking conclusion that the basic organization of prison labor in the U.S. today most closely resembles a form of slavery. Inmates are compelled by economic, cultural, and political forces to enter into this prison slavery, where the products of their labor are taken by others both inside and outside the prison. The effects of prison slavery on both the inmates who are enslaved as well as on American society as a whole are also explored. We find that as the prison has been transformed over the last 150 years by social movements, legal changes, and economic forces, so too has prison slavery. We also find that these social changes have allowed slavery to continue and even to expand in American society, despite the Civil War and the abolition of slavery outside prisons. The enslavement of inmates threatens the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, since slavery is widely seen as an ethically unacceptable form of labor. This loss of legitimacy may lead to increased criminal behavior.

In this dissertation, I argue first that for policy and research purposes, identifying the agent who controls the child's labor reveals more about child work than simply identifying the child's attachment to the labor market. Children are not perfectly substitutable between different types of work either; the child's sex determines the kind of work assigned to the child. Thus in addition to the importance of agent controlling the child's labor, the dissertation asserts that at the margin, the trade-off between school and work partly depends on the task assigned to the child. The important findings in this dissertation are as follows: By using non-parametric analysis, I uncover that as household wealth improves, children are withdrawn from third party employment, but continue to work under parental control. Often, but not always, children working for third parties work harder compared to children working under parental control; and in some cases, children from better-off households work far more hours than the children of poor households. I then build a model in which a child's time is allocated to school, market and domestic work. The model predicts that, at the margin, the trade-off between school and work depends on the task, which may not fall under market boundaries. I then test the two theses of the dissertation using a dataset from Turkey. The results reveal that in Turkey, girls lose the priority in schooling in the presence of brothers, while boys gain by having sisters. Having assets complementary to child's work shifts boys' time away from third party employment to work under parental control, and parents adjust only their daughters' time when the household infrastructure is less developed. The dissertation contributes to our understanding of work and schooling outcomes of children living in the so-called Third World in three ways: first, by highlighting the importance of the agent controlling the child's work; second, by emphasizing that the trade-off between domestic work and schooling may be as crucial as the trade-off between market work and schooling, and last, by highlighting the need for different policy tools in order to improve Turkish children's schooling.

Thesis advisor: Theodore Papageorgiou / Thesis advisor: Robert Ulbricht / This thesis contains three independent essays on topics in macroeconomics and labor economics. In the first chapter, I investigate the implications of the increasing share of older businesses in the United States economy for labor market outcomes across workers in different age groups. I find that over the period 1994-2019, employment and wages fall by more for younger cohorts, driven by a ``firm competition” channel. Moreover, workers are better sorted, but receive a lower share of the match surplus, on average. In the second chapter, my co-author Div Bhagia and I ask whether broad sectoral shifts in labor demand account for the divergence of employment outcomes between Black and White men after 1970. We find that they explain no more than one-fifth of the increase in the employment-to-population ratio gap, and that the widening of this gap is primarily driven by differential responses to labor demand shocks across groups. In the third chapter, I quantify the roles of increases in job separations and decreases in job finding in recessionary increases in unemployment. I find that while job separations lead job finding, both margins contribute significantly to unemployment fluctuations. I conclude that future research should not ignore the interaction between unemployment inflows and unemployment outflows in explaining the cyclical behavior of the labor market. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

This dissertation presents an analysis of coordination problems which are not solved by competitive markets. I argue that a variety of coordination failures occur if relations between a firm and its employees, and between a firm and other firms, are market mediated. In the first essay I consider the profit maximizing choice of the individual firm over a continuous job security variable. I argue that competitive markets yield Pareto suboptimal levels of job security due to agency problems, and the negative externality of aggregate demand instability generated by those firms that hire and fire over the cycle. I develop a model incorporating these features to generate reaction functions for the optimal level of job security in an individual firm in the light of the decisions of other firms. In the second essay I model the equilibrium composition of a population of firms faced with decisions over a discrete job security variable. Firms either offer no security against cyclical dismissal, or total security (long term employment arrangements). This model is not about how firms select the optimal level of tenure, but about how the distribution of firms between the two extremes is selected on the basis of profitability. I develop a model of a two-way relationship between the percentage of firms offering long term employment arrangements and demand instability. I show that it is possible to have multiple equilibria. In the third essay I argue that cooperative inter-firm relations, represent a solution to coordination failures that may take the form of both Prisoner's Dilemma and Hawk-Dove games. Inter-firm cooperation therefore facilitates the realization of potential Marshallian external economies, that would not be realized in the absence of such cooperation. I extend the Hawk-Dove game by considering both iteration and non-random pairing of agents to show that the viability and stability of cooperation are enhanced under conditions which are considered as impediments under the Walrasian model of market exchange. This model is then applied to the British and Italian furniture sectors. I present conclusions in Chapter 4.

American companies have experimented with "employee involvement" (EI), also referred to as "workplace democracy," "quality of worklife," and "participatory decision making" since the late 1960's. Results are mixed but interest remains high because organizations that have adapted to this new form are industry leaders. Research of the literature suggested (and this research agrees) that EI will be a long term success when management: (1) shares information and power at all levels of the organizational unit, (2) emphasizes cooperative problem solving to meet organizational goals, and (3) engenders a sense of dignity, meaning and community in every employee in the organizational unit. This study at four manufacturing sites investigates the link between the process of change to EI management and managers' beliefs. In-depth interviews of 25 managers and 8 hourly employees (plus printed matter) provide data for this qualitative research. "Grounded theory" from the data generated five Management Characteristics and seven Antecedents for Change which provide a framework for further analysis of managers' beliefs related to EI. Research sites had different types of manufacturing, different organizational histories, and EI programs were at different stages of development, but 13 themes emerged which were highly consistent (and two themes that were dissimilar were still clearly significant to the change process). The study establishes that both the organizational change process and Antecedents affect a manager's response to EI. Some experiences and beliefs make it easier for a manager to adapt to EI management and some make it more difficult. Antecedents that were shown to have both positive and negative affects on the process include self confidence, family, education, and work experiences, mentors, organizational culture, and personal characteristics, beliefs and values.