This thesis is a history of the gas industry down to 1914 with special reference to London. Part One deals with the industry's origins and its technical and business history and traces the development from the discovery of coal gas manufacture at the end of the seventeenth century to its first commercial exploitation in the early nineteenth century. It then sets out the subsequent technological progress made in the industry from the manufacturing process to the applications of coal gas. The commercial history of the gas companies in London is related from the early period of competition between an increasing number of speculative and often fraudulent concerns to the agreement of monopoly districts in the 1850s and amalgamation in the 1870s. The increasing government and legislative regulation is dealt with in detail and biographies of the leading industrialists are given. Part One concludes with an analysis which sets out to explain the nature and progress of the industry, its initial innovation, the pace of subsequent technological change and its commercial history, particularly relating to growth, competition, the actual role of government regulation and municipalisation, the relationship with the electricity industry and other linkages with the rest of the economy. Part Two deals with the fortunes of the workers employed in the London gasworks and deals with working conditions, wages, hours, welfare benefits and the attempts of the companies to discipline their men. It relates the early strikes in London particularly those of 1834, 1859 and 1872 and looks at the rise of the permanent union in 1889, the winning of the eight hour day and the prolonged strike at the South Metropolitan company in 1889-90. The history of the profit sharing schemes which became a feature in gas companies is given as is a brief history of some aspects of the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers down to 1914. Part Two concludes with some analysis to explain the major variables in the labour relations of the gasworks, especially wages, strikes and the level of union membership.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Stockholms universitet, 2006.

The first chapter examines the causal effect of education on individuals' retirement decisions and changes in quality of life after retirement. When estimating the return to education, much of the existing literature assumes implicitly that individuals optimize over their career with a fixed year of retirement ("fixed-retirement-age" assumption). Using the provincial compulsory schooling laws as instruments to estimate the causal effects of educational attainment on individuals' retirement decisions and change in the quality of life after retirement, I find that years of schooling have no significant impact on retirement decisions. Furthermore, among those who are already retired, years of schooling do not have any impact on their age at retirement and the change in the quality of life after retirement. Results in this paper support the "fixed-retirement-age" assumption used in empirical studies based on the classical return to education model where the exogenous assumption on retirement age might not be a bad approximation. The second chapter relates to labour market flows and worker trajectories in Canada during COVID-19. We use the confidential-use files of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) to study the employment dynamics in Canada from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic through to mid-summer. Using the longitudinal dimension of this dataset, we measure the size of worker reallocation and document the presence of high labour market churning that persists even after the easing of social-distancing restrictions. As of July of 2020, many of the recent job losers -- especially those who had been temporarily laid-off between February and April -- have regained employment. However, this apparent strong recovery dynamics hides important heterogeneity, and large groups of workers, such as those who were not employed prior to the pandemic, face important difficulties with finding a job. Our results further suggest that gross job losses were higher among women and young workers during the shutdown and that older workers were more likely to leave the labour force when the economy reopened. The third chapter analyzes the gender differences in early career labour market trajectories and wage growth in Canada. Using the Longitudinal Workers File (LWF) linked to the 2006 and 2016 Census, I find that, although some progress has been made on the gender gap on labour market trajectories for young workers in their earlier careers, women faced higher penalties for taking time out of the labour market compared with men. More specifically, regardless of the type of job separation, changed employer or occupation, and reason for separation, women's weekly wage annual growth rate was lower compared with their male counterparts. The results from regression analysis suggest that labour market trajectories affect women's and men's weekly wage annual growth rates differently. Women's weekly wage annual growth rate was more sensitive to temporary job separation compared with men, whereas men's weekly wage annual growth rate was more sensitive to permanent job separation. The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition shows that the total number of permanent separations and the total number of permanent separations due to parental/maternity leave each explains about one-third of the cross-sectional gender differences in weekly wage annual growth rate observed for young workers in Canada.

This thesis consists of three independent but thematically related papers exploring the income determination process in African labour markets from spatial and sectoral perspectives. Using long-run household panel data from rural Tanzania, chapter 2 investigates the extent to which education can explain migrants' income and consumption gains. We expect that the higher return to schooling at the destination primarily drives migrants' gains, suggesting that those who cannot afford the cost of schooling cannot reap the benefits of migration. We find that education indeed plays the role, but that it does not appear to be a major factor in limiting the internal migration as a source of raising income and consumption. Exploiting data drawn from urban household panel surveys in Ghana and Tanzania, chapter 3 investigates how rural-to-urban migrants' earnings compare with those of natives in urban labour markets. The chapter attempts to identify the growth of migrants' earnings at the destination (assimilation), making a distinction between wage and self-employed migrants. We find that wage-dependent migrants would achieve higher lifetime earnings if they entered a self-employed sector from their arrival, conditional on individuals' attributes and the varying returns to those attributes across urban residents. The evidence points towards the importance of capital constraints in a decision to start a business. Using firm-level data of manufacturing and retailing from the Enterprise Surveys conducted in seven Sub-Saharan African countries, chapter 4 attempts to improve our understanding of enterprise performance in urban Africa by investigating three aspects of firms' productive structure: technology, total factor productivity (TFP), and firm size. We find that the technology is similar between sectors, that retailing firms are smaller and less capital intensive but not, on average, ones with lower TFP, and that TFP differences are primarily within sectors. All these findings might point towards the importance of factor prices in characterising the industrial structure in urban Africa.

This thesis discusses the changes and corresponding causes of the wage distribution in China from the late 1990s to the 2000s. According to various data sources, real wage inequality in China has been increasing over time. People have become increasingly concerned about such a phenomenon, which can potentially cause economic instability and further social unrest. From the analysis of household survey data, a significant part of the the increase in wage dispersion in China can be attributed to changes in the institutional changes. Having gone through the institutional reform of state-owned enterprises in the late 1990s, many Chinese firms have become more privatized and smaller in size. That is to say, the Chinese labour market becomes less affected by the government intervention (through public enterprises). Changes in the supply side of the labour market have also been examined. The increase in the number of university graduates slows down the growing wage dispersion. A comparison between the household survey data and the industrial enterprises data tells a slightly different story about Chinas wage structure. As the firm-level data omits within-firm wage inequalities and excludes data of primary sectors, the service sectors, and the small businesses, a decrease in the logarithm of the wage variation has been found. The inconsistency between the changes of real wage dispersion and the dispersion of log wages has been discussed in depth in the thesis. Nonetheless, since China set the new minimum wage in 2004, the wage distribution in the countrys industrial sector has been reshaped, which is not obviously shown in the household data. The impact of increasing the national minimum wage has been evaluated under a set of relatively conservative assumptions. Further analysis has been conducted to quantify the effect of trade liberalization on wage dispersion. It turns out that starting to export on the part of the firms has a significant positive effect on firm-level wages and employments, but the impact of an increasing export exposure remains debatable.

Neoclassical economic theorys assumption of a strictly utility of money maximizing economic actor has been unable to explain such economic phenomena as involuntary unemployment and above market clearing wages. Efficiency wage theory, in its various forms, has provided some explanation for these labour market features. Akerlofs (1982) Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis or Partial Gift Exchange model of the labour market explains involuntary unemployment through the productivity enhancing effects of higher wages. In Akerlofs model this is done through a sort of unspoken gift exchange in which higher wages given to the workers are returned to the firm in the form of higher effort or productivity. <p>The Partial Gift Exchange model can also be modeled in a laboratory setting where its various predictions and assumptions can be tested. This has been done by a number of researchers over the last 15 years, who have generally found support for the validity of the theory using a one sided oral auction procedure. This thesis seeks to conduct a similar experiment, but in the form of a survey, the focus of which is the relationship between wages and effort. <p>A number of the results of previous experiments supporting the Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis have also been generated in the survey, for example a positive relationship between wages and effort. New and interesting findings not previously examined in the lab or not present in previous experiment were also present in the survey: the negative effect of wage inequity; a positive coefficient for the gender dummy variable; and the negative effect of unemployment insurance. <p>The survey has produced some new and interesting results, transporting the survey back into the laboratory setting from which it was inspired would provide an interesting comparison.

Neoclassical economic theorys assumption of a strictly utility of money maximizing economic actor has been unable to explain such economic phenomena as involuntary unemployment and above market clearing wages. Efficiency wage theory, in its various forms, has provided some explanation for these labour market features. Akerlofs (1982) Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis or Partial Gift Exchange model of the labour market explains involuntary unemployment through the productivity enhancing effects of higher wages. In Akerlofs model this is done through a sort of unspoken gift exchange in which higher wages given to the workers are returned to the firm in the form of higher effort or productivity. <p>The Partial Gift Exchange model can also be modeled in a laboratory setting where its various predictions and assumptions can be tested. This has been done by a number of researchers over the last 15 years, who have generally found support for the validity of the theory using a one sided oral auction procedure. This thesis seeks to conduct a similar experiment, but in the form of a survey, the focus of which is the relationship between wages and effort. <p>A number of the results of previous experiments supporting the Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis have also been generated in the survey, for example a positive relationship between wages and effort. New and interesting findings not previously examined in the lab or not present in previous experiment were also present in the survey: the negative effect of wage inequity; a positive coefficient for the gender dummy variable; and the negative effect of unemployment insurance. <p>The survey has produced some new and interesting results, transporting the survey back into the laboratory setting from which it was inspired would provide an interesting comparison.

This thesis involves three essays that explore the theory and application of econometric analysis to labour market interventions. One essay is methodological, and two essays are applications. The first essay contributes to the literature on inference with data sets containing within-cluster correlation. The essay highlights a problem with current practices when the number of clusters is 11 or fewer. Current practices can result in p-values that are not point identified but are instead p-value intervals. The chapter provides Monte Carlo evidence to support a proposed solution to this problem. The second essay analyzes a labour market intervention within Canada--the Youth Hires program--which aimed to reduce youth unemployment. We find evidence that the program was able to increase employment among the targeted group. However, the impacts are only present for males, and we find evidence of displacement effects amongst the non-targeted group. The third essay examines a set of Graduate Retention Programs that several Canadian provinces offer. These programs are aimed at mitigating future skill shortages. Once the solution proposed in the first essay is applied, I find little evidence of the effectiveness of these programs in attracting or retaining recent graduates. / Thesis (Ph.D, Economics) -- Queen's University, 2013-07-05 15:56:33.805

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This dissertation comprises three essays on the allocation of labour and capital in a large developing country, Indonesia. In the first essay, I examine the impact of the 1998 East Asian recession on child schooling outcomes in Indonesia. Using panel data on 7-15 year-olds, I exploit the heterogeneous impact of the recession across urban communities as measured by the variation in rice price increases, under the assumption that communities where rice prices increased the most were those where real wages declined the most. I find that for the youngest children (aged 7-12 years) there is a large negative impact of higher rice prices on school attendance and no effect on labour market participation. For older children (aged 13-15 years), schooling enrolment does not respond to rice prices but labour market participation declines sharply in the worst-hit communities. I find no evidence of adverse long-term consequences on human capital formation. In the second essay, I test the hypothesis that there exists a significant earnings differential between similar workers in the formal and informal sectors. Using panel data on salaried and self-employed individuals, I find that after controlling for firm size and individual-specific heterogeneity, there is no formal sector earnings premium, except in the public sector. The results are robust to the presence of unpaid family workers, measurement error, and non-random attrition in the survey. This questions the commonly held belief that labour markets in developing countries are segmented because of legal institutions that protect high formal sector earnings. In the third essay, I estimate the effect of a large exchange rate depreciation on the performance of importers. The ability to manage volatility in the cost of imported inputs is likely to depend on a firm's access to external sources of finance as well its ability to hedge against exchange rate movements. Using data from a census on Indonesian firms, I find that while domestic importers face lower value-added due to a rise in their costs of production, foreign-owned importers fare better: they are more likely to sustain higher value-added, hire more labour and use more materials than domestic owned firms. This suggests another channel through which FDI can add value to a firm in a developing country, particularly with the increasing importance of trade in intermediate goods.