Modern Japanese philosophy offers a new approach to describing the world of labour. The article compares this approach with neoclassical labour market theories. Neither the working individual nor her "labour world" are sufficient as starting points to explain certain forms of organization. Instead, Graupe focuses on the "context of action". As an example of organisation, which classic economical theory is unable to explain, she presents "internal labour markets". The Japanese philosophical understanding of the world influences thus the specific design of working worlds in Japan.

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What is the total, summarized effect of immigration? Up to this date researchers have found both small positive effects and small negative effects for the same variable (e.g. wages or unemployment). As far as I know no one has yet focused on the total effect. With panel data on a bundle of variables for 22 OECD countries between 1970-2007, using multiple regression analysis I will estimate each variable individually and add together the signs of the effects to one combined sign (+/-/0). I find that the total, summarized effect of immigration tends to be slightly positive for OECD destination countries (under my assumptions).

In the past decades, European labour markets have undergone profound changes, witnessing a process of liberalisation and flexibilisation, in part through the spread of various forms of atypical employment. These new forms of employment have been argued to be of generally lower quality than standard employment, presenting several disadvantages across a range of employment-related dimensions. Nevertheless, the disadvantages experienced by atypical workers are argued to differ depending on nationally specific institutional settings, as employment regulations, welfare institutions and collective representation are commonly claimed to play a significant role in the shaping of disadvantage. Within the field of comparative political economy, a literature has emerged dealing with issues of dualisation and insider-outsider divides associated with these new forms of employment, mainly focusing on institutional divides in employment and welfare protection and political representation between standard and atypical workers and their consequences in terms of social inequalities. Authors within this literature have argued divides to be different across groups of countries within Europe. Specifically, an important distinction has been claimed to exist between Liberal countries, where divides are argued to be limited, and Southern European countries, where they are said to be among the highest. But this literature has mostly considered disadvantages from an institutional perspective, without empirically investigating whether institutional divides actually translate into individual disadvantages. At the same time, within sociology, authors have investigated individual disadvantages experienced by atypical workers under the broad concept of precariousness. Nevertheless, these scholars have not provided a systematic analysis of the relation between different institutional frameworks and individual disadvantages. This thesis aims at partly bridging these two literatures, by providing an analysis of how different institutional settings impact on disadvantages as experienced at the individual level. To do this, this thesis explores the disadvantages experienced by a specific category of atypical workers, namely temporary agency workers. It focuses on two countries which have been argued to present very different institutional divides across a broad range of employment-related dimensions. The UK is seen as the main example of Liberal country in the European context, providing limited employment protection to all workers, a fragmented system of industrial relations and a social protection system mainly based on means-testing and mostly aimed at poverty prevention. In contrast, Italy has been considered one of the European countries with the most highly segmented labour market, with high employment protection for core workers but very little for workers at the margin. At the same time, both its industrial relations system and it social protection system are said to strongly discriminate against people in atypical forms of employment. These claims are explored through semi-structured interviews with temporary agency workers in the service sector, trade unionists and other relevant stakeholders involved in atypical employment. The study demonstrates that temporary agency workers in the two countries experience partly different disadvantages. Although differences in the institutional settings can be said to contribute to explaining these differences, the analysis reveals a more complex picture. I show that institutional divides do not necessarily translate into individual disadvantages, as they interact among each other and with other factors in moulding individual experiences in a variety of ways. At the same time, individual disadvantages are present even when no institutional divide exists. Thus, the study argues that considering disadvantages only in terms of institutional divides oversimplifies a more complex and varied reality, and calls for more attention to be paid to how institutional divides are translated into individual disadvantages.

The two decades preceding the global financial crisis of 2008 saw an increase in international migration flows. This development was accompanied by the relaxation of immigration entry controls for select categories of foreign workers across the developed world. The scale of labour immigration, and the categories of foreign workers granted entry, varied considerably across states. To some extent, these developments transcended the traditional classifications of comparative immigration politics. This thesis examines the reform process in two states with contrasting policy legacies that adopted liberal labour immigration selection and control policies during the abovementioned period. The instrumental role that immigration has played in the process of nation-building in Australia has led it to be classified as a 'traditional destination state' with a positive immigration policy legacy. By contrast, immigration has not been significant in the formation of national identity in the United Kingdom. It has a more negative immigration policy legacy and is generally regarded as a 'reluctant state'. Examining the reasons for liberal shifts in labour immigration policy in two states with different immigration politics allows insights to be gained into the processes of policy-making and the dynamics that underpin it. In Australia, labour immigration controls were relaxed incrementally and through a deliberative process. Reform was justified on the grounds that it fulfilled economic needs and objectives, and was consistent with an accepted definition of the national interest. In the UK, liberal shifts in labour immigration policy were the incidental consequence of the pursuit of objectives in other policy areas. Reform was implemented unilaterally, and in an uncoordinated manner characterised by an absence of consultation. The contrast in the manner in which reform was managed by the various actors, institutions and stakeholders involved in the process both reflected, and served to reinforce, the immigration policy legacies of the two states. Moreover, the Howard government used Australia's positive legacy to construct a coherent narrative to justify the implementation of liberal reform. This generated greater immediate and lasting support for its reforms among stakeholders and the broader community. By contrast, lacking a similarly positive legacy, the Blair government in the UK found it difficult to create such a narrative, which contributed to the unpopularity of its reforms. This thesis therefore argues that policy legacies had a significant impact on the processes and dynamics that shaped labour immigration selection and control decisions during the recent wave of international migration. The cases demonstrate that a nation's past immigration policy experiences shape its policy-making structures, as well as institutional and stakeholder policy preferences, which are core constituent components of a nation's immigration politics. The UK case shows that even when reluctant states implement liberal labour immigration policies, these characteristics tend to create feedback effects that make it difficult for reform to be durable. The relationship between immigration policy and politics thus becomes self-reinforcing. But this does not necessarily mean that states' immigration politics are rigid, since the institutions that help to make a nation's immigration policy and shape its politics will inevitably undergo a process of adaptation in response to changing contexts.

This thesis comprises three stand-alone chapters: The first chapter is on the effect of natural disasters on labor markets. Using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey, the Desinventar database, the US Geological Survey and district level employment indicators, we explore how a large earthquake in Indonesia affected local labor markets, in particular the evolution of wages and employment across sectors. We find that wage growth in the agriculture sector is significantly higher in earthquake affected areas. We propose two mechanisms for this result and show evidence for both mechanisms. The second chapter investigates the intra-household allocation of leisure and consumption among siblings. Children are often treated as passive members in the household and their preferences over consumption and leisure are rarely modeled. This chapter considers children as agents with their own preferences over leisure and consumption and builds a theoretical and empirical model for children's time and consumption allocations in a household. We test the predictions of the model with data from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam. The results suggest that differences in siblings' relative time and consumption allocations are driven by their relative preferences over leisure and consumption rather than differences in parents' relative altruism. The third chapter examines the cost of transport infrastructure in developing countries. To our knowledge, this is the first study that analyzes drivers of unit costs of construction of transport infrastructure using a large data set of 3,322 unit costs of road work activities in low and middle income countries. We find a large dispersion in unit costs for comparable work activities. Unit costs are significantly higher in conflict and corrupt countries, and these effects are robust to controlling for a country's public investment capacity and business environment. Finally, higher unit costs are significantly negatively correlated with infrastructure provision.

I examine the importance of human capital for economic development in Thailand during the period of high economic growth and structural transformation (1985-2000), using labour force survey data. The three main chapters attempt to estimate the effects of education, as a measure of human capital, on three major outcomes in the Thai labour market, namely (i) earnings; (ii) sector of employment; and (iii) earnings inequality. I address the endogeneity problem of education using an education policy shift—the change in the compulsory schooling law—that produces exogenous variation in education. The three main chapters adopt distinct modelling frameworks. The details of each of the main chapters are as follows. The third chapter investigates how education increases earnings and the probability of being in the non-agricultural sector. As the education policy shift influences educational attainment in a discontinuous way, a regression discontinuity (RD) framework is adopted to identify the average returns to education and the effect of education on the sector of employment. It is important to emphasise that the RD technique constrains the effects of education on the two outcomes to be linear and to be applicable only to sub-populations. My results confirm significant effects of education on both earnings and the sectoral sorting process. In addition, there are heterogeneous effects of education by gender. The fourth chapter is an extension of the previous chapter. I allow the returns to education to be heterogeneous across education levels and sectors of employment, while attempting to estimate the returns for the entire population. I use a control function (CF) approach and a double selection correction to estimate the sectoral earnings process, while jointly accounting for the choice of education and the selection into sectors and paid employment. I find that the returns to education are non-linear and higher in the non-agricultural sector especially for medium and highly educated workers. This suggests that human capital plays a crucial role in facilitating a structural transformation towards the non-agricultural sector. In the final chapter, I study how the increased primary education completion rate affects earnings inequality. While there exists a burgeoning literature on the average returns to education, less attention has been devoted to estimating the effects of education on the distribution of earnings. I identify the effects of primary education completion on earnings at different points of the distribution, and thus earnings inequality, using a recently developed approach, called regression discontinuity distributional treatment effects. My results suggest that the increased primary education completion rate reduces earnings inequality as the returns to primary education are larger for the poor than the rich.

This thesis presents three essays, each seeking to deepen our understanding of labour markets. The first essay studies the response of real wages and hours of new hires to the business cycle during the UK’s Great Recession. The second essay analysis in how far the assumption of rational expectations in the Mortensen-Pissarides model is required for the economy to converge to an equilibrium. In particular, it asks if it is possible for economic agents to use simple linear forecast rules and still ensure convergence to the rational expectations equilibrium. The final essay seeks to determine whether labour income shares at the sectoral level are constant across countries, as is usually assumed in the literature, and whether this assumption quantitatively matters. Therefore, it takes the input-output structures across countries into account, and conducts a development accounting exercise. Real wages and hours in the Great Recession: Evidence from firms and their entry-level jobs Using employer-employee panel data, I provide novel facts on how real wages and working hours within jobs responded to the UK’s Great Recession. In contrast to previous studies, my data enables me to address the cyclical composition of jobs. I show that firms were able to respond to the Great Recession with substantial real wage cuts and by recruiting more part-time workers. A one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate led to an average decline in real hourly wages of 2.8 per cent for new hires and 2.6 per cent for job stayers. Hours of new hires in entry-level jobs were also substantially procyclical, while job-stayer hours were nearly constant. My findings suggest that models assuming rigid labour costs of new hires are not helpful for understanding the behaviour of unemployment over the business cycle. Unemployment and econometric learning I apply well-known results of the econometric learning literature to the Mortensen-Pissarides real business cycle model. Agents can always learn the unique rational expectations equilibrium (REE), for all possible well-defined sets of parameter values, by using the minimum-state-variable solution to the model and decreasing gain learning. From this perspective, the assumption of rational expectations in the model could be seen as reasonable. But using a parametrisation with UK data, simulations show that the speed of convergence to the REE is slow. This type of learning dampens the cyclical response of unemployment to small structural shocks. Measuring sectoral income shares: Accounting for input-output structures across countries I use input-output tables to measure the labour income shares of the goods and the services sector for a large cross-section of mostly developed countries. I present two novel findings: sectoral labour income shares significantly increase with the level of development, and within-country differences between these income shares are uncorrelated with the level of development. These cross-country differences are not caused by variation in the input-output structure or final demand, but originate at the production-side of the economy. I measure sectoral total factor productivity using a development accounting framework to assess the quantitative importance of my findings. The goods sector of less developed countries is relatively less productive than the services sector; assuming that the values of the sectoral labour income shares across countries are identical to their corresponding U.S. values leads to an underestimation of productivity differences across countries. All findings are robust to different adjustments for the labour income of the self-employed.

Since 2008 Europe has been in crisis, a financial and debt crisis that spread from the U.S. to all European countries. This thesis aims to provide evidence on the consequences of the crisis for individuals’ labour market outcomes across different countries and regions of Europe and to analyse how the recession has differentially affected sub-groups of the European population. Through the analysis of the longitudinal component of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) dataset, the project sheds light on the labour market trajectories of more than 20,000 Europeans across 11 European countries and 41 regions, before and during the 2008 financial crisis (2005-2012). Sequence and cluster analysis are used to investigate the heterogeneity of individual labour market trajectories across countries and time, while multilevel models are used to study regional labour markets during the years in crisis. The concept of transitional labour markets, as well as theories of labour market segmentation, job competition and job mobility, provide the theoretical framework for this research. The empirical findings show that during the financial crisis, labour market trajectories appear more turbulent and fragmented for the already disadvantaged sub-groups, namely women, younger workers and low educated workers. Furthermore, during the Great recession, an increase in unemployment among men confirms the sectoral profile of the crisis, which hit harder the male-dominated sectors of construction and industry. At the same time, a decrease in inactivity among women is consistent with the added worker effect, according to which women in periods of economic hardship are pushed towards labour market activity in order to contribute to the household income. Countries with weak economies and underperforming labour markets prior to the crisis, such as Greece and Italy, unsurprisingly experienced a deep and persistent crisis, while countries with stronger economies and more inclusive labour markets, such as Denmark and Sweden, managed to survive the crisis with less social harm. The institutional context of the countries offering high chances of employment even during the financial crisis, such as the Nordic countries, lies on the flexicurity of their labour markets. Indeed, flexible labour markets with the use of reduced working-time schemes, i.e. part-time forms of employment, contained unemployment during the financial shock. However, we need to be cautious about flexibility without security or partial deregulation of the markets, implemented in southern European countries, because during the crisis such policies led to further labour market segmentation and thus an increase in employment inequalities. Finally, the region of residence matters in employment outcomes, almost as much as the country of residence. In fact, from the regional analysis of individual employment outcomes during the years of the crisis, an uneven distribution of labour is detected even within the national borders. Summing up, the European crisis should be considered as the sum of national and regional crises.

This paper contributes to the field of research on entrepreneurship and self-employment. More explicitly, it contributes to the research regarding heterogeneity by studying the ‘necessity’ self-employed. In this paper, we question the notion of ‘necessity’ and its connection to weak labour market attainment by measuring individual’s human capital in relation to local labour market structures. The used data derives from relevant labour market data combined with data from a postal survey study conducted in 2011, containing self-employed between the age 25–64. The results show no connection between labour market attainment and ‘necessity’ self-employment. The results however indicate a correlation between sociodemographic-aspects and ‘necessity’ self-employment.