The present thesis is a study of the economic consequences of declining real wages in the United States. It proposes that, when the real wages of the majority of the U.S. workforce declined in the 1970s, 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, household labour supply increased. Consequently, real family income in the bottom eighty percent of the income distribution rose. Wage-earning households were not only struggling to maintain their acquired standard of living as real wages were declining, but they were also, perhaps more importantly, trying to raise their standard of living. It was precisely when household labour supply hit a ceiling in the second half of the 1990s, that household debt exploded. Surging household debt from the late 1990s until 2007 – driven primarily by home mortgage debt – suggests that the culturally powerful “American Dream” motivated wage-earning households to seek and expect a continuously rising standard of living via home ownership even in the face of topped out work hours and historically low real wages.

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The Sub-Saharan African informal economy is often characterised by underemployment where workers spend countless hours earning bare minimum. This study investigates the impact of microfinance participation on earnings, time spent on market work, household work and leisure among women in the informal economy in Kenya. The findings are that microfinance on average increases earnings and reduces working hours due to a negatively sloping labour supply curve. This can be interpreted as an increase in productivity. As working hours are reduced, it is argued that time spent on the two other activities increase proportionally. If household work and leisure can be interpreted as activities with positive marginal utility, then these changes can be seen as income effects.

This thesis deals with the alternative work arrangements in Europe, namely flexitime and part-time. The theoretical basis is built on the theory of preferences and takes into account household labour supply considering also household production. The aplication part compares and contrasts situation in corresponding European countries with special reference to identification the differences between men and women. As a next step, regression and correlation analysis is used in order to identify relationship between part-time ratio and other variables. It was found that there is no relationship between part-time ratio and gender wage gap. Furthermore, there is a statistically significant relationship between GDP per capita and women part-time ratio, which helps to explain the differences among corresponding countries.

There are four parts to this thesis: the first chapter analyses the structure of leisure in couples with particular emphasis on joint leisure. We take a structural approach and model the household as a two-stage decision making unit. The findings suggest that couples see joint leisure as a distinct good from private leisure. Specifically when a household decides to have more leisure, almost 40 percent of this increase is allocated to joint leisure as opposed to only 8 to 15 percent allocated to male private leisure. Furthermore, couples prefer to spend leisure together (synchronisation) relative to spending time independently, giving joint leisure the largest weight in the utility function. The findings further suggest that demographics can play a large role in determining the patterns of spousal leisure, with ethnicity and job characteristics being important factors. Finally, when analysing weekend time use patterns, there is evidence to suggest that Saturdays should be distinguished from Sundays as approximately 41 percent more joint leisure is observed on Sundays. The second chapter of the thesis begins our examination of the UK income taxation reform in 1990. The UK went from a system of joint taxation to independent taxation of couples and this reform may have had important implications for households. Across countries, there is a large variation in the income tax treatment of couples. Over the last three decades, many countries have undergone reforms in their tax systems, some have moved from joint to independent taxation, some from independent to joint, while others have begun the practice of allowing couples to choose the system they prefer. This chapter aims to give an overview of the tax treatment of couples and outlines the differences across countries, with particular emphasis on the tax reform in the UK. The third chapter investigates the UK income taxation reform in 1990 and examines how the change from a system of joint to independent taxation of couples has shifted women's relative earning potentials in the household, and how this in turn has led to changes in intra-household assignable clothing expenditures. I apply my method to a sample of UK couples with children and the findings of this chapter show that an exogenous increase in women's income relative to their spouse significantly and substantially increases female clothing expenditure and decreases male clothing expenditure ceteris paribus. However an increase in relative female earnings does not necessarily mean that children will do better relatively. The final outcome may depend on the type of transfer in question. In addition, there is evidence that the final allocations of expenditures on each partner and children may depend significantly on distribution factors such as spousal relative incomes, age gap and educational gap, despite the fact that these variables do not impact on preferences nor on budgets directly. This provides further evidence against the unitary framework in favour of the collective approach and the sharing rule interpretation of how households make decisions in practice. The final chapter of this thesis examines the effects of the tax reform in 1990 with particular emphasis on female labour supply. A method of clarifying the concept of a spouse's individual net income under a joint tax regime is proposed and following the methodology of Blundell et al (2007), the labour supply elasticities for both male and female are estimated. The analysis is extended further to include children in the model and the results show that both the number of children and their age are highly significant for women's labour supply and to a smaller extent also for men. Testing the income pooling hypothesis, the unitary model is not rejected. However, the results strongly reject the hypothesis that distribution factors have no effect on labour supply. The results also suggest that for the group of women affected, the reform generated two opposing effects on their labour supply: a positive effect from an increase in net wage and a negative effect from an increase in bargaining power. On balance, we find that a typical female decreased her labour supply by approximately 2.6 hours per week, yet she still experienced a 22 percent increase in her net income.

This licentiate’s thesis consists of two essays on immigrant self-employment and labour supply. The first essay (co-author Mats Hammarstedt), Intergenerational transmissions in immigrant self-employment: Evidence from three generations, reviews intergenerational transmissions in immigrant self-employment over three generations. More precisely, we study whether self-employment is transferred both from grandfather to grandson and from father to son, as well as if there are any differences between immigrant groups and differences between immigrants and natives. In addition, we investigate the importance of the intergenerational transfer of general and specific human capital for choice of business line. The results show that having a self-employed father and self-employed grandfather have a strong positive effect on self-employment propensities for male third-generation immigrants. On the other hand, natives were found to transfer self-employment from father to son, but not from grandfather to grandson. The results also indicate that immigrants inherit self-employment abilities from their self-employed fathers increasing the self-employment propensity, but not necessarily in the same business line. In contrast, native self-employed fathers transfer human capital to their sons making them more prone to become self-employed in the same business line as the father is in. The second essay, Female immigrant labour supply: The effect of an in-work benefit, focuses on immigrant labour supply, and evaluates the effect of a recently introduced in-work benefit, the so called job deduction, on the labour supply of single immigrant women. In this study, we address the following questions: What is the effect of the in-work benefit on the labour supply of single immigrant women? Does the effect of the in-work benefit on working hours differ between immigrant groups? The results show that, on average, there is no major effect of the in-work benefit on the labour supply of single immigrant women. However, households with the lowest incomes increase their working hours quite strongly. Furthermore, on average, there appears to be no difference in the effect of the in-work benefit between immigrant groups. In the low-income households, though, immigrants from non-European countries and from Southern and Eastern European countries, increase their labour supply relatively more than immigrants from Nordic countries and Western Europe. Finally, the relatively large increase in working hours for single immigrant women with the lowest incomes appears, above all, to be a result of increased participation in the labour market. However, part of the effect is related to an increase in the number of working hours of already employed women.

The most widely cited European data on work hours mismatches at the couple level date back to the 1990s. The general gist of analyses of these data was that "overworked" dual-earner couples frequently preferred work hours reductions, especially those with childcare responsibilities. This study uses more recent data from the European Social Survey (2010-12) to update the available evidence on actual and preferred breadwinner models and on the occurrence and determinants of work hours mismatches among couples in Europe. The focus is on differences between demographic groups and countries in the degree to which cohabiting couples are either underemployed (working fewer hours than desired) or overemployed (working more hours than desired). Our analyses show that about one third of couples are underemployed, while only one in ten report being overemployed. We identify low education and the presence of children below school age as risk factors for underemployment, whereas highly educated women and fathers of teenagers tend to be overemployed. In a comparison of 16 European countries, we find couples in Greece, Ireland, Slovenia, and Spain to be most at risk of experiencing underemployment - in the countries that were most strongly affected by the recession. The effects of children on the experience of hours mismatches are found to vary across Europe - a particularly strong association of children below school age with parental underemployment is observed in Central and Eastern Europe, Finland, and Germany and a particularly weak one in Great Britain, Greece, Ireland, and Sweden.

This thesis studies the labour supply with aspiration-based reference-dependent preferences. The first contribution of the thesis is the theoretical modelling of behavioural contract theory. In Chapter 1, I modify the classical principal-agent model with uncertainty and moral hazard by replacing the Expected Utility preferences of the agent with chance theory preferences (Schmidt and Zank, 2013). Chance theory agents are primarily concerned with the sure wage they can obtain, i.e., the certain component in their contract, as they treat increments in bonuses markedly different to similar changes in sure wages. Similar to the classical predictions, our agents' optimal contracts are contingent payment schemes, however, they differ with respect to the level of the sure wage. I also contrast my predictions to those of the model of Herweg et al. (2010), who assume agents with expectation-based loss-averse preferences. The other contribution of this thesis is the empirical support for the theory of aspiration-based reference-dependent preferences with field data in education economics. In Chapter 2, I study aspiration-based reference-dependent preferences in undergraduate students' performance and effort provision. Students' reference points are set as their targeted grades. I extend a two-period economics-of-education model (Krohn and O'Connor, 2005) by proposing an additional utility function that is based on the difference between the realised grade and targeted grade. I design surveys and collect data by following a group of undergraduate students at the University of Manchester for two semesters of a full academic year with a two-period panel. My results provide evidence for students' reference-dependent preferences in two ways: first, a significant jump in students' proxied utility of grade is found at the reference point, which also implies students are loss averse. Second, the reference point positively affects students' effort provision. I further study the formation of the reference point and its variation over time. My results suggest that students partially update their past realised results into the formation of reference points. Further, the relative change of their reference points depends on the achievement of the past period reference point.

The general objective of this study is to identify skills required by employers relevant to the agricultural sector especially in cash crop rice farming and to explore how to increase the contribution of new entrants to the labour market leading to increased production, socio-economic development and the reduction of income-poverty in Tanzania. Productivity gains in the agriculture sector have been modest and have had a limited effect on economic growth in Tanzania. Although the country has considerable agricultural potential, making the most of this depends on the availability of a labour force that has the skills to support a shift to greater productivity. This study profiles, analyses and examines the reality of skills provision and the emerging opportunities to find out how skills development and employability should be improved. The research questions focus on (i) identifying the existing skills gaps between employers' needs and employees' capabilities; (ii) identifying the skills which TVET programs impart to enhance performance in the agriculture subsector; and (iii) identifying the skills required by employers and analysing the employability of TVET graduates entering work in the agricultural sector, especially for paddy production. The study concludes by outlining policy implications for improving TVET programs for workforce development. Among the key research findings was the identification of the high degree of irrelevance of most TVET courses for the targeted labour market as overall 89 % of employers claim that the skills possessed by graduates were not applicable to their intended jobs. Moreover, there is a gap in perception between employers and employees about the value of their training. Serious concerns need to be addressed. This can be done by creating an effective system of knowledge dissemination and training building on the current cascade training system involving both the TVET institutions and the visitation of extension workers in the field responsible for enhancing the transfer of modern farming practices. Findings also indicate that very few TVET graduates who enter the agriculture sector have actually studied agriculture, and only seven percent out of the entire TVET graduating cohort have studied the agricultural track. These research findings, drawn largely from a case study analysis as well as analysis of secondary sources, were formed during my professional experience working in the TVET sub-sector in Tanzania. The findings lead to the conclusion that the nature and structure of the curriculum as well as the teaching methodology mean the skills of the TVET graduates are inadequate to meet the demand from the labour market, especially in the paddy production sector. In addition, the study findings lead to a number of critical policy options to reduce skills gaps by refining the curriculum and pedagogy to ensure it is more demand driven and by ensuring that a mechanism is created linking supply and demand. Critical policy options include the need for a clearer and more systemic occupational analysis of the skills needed in paddy production -- such as the analysis provided in the Developing A Curriculum (DACUM) approach in order to ensure that the TVET curriculum is in alignment with the demanded occupational skills. To enhance the scientific and technological foundation of TVET, a strong focus will be required on high-order literacy and numeracy skills. The study also suggests that to establish a “knock-on effect”, youth who obtain skills from TVET institutions also need to be provided with appropriate leadership training during their TVET programs in preparation for disseminating knowledge and skills to other farmers in the field and leading change in agricultural practice. The training system needs to be more closely linked with employers and work places where knowledge and skill can be utilised.

Existing research (Guarnizo et al. 2003; Portes, 2001; Cohen and Sirkeci, 2005) has endeavoured to clarify the relationship between migrants' transnational activities and their integration into the host society. Although there are both positive and negative perspectives on this relationship, it remains unclear whether migrants' transnational activities are likely to help or hinder their integration into the host society (Vertovec, 2009). This thesis uses the lens of social capital and diaspora identity to shed light on the relationship between Indonesian migrants' transnational activities and their integration in a multi-ethnic town in South Korea. The influx of migrants from various countries has led to the creation of what is called ‘Borderless Village', where people have opportunities to build intercultural connections beyond their national group. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a group of Indonesian migrants, which themselves show social disjunctions in terms of region of origin, language, religious belief and cultural practices, this thesis examines the integration patterns of Indonesian immigrant groups in this town. In terms of whether transnational activities help or hinder integration in South Korea, I argue that both realities co-exist, and that the status of Wongok-Dong as a migrant enclave and the internally divided nature of the Indonesian migrant group itself are key factors in this regard. Indonesian migrants achieve integration among themselves by performing economic and socio-cultural transnational activities, thereby transcending divisions within the group. Although there are differences in terms of their capacity to conduct transnational activities that are shaped by each Indonesian immigrants' different types of social capital, they are able perform transnational activities through creating and utilising ‘hidden social capital'. This is generated when Indonesian migrants strategically reveal one of their identities, such as Indonesian, Muslim or other positions, rather than emphasising their regional origin in Indonesia to achieve their objectives such as pursuing economic profits, saving face and maintaining livelihood. Through mobilising these additional identities, most Indonesians can access resources that enable them to perform transnational activities – making international phone calls, occupying cultural spaces, participating in national celebrations – beyond their regional affiliations. In this regard, Indonesian migrants integrate into Wongok-Dong by performing transnational activities due to the features of the town as a migrant enclave. However, they are isolated from mainstream Korean society, as they only achieve integration into the multiethnic space of Wongok-Dong. Thus, this research adds crucial dimensions to theories of the relationship between migrants' transnational activities and integration into their host society through redefining both the features of the diaspora group and the role of social capital.