This thesis analyses the effect of father’s job displacement on his children’s occupational and educational choices. I use Finnish administrative data covering years 1989-2020 and identify downsizing as well as closing workplaces to find exogenous job losses. Despite identifying negative and persistent effects on displaced fathers, the found impact on their children’s career choices are limited and sensitive. I estimate that a paternal displacement decreases the probability of following father’s educational path by 0.5 percentage points. No effects on occupational mobility or educational applications are found. I establish pro-cyclical displacement costs for fathers that, however, are not found to translate into differences in the effects on the next generation.

This thesis project aims to target the increasing number of people who live, work and transit through the densely populated metropolises that, fused together, create megaregions. These individuals, an already big and ever increasing number of people, are the so-called super-commuters, members of the workforce whose commutes surpass the figures of 90 minutes or, alternatively, 145 km in a single-way.As it happens with others who live in the same geographical region, they experience the need or wish of working in the dense urban centres that offer plenty of job opportunities, but little housing opportunities. This lack of housing paired with its very high and ever increasing prices forces these people to disperse and to search for living places farther away from their workplaces, thus trading convenience and free time for long commutes. Super-commuting is indeed showing a growing trend, not only in the number of super-commuters themselves but also in the duration of commutes.Commutes are getting lengthier for a number of reasons, such as increasingly comfortable vehicles, technological advancements that help render commuting time either productive or entertaining.However, in a post-pandemic society, many companies are also offering their employees the chance to adopt hybrid work modes with more days spent working from home - which makes workers consider living farther away from their workplaces as they need to commute less (number of times). It is an undeniable fact that the longer the commute, the less free time one worker has, either for resting or doing something productive. It is also true that in an increasingly fast-paced technological world, people have also increasing difficulties in separating their professional and personal lives. Therefore, the approach of this thesis project goes through offering people the chance to make the most out of their commutes, so as to free more of their time when not commuting or working - time to spend with their loved ones or to be used to do whatever they would like. To achieve that, this project contemplates the use of autonomous technologies expected to become more widespread within the automotive industry; as by rendering vehicles autonomous would free people from driving and let them allocate their time to other tasks. This thesis project offers a holistic proposal of a premium commuting service targeted to super-commuters living and working within the Northern California megaregion. This service would connect peripheral communities directly to the Bay Area, where most companies are located, through a door-to-hub service.It focuses on how users of this service might experience their commutes by presenting case studies of three different types of professionals with diverse needs, and exploring how they would use it as a means of making their commutes as convenient and efficient as possible. The process herein exposed goes through the various stages of design development, from research to ideation and leading to a final proposal, consisting of a service, mobile booking app and exterior + interior design of a vehicle.

BACKGROUND: It is widely documented that people with a mobility disability are at increased risk of severe illness, morbidity, or mortality following a disaster. However, disaster risk is multifactorial and not simply a result of underlying conditions. There is a need to examine contributors to dis- ability experiences during a pandemic, and strategies to account for these in pandemic response. METHODS: Using grounded theory methodology, we employed iterative, inductive coding, and constant comparative methods. Sixteen people with a mobility disability from Ontario and Quebec, Canada, participated in 1-hour qualitative interviews (ages 20-86). Participants' disability etiology included stroke, multiple sclerosis, amputations, and other. RESULTS: The pandemic was a source of dis-ability for the whole population, making disability disparities more noticeable and highlighting the role of adaptive capacity in disaster resilience. Although COVID-19 compounded existing barriers faced by people with a mobility disability, participants were able to mobilize their assets (i.e., individual capacity, mobility assists, etc.), empowering them to take action to maintain autonomy. When the general population experienced barriers to social connection, adaptations to support resilience were at the forefront of policy decisions. New solutions, including digital infrastructure, demonstrated the potential to diminish existing barriers by providing accommodations to meet the accessibility needs of people with disability, especially for regular healthcare provider contact. CONCLUSION: The COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to break the cycle perpetuating health-related inequities. Pandemic planning, response, and recovery can be reformed toward disability-inclusiveness with systemic changes focused on human rights and physical and psychosocial needs of people with a mobility disability.

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Shenzhen is the fastest growing magacity in China, and one that is always young. It attracts workers with a large number of jobs in high-tech zones, but the lack of housing and the banning of illegal urban villages also reduces the possibilities for workers to settle. The governmental planning of the high-tech zone attempts to address the spatial separation of work and life in future. On this basis, this project aims to reshape the urban spatial relationship and achieve a better quality of urban settlement, from a human perspective, using urban mobility and green accessibility. This project focuses on three aspects of urban spatial relationships:1. Increase in housing supply and coexistence with work space;2. Increased transport diversity, reshaping the urban street hierarchy;3. An east-west axis and integrated green network dominated by green accessibility.

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Transport and mobilities contribute majorly to our global emissions of greenhouse gas, while at the same time is necessary for citizens to travel for jobs and recreation. A shift of more sustainable development is adopted within the EU and sustainable mobilities play a key part in this. Both for societal growth but also mitigation. Regional organizations usually take care of the questions of transport within the region, but how can local circumstances and municipal planning for a shift towards a more sustainable development in a northern environment look like? And what local circumstances need to be considered? Especially when there can be organizational limitations. This descriptive study aims to answer that through a deductive document analysis of official documents and interviews with officials from different municipalities, which is coded thematically from a theoretical framework of previous studies. In this process, the term “access to mobility” is also constructed to clarify what this study aims to describe within those broad fields. Circumstances that were present were found usually concluded in prolonged distances and complexities for alternative choices of mobilities than the car. On top of this measures were focused on decreasing distances and time, while at the same time encouraging citizens to use and value more sustainable mobilities, since these are seen to contribute to all dimensions of sustainable development.

Thesis advisor: Pablo Guerron / The dissertation examines how fiscal policies adjust to economic states in a growth model where productions are mobile across jurisdictions and the corresponding consequences. In my work, I study the properties of optimal state-level corporate and labor income tax rates and how shocks in the federal tax rates affect the economy; and I endogenize the federal-level fiscal policies in a Stackelberg game setting where the federal government is the leader and the states are the followers. In “Fiscal Competition and Federal Shocks”, I answer such the question of “how a shock to federal tax rate affect the macro-economy”. The innovation is that I take into account the effects of factor mobility, state-federal interaction, and state-state interaction on the transmission mechanism of the federal shocks. By using the U.S. data set, I find the evidence that state-level tax rates will respond to changes in federal tax rates (known as vertical competition) and the neighboring state's policies (known as horizontal competition). To rationalize this finding, I develop a two-region growth model with benevolent state governments, integrated capital market, and sticky migration. My quantitative result indicates that omitting the endogenous responses of state-level policies leads to significant difference in response to a federal shock. This means that the central policy make has to consider the intergovernmental fiscal relations when designing federal fiscal policies. In “Optimal Policies in a Federation”, I examine the optimal federal and state fiscal policies in a dynamic macro model with policy commitment, integrated capital market, and inter-state migration. In modeled governance system, the federal government is the Stackelberg leader, the state governments are the followers and take the leader's policies as given. In the interior-point steady-state, the overall tax rate on corporate income is zero. However, the leader and followers impose different tax rates. The leader levies a positive and high tax rate, the followers levy negative tax rates. The zero (overall) tax rate result holds when the states are heterogeneous in their TFPs. If the federal government has to impose the same labor income tax rate on the states, the federal tax rates are independent of the degree of inequality and each state has a zero overall corporate tax rate. IF the federal labor tax system is nonlinear, the states impose different tax rates. But the tax-base-weighted overall tax rate in the economy is still zero. In addition, I find that increasing the federal corporate tax rate is the optimal response to foreign country's TFP becomes higher. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.