This thesis seeks to predict the results of the presidential election in the United States, with a specific interest in swing states. I construct a methodology to predict the difference between the state and national two-party vote share for all 50 states plus D.C. using economic variables such as the change in the unemployment rate, the growth of real per capita Gross Domestic Product, Gallup poll ratings, and the ideology of the candidate. The methodology presented also allows the number of swing states to adjust between election years by giving each state its own coefficient on the difference between the state and national change in the unemployment rate. The resulting State-National Gap Model is then used to predict the two-party vote share for the Democrats using regression analysis with panel data for the elections from 1992-2008. My model is tested against the 2012 election and successfully predicts 49 out of 50 states as well as D.C.

Syftet med denna uppsats var att utifrån Berglunds (2001) fyra idealtypiska attityder undersöka vilka attityder andraårselever på gymnasiet hade till sitt kommande arbetsliv, med samma utgångspunkt ämnade vi också att undersöka vilka attityder arbetsgivare ville se vid en nyrekrytering. Med attityder till arbete avsågs individens värderingar av vad som var viktigt med arbete. De fyra idealtypiska attityderna innefattade instrumentell-, altruistisk-, individualistisk-, och materialistisk attityd. Det första urvalet bestod av 103 andraårselever på gymnasiet fördelade över el- och energiprogram och samhällsprogram. Det andra urvalet bestod av 23 strategiskt valda arbetsgivare fördelade mellan både offentlig- och privat sektor. Resultatet av vår kvantitativa undersökning visade att den dominerande attityden bland eleverna var den materialistiska attityden, både som sammanhållen attityd och som attitydkombination. Bland arbetsgivarna visade vår kvantitativa undersökning att den attityd som premierades var den individualistiska attityden, en attityd som endast återfanns bland samhällseleverna. Undersökningen visade också att det fanns tendenser till att el- och energielever hade en mer instrumentell attityd än samhällselever. / The purpose of this paper was to draw on Berglund's (2001) four ideal typical attitudes, to examine which attitudes senior students in high school had towards their future working life, with the same starting point we also intended to examine which attitudes employers wanted to see when recruiting. With attitudes towards work meaning the individuals values of what was important with work. The four ideal typical attitudes included instrumental-, altruistic-, individualistic-, and a materialistic attitude. The first sample consisted of 103 senior students in high school distributed over electricity- and energy programs and studies of social science programs. The second sample consisted of 23 strategically selected employers split between both the public and private sector. The results of the study was that the dominant attitude among the students was the materialistic attitude, both as a coherent attitude and as an attitude combination. Among employers, our quantitative survey showed that the preferred attitude was the individualistic attitude, an attitude which could only be found among the social science students. The study revealed that there was a tendency for electricity and energy students to have a more instrumental attitude than the social science students.

The aim of this study was to examine the view that officials involved in youth unemployment have on the significance of collaboration between organizations working with unemployed youth. The study was based on nine qualitative interviews with officials from PES offices and from municipalities such as job coaches. The results were analyzed based on qualitative content analysis. The analysis led to two different themes: conditions and the individual. In the analysis two different theories were used, new institutionalism and Lipsky's theory about street-level bureaucrats. The analysis led us to the conclusion that these officials find collaboration important both for their work and for the unemployed youth and that they collaborate with the individual’s interests in mind.

Geographic space is an important friction preventing the instantaneous matching of unemployed workers to job vacancies. Cities reduce spatial frictions by decreasing the average distance between potential match partners. Owing to these search efficiencies, theories of agglomeration predict that unemployed workers in larger labor markets find employment faster than observationally similar workers in smaller markets. Existing studies rely on cross-sectional variation in aggregate unemployment rates across spatially distinct labor markets to test for scale effects in job search. A major difficulty with these studies is that the unemployment rate is, at any given time, simultaneously the incidence and duration of unemployment. Therefore, conclusions about unemployment exits using the unemployment rate are confounded by transitions into unemployment. This dissertation examines the relationship between market scale unemployment duration for permanently laid off workers in the U.S. Using a large sample of individual unemployment spells in 259 MSAs, proportional hazard model estimates predict a negative relationship between market scale and the hazard of exiting unemployment. This effect is strengthened when space is explicitly controlled for and measured with greater precision. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that search efficiencies lead workers to increase their reservation wages. 2SLS estimates show that re-employment earnings for permanently laid off workers increase with market scale after controlling for endogenous search duration. These effects are robust to standard controls, as well as controls for local labor market conditions. These results challenge the view that search efficiencies lead to lower unemployment rates through faster job-finding rates.

This composition is an qualitative study about unemployment and working life. The point of the study has been to make a larger understanding how unemployment can perceive by the individual and how this person can see and plan for future working life. This has been study with help from 8 intervirws. The paticipants has been umeployed between  6 months and 5 years, and they have workt arleast 5 year before the unemployment. The study has show that it is many different components who contribute to how the individual perceive the time in unemployment and how the planning for the future looks like. The persons who has been intervirws perceive their psycal health as god,, even but unemployment.  The study has even show that all the persons in the study want to come out from the unemployment. All the persons in the study want to go back to the working life.

The aim of this qualitative study is to gain a deeper understanding of how young people whoare unemployed or have experienced unemployment, experience the situation and how theyapprehend themselves in relation to unemployment. I performed semi-structured interviewswith five young women and men. Three theoretical perspectives have been used for myanalysis, Marie Jahoda’s deprivation theory, Mikael Nordenmark´s PEN-model and HansBerglund’s action theory.The results show that the majority of the respondents perceive the situation as unemployed asdifficult and stressful. Four out of five have more or less felt depressed or sad. The depressionis described as a recurrent, not a permanent condition. Furthermore, the results show that thetime of unemployment is relevant to how the situation is perceived. Study findings alsosuggest that those who value work the most suffer most from not having a job. The result alsoindicates that several of the youths feel like the unemployment had a negative impact on theirconfidence and self-image. Four out of five respondents spent most of their time looking forjobs. Those who were actively looking for work were also relatively optimistic about theirchances of getting a job.

The paper investigates the relation between effective demand, income distribution and unemployment empirically. Its aim is to evaluate Keynesian, Kaldorian and neoclassical hypotheses about the determination of labor market variables. To do so, a vector autoregression model consisting of capital accumulation, capacity utilization, the profit share, unemployment and the growth of labor productivity is estimated. A general post-Keynesian model following the lines of Kalecki and Kaldor is presented and provides the specification for a structural VAR. The model is estimated for the USA, UK and France. (authors' abstract) / Series: Working Papers Series "Growth and Employment in Europe: Sustainability and Competitiveness"

The three chapters of my dissertation examine immigrant assimilation in the Canadian labour market. Through three levels of analysis, which are distinguished by the sample restrictions that are employed, I investigate immigrant labour force and job dynamics, immigrant propensity for self-employment, and immigrant wage assimilation, respectively. In the first chapter, I exploit recently-introduced immigrant identifiers in the Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the longitudinal dimension of these data to compare the labor force and job dynamics of Canada's native-born and immigrant populations. I am particularly interested in the role of job, as opposed to worker, heterogeneity in driving immigrant wage disparities and in how the paths into and out of jobs of varying quality compares between immigrants and the native-born. The main finding is that the disparity in immigrant job quality, which does not appear to diminish with years since arrival, reflects a combination of relatively low transitions into high-wage jobs and high transitions out of these jobs. The former result appears about equally due to difficulties obtaining high-wage jobs directly out of unemployment and in using low-wage jobs as stepping-stones. I find little or no evidence, however, that immigrant jobseekers face barriers to low-wage jobs. We interpret these findings as emphasizing the empirical importance of the quintessential immigrant anecdote of a low-quality "survival job" becoming a "dead-end job". The second chapter analyzes immigrant choice of self-employment versus paid employment. Using the Canadian Census public use microdata files from 1981 to 2006, I update the Canadian literature on immigrant self-employment by examining changes in the likelihood of self-employment across arrival cohorts of immigrants and how self-employment rates evolve in the years following migration to Canada. This study finds that new immigrants, who arrived between 1996 and 2005, turned to self-employment at a faster rate than the earlier cohorts and that immigrants become increasingly likely to be self-employed as they spend more time in Canada. More important, I examine immigrant earnings outcomes relative to the native-born, instead of within, sectors and thus explore the extent to which a comparative advantage in self-employment, captured by the difference in potential earnings between the self- and paid-employment sectors, can explain the tremendous shift toward self-employment in the immigrant population. The results show that the earnings advantage between the self- and the paid-employment sectors accounts for the higher likelihood of self-employment for traditional immigrants in the years following migration. However, the potential earnings difference cannot explain the reason that non-traditional immigrants are more likely to be self-employed as they consistently lose an earnings advantage in the self-employment sector relative to the paid-employment sector. My paper suggests that immigrants may face barriers to accessing paid-employment, or immigrants are attracted to self-employment by non-monetary benefits. Lastly, in the third chapter, studies which estimate separate returns to foreign and host-country sources of human capital have burgeoned in the immigration literature in recent years. In estimating separate returns, analysts are typically forced to make strong assumptions about the timing and exogeneity of human capital investments. Using a particularly rich longitudinal Canadian data source, I consider to what extent the findings of the Canadian literature may be driven by biases arising from errors in measuring foreign and host-country sources of human capital and the endogeneity of post-migration schooling and work experience. The main finding is that the results of the current literature by and large do not appear to be driven by the assumptions needed to estimate separate returns using the standard data sources available.

The advent of urbanization has paved the way for the emergence of varied social problems amongst which is youth unemployment. The occurrence of youth unemployment varies across countries with its nature and extent been determined by the local context in which it prevails. Youth unemployment in Cameroon is a major problem prevailing in urban areas in the country, based on the high rate of unemployed young people in the country. This study was set to analyze the prevalence of youth unemployment as an urban social problem with the goal of providing a better understanding of its prevalence. The problem was analyzed around the individual and structural perspectives with the aid of the individualization concept and human capital concept. Three themes constituted the central issues that guided the study of the problem; they are; views on causes, its impact, and measures adopted to address it. The premise behind these themes was geared towards outlining governmental as well as public opinion on the causes of the problem, as well as analyzing the measures the government has adopted or set in place in a bid to mitigate the occurrence of unemployment amongst youth.

The aim of this study was to compare unemployed and workers' life situation and the way they cope with different situations and to determine their degree of Type A. We used two different instruments: Friedman and Rosenman’s Type A-test and Carver’s cope test. The total number of respondents amounted to 169 participants. The participants were selected from a convenience sample at the employment service and from three different companies. Our hypotheses were that social support, Type A-behavior, age and education affect coping with unemployment or a difficult life situation. Our results confirmed the hypothesis partially. Women reported more social support than men, which affects how they are dealing with a difficult life situation. Unemployment and other difficult life situations are coped better with increasing age, and the use of problem-focused cope increases with higher education. / Syftet med studien var att jämföra arbetslösas och arbetandes livssituation, deras sätt att hantera olika situationer samt att ta reda på vilken grad av Typ A-nivå de hade. Vi har använt oss av två olika mätinstrument; Friedman och Rosenmans Typ A-test och Carvers copingtest där det totala antalet respondenter uppgick till 169 stycken. Våra deltagare valdes ut genom bekvämlighetsurval från arbetsförmedlingen samt från tre olika företag. Våra hypoteser var att socialt stöd, Typ A-beteende, ålder och utbildning påverkar hantering av arbetslöshet eller en svår livssituation. Vårt resultat bekräftade hypoteserna delvis. Män har lägre socialt stöd än kvinnor vilket påverkar hantering av en svår situation. Arbetslöshet och andra svåra händelser hanteras bättre ju äldre man blir. Vidare ökar användandet av problemfokuserad coping med högre utbildning.