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Temporary Employment: The Spanish Experience, Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes

Dissertations

In an effort to promote employment flexibility and reduce the unemployment rate, Spanish authorities deregulated temporary employment in the early 1980s. Nonetheless, the deregulation of temporary employment took place at the margin, favoring the development of a dual labor market in which temporary workers constituted a second class of workers involuntarily employed and enduring limited advancement opportunities.

Using data from the Spanish labor force survey, Spanish temporary employment and job transitions into and out of temporary employment are examined. The study first evaluates the incidence of Spanish temporary employment and its involuntary and demand-led character. Secondly, the analysis reveals temporary …

Market Reaction To Seasoned Equity Offerings: The Relevance Of Leverage, Growth Opportunities, And Corporate Structure, Mojib U. Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Empirical work on the market's reaction to seasoned equity offerings has rarely considered the impact of the issuing firm's leverage level or its corporate structure. This work is an attempt to include these parameters in order to better understand the market's reaction to such issue announcements.

The current finance literature recognizes the fact that leverage plays an important role in assessing the value of the firm. Leverage has both negative and positive impacts on the value of a firm (McConnell and Servaes, 1995), and thus, has both negative and positive impacts on the market's reaction to seasoned equity offerings. This …

A Cross-Sectional Analysis Of The Determinants Of Corporate Share Repurchases, Kenneth M. Washer

Doctoral Dissertations

The objective of this study is to determine which motives play a significant role in determining the extent of a firm's repurchasing activity. For firms repurchasing through the open market, the motives include taking advantage of perceived undervaluation, increasing financial leverage, distributing cash to shareholders, and reducing agency costs. For firms using a tender offer, the motives include taking advantage of perceived undervaluation and having the ability to significantly increase financial leverage. Also, the hypothesis that the perceived undervaluation motive is stronger for smaller firms is tested. Three censored regression models are employed, and each model's explanatory variables represent commonly …

Measurement Of Hospital Performance: Environmental And Organizational Factors Associated With Cost, Debra Kay Dierksmeier Anderson

Health Services Research Dissertations

As U.S. health care expenditures top the $1 trillion mark, there is increased interest in measuring the performance of health care providers. For bottom line oriented payors such as government and business, the focus is on measuring cost. As hospitals account for over one-third of health care expenses, hospital cost per admission is a common measure of performance.

Many environmental and organizational factors come into play in determining hospital cost per admission. This research examines several of these factors, using Raymond Zammuto's model of organizational effectiveness assessment. Using Zammuto's framework, this research looks at the relationship of social, physical, and …

An Application Of The Capital Asset Pricing Model To The Egyptian Stock Market, Islam Abdel Azim Azzam

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Skill, Tenure And Size As Determinants Of Wages In A Blue Chip Market, Nevine Esam Zaki

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Glens Falls, New York: An Industrial Perspective, Kathleen M. Tarrant

MALS Final Projects, 1995-2019

This paper examines the decline and changing nature of work in the manufacturing sector in a variety of industries located in the city of Glens Falls, New York. A small industrial city, Glens Falls has experienced an overall decline in population, the number of industries, plant locations, and total manufacturing employment. An examination of eleven companies, including the history and nature of operations, confirms a cycle of manufacturing job creation and job destruction which ebbs and flows based on the restructuring activities of companies including shifting, consolidating and closing plants as they strive to maintain and increase profitability. In the …

Money: Commodity Versus Fiat, Jenifer Karen Byington

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Most economists would agree that money is a very important part of an economy. It allows people to trade and exchange freely and much more easily than if the economy were left with only the use of barter. Without money it would be necessary for each person to trade one good for another good. It would take time for each person to decide how much of one good would be equivalent to the other good, and each party would need to want what the other party has to offer. The purpose of this paper is to examine different types of …

Constructing True Cost Of Living Indexes For Egypt, Shireen Abdel Hameed Al-Demerdashi

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Jordan's Peace Dividend, Amal Abdel Fattah Kandeel

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Economic Impact Of Federal Land On County Governments In Utah, Daniel C. Hope

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

County governments cannot assess property taxes on federal land, yet local governments are required to provide similar services as they do on all other areas of the county. Federal government payment programs have been implemented to compensate county governments for the expenditures incurred due to federal land.

In the mid-1960s, the Public Land Law Review Commission implemented and completed a study which analyzed whether selected individual states and counties were being compensated for the expenditures incurred on federal land. It also estimated tax revenues local governments would receive if federally owned acreage was privately owned. The study then compared these …

Essays On The Impact Of Foreign Aid On Economic Growth And Development: The Case Of Jordan, Jamal G. Husein

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation examines the role of foreign aid in economic growth and development of Jordan. The flow of foreign capital takes two main forms: private foreign investment, mostly foreign direct investment by large multinational corporations, and public development assistance (foreign aid) from both individual national governments and multinational donor agencies. The distinguishing characteristic of foreign aid is the concessional element. In this dissertation, recent techniques and advances in time-series analysis are used in the empirical section of Chapters 2 and 3, i.e., vector autoregression (VAR), impulse response functions, and variance decompositions. In the fourth chapter, we use a nonlinear three-stage …

The Impacts Of Privatization And Government Intervention In The Economy: An Empirical Analysis (Two Essays), Tayseer Al-Sumadi

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In this dissertation, we provide empirical assessment of government involvement in economic activities. This assessment is done within the framework of a two-part strategy. In the first part, we evaluate the effects of the government size on the overall rate of economic growth of a group of 30 developing countries. This approach can be regarded as macroeconomic in the sense that the economywide growth is the subject of investigation. In the second part, we conducted a comparative study of technical efficiency between privately owned and publicly owned companies in the international oil industry. We refer to this approach as microeconomic …

Essays On The Determination Of Equilibrium Real Exchange Rate For Taiwan, 1981-1993, Mei-Ling Chen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Taiwan is one of the four smaller Asian economies. Before 1960, Taiwan pursued industrialization policies by limiting imports of manufactured goods, gradually adopting an open and outward-oriented economic policy, believing it would expend exports and yield gained ground.

With this increasingly open and outward-oriented economic policy as the background, we will study the real exchange rate (RER) misalignment in Taiwan over the period 1981-93. The RER plays a critical role in maintaining external competitiveness. Hence, from the policy point of view, this rate should not be allowed to deviate much from its equilibrium level. Since the equilibrium real exchange rate …

Essays On Scale Economies And Efficiency In Public Education, Kalyan Chakraborty

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Efficiency in public education is a significant issue in the United States. Nationwide, real expenditure per student increased 8% per year between 1960 and 1993, but output as measured by standardized test scores has not increased and in some cases (i.e., the verbal SAT [Scholastic Achievement Test] score) has declined. One explanation is that resources are not being utilized efficiently either in the technical or allocative sense. Also, the issue is important because substantial savings are possible by consolidation of schools and/or districts.

This dissertation explores efficiency by measuring technical efficiency at the school district level from four perspectives. The …

Relative Gains Problem And Case Studies Of Economic Cooperation In East Asia, Ping Deng

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Relative gains problem basically means unequal cooperative payoffs disproportionately favoring partners. With the relative gains problem widely accepted as a serious impediment to international cooperation, some scholars have theoretically argued or modeled several conditions that are most likely to foster a state's sensitivity to relative gains and thus substantially affect the prospects for cooperation. But little empirical work has been done to date. The central objective of this dissertation is to test whether those theoretical propositions can be supported by empirical evidence. For this purpose, we have deducted three hypotheses: (1) If a state faces military threat and zero-sum political …

Essay I. Intra-Industry Contagion And Competitive Effects Associated With Corporate Liquidation Announcements: Does Shareholder Governance Influence The Results? Essay Ii. Investors' Pricing Of Exchange Rate Risk In U. S. Firms That File For Bankruptcy, J. Terry Ray

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Essay I. Intra-industry contagion and competitive effects associated with corporate liquidation announcements: Does shareholder governance influence the results? This essay extends earlier research by investigating the role shareholder governance may play in the abnormal stock returns of the liquidating firms' competitors. The empirical model used for analyzing the abnormal returns includes variables to capture the influence of: leverage, Tobin's q, the Herfindahl index, Book Equity-to-Market Equity ratio, the level of institutional stock ownership, and the level of stock ownership by insiders.

The conclusion is leverage of the liquidating firm as well as its competitors is the major factor affecting the …

Institutions, Developmental Alliances, And Economic Development In Korea And Brazil (1950-1985), Charles Paul Winebarger

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

This paper compares the development of Korea and Brazil, 1950-85. These newly industrialized countries developed at above-average rates among less developed countries. Korea developed more rapidly than Brazil. The paper contends that institutions, interest groups (especially firms) and the state, enter into developmental alliances. Alliances affect policies. Policies, then, affect development.

Findings reveal interesting trends in the 1950s' democracies of the cases. Both countries had semi-autonomous states, equivocally committed to industrialization. Industry was the growth point in each. Korea used local firms to industrialize; Brazil used foreign firms. In both cases, the state allied itself with firms. Policy mostly favored …

Corruption: Friend Or Foe? A Study On The Effect Of Corruption On Economic Growth, Dalia Mahmoud Al Arousy

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Household Saving Behavior And The Real Interest Rate: An Empirical Study, Harsha Thirumurthy

Honors Papers

This paper tests several hypotheses about the responsiveness of household saving to the real interest rate. It tests how the interest responsiveness in a country depends on certain common macroeconomic and demographic variables. These include per-capita income, the income distribution, the pervasiveness of borrowing constraints, the degree of financial depth, and demographic characteristics. The rationale for considering these variables is provided in the context of a theoretical model of household saving behavior, which then leads to the estimation of a structural equation for household saving.

State, Capital And Workers Protests In Egypt, Tamer Abdel-Kader

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Modeling The Economic Growth Of Greece, Karolos A. Alexakos

Honors Theses

The objective of this project is to use an econometric model to examine economic growth in Greece. Using a growth model to investigate a country's economy one can obtain a more complete picture of the historical growth experience of a particular country by pinpointing the underlying causes for growth and recession at particular time periods. My main objective is to thus construct a growth model for the Greek economy, which is based on Solow's theory of economic growth. Solow was one of the first economists that attempted to examine growth within an economy through the use of a well structured …

A New Approach To Expectation Theory: Rationality Revisited, Tamas Forgacs

Masters Theses

Expectations play an important role in economics. Traditionally two major branches of expectation theory are distinguished: that of adaptive and rational expectations. This study sets out the goal of investigating inflationary expectations based on real world experiences. The model proposed and tested here abandons the traditional fixed-time-interval-update models for a non-fixed-time-interval-update model. Although the penalty function attached to each error is still subject to debate, it is shown that by reacting with faster updates to errors in expectations economic agents achieve more precise expectations compared to those of a fix time interval update model. We also find the model rational …

"In The Eye Of All Trade": Maritime Revolution And The Transformation Of Bermudian Society, 1612-1800, Michael J. Jarvis

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This study examines the settlement of the British colony of Bermuda in 1612 and its development to 1800. Drawing heavily on primary sources, it is the first social and economic history of the island and an exploration of trade and migration within a pan-colonial network. The purpose of this dissertation is to bring Bermuda's history to the attention of colonial historians and to map connections between Europe's colonies within the Atlantic world.;Part I examines Bermuda's initial settlement and its development under the Somers Island Company. The first English colony to successfully cultivate tobacco and to import slave labor, Bermudian society …

The Agroecologies Of A Southern Community: The Tye River Valley Of Virginia, 1730-1860, Lynn A. Nelson

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The farmers of piedmont Virginia's Tye River Valley adapted agriculture to a commercial frontier during the eighteenth century. This 'frontier agroecosystem' optimized labor returns by exploiting the stored fertility of mature ecosystems at the expense of conservation, but proved vulnerable to population growth and soil exhaustion. Out-migration increased after the Revolution, and economic growth was stymied by limited capital and consumer formation. The frontier agroecosystem could not provide the reliable commercial returns needed to promote development or stable neighborhoods.;During the early 1800s, prominent planters demanded that Virginia farming be intensified---that land productivity be maximized, rather than labor productivity. This strategy, …

Small And Micro Enterprises' Assistance Programs In Egypt, Reem Ahmed Abd El-Megeed

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Increases In Labor Supply On Real Wages, Christopher M. Jahnke

Masters Theses

The working class citizen is an important part of the United States. However, the manufacturing worker is getting paid less in real terms now, than in 1975. Because of this, working harder for less has become the battle cry of the blue collar worker. This study is focused on examining the decline in average real hourly wage in manufacturing.

The hypothesis of this paper is that large increases in female labor force participation rates have caused average real wages to fall since 1966. This hypothesis is examined through multiple regression analysis based on a model with three independent variables. The …