Digital Commons Network^™

Atelier Interloper, Isabel Jane Marvel

Masters Theses

Architects frequently specify toxic materials, like fiberglass insulation, for construction projects, materials they would never touch with bare hands, let alone wear as garments. So why incorporate such harmful substances into our buildings? Atelier Interloper, a nimble fabrication studio, intervenes in job sites and manufacturer waste streams, reclaiming industrial materials that are no longer usable at building scale but are suitable for clothing. The premier collection of garments draws inspiration from workwear and is crafted from industrial materials such as Tyvek and 100% recycled denim insulation. In outfitting the body with these materials, this thesis work brings visibility to substances …

The Future Of Roe And The Gender Pay Gap: An Empirical Assessment, Itay Ravid, Jonathan Zandberg

Indiana Law Journal

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court upheld a Mississippi law that prohibits nearly all abortions after the fifteenth week of pregnancy and overruled the holding in Roe v. Wade. Among the many arguments raised in Dobbs in an attempt to overturn Roe, the State of Mississippi argued that due to “the march of progress” in women’s role in society, abortion rights are no longer necessary for women to participate equally in economic life. It has also been argued that there is no empirical support to the relationship between abortion rights and women’s economic success in society. …

Grabbing The Paycheck: A Glimpse Into The Modern Economic Livelihoods Of Xe Máy Grab Drivers In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Maddie Davis

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Woven into the very fabric of urban life in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam is commuting via motorcycle (Vietnamese: xe máy). The versatility of xe máy can be witnessed in the surge of rush hour traffic, the shipment of a great variety and quantity of goods, and the crunch of people in order to get the whole family atop a single bike. Due to xe máy as the primary way much of the population gets around, Ho Chi Minh City’s transportation infrastructure and traffic patterns are highly conducive to this method of transit. Resulting from these favorable conditions, a multitude …

Three Essays On Social Justice Issues: Health, Gender, And Policing, Travis B. Campbell

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation empirically examines three pressing social justice issues in the United States. In the first chapter, titled "Black Lives Matter's Effect on Police Lethal Use-of-force," I explore the influence of Black Lives Matter protests on police lethal use-of-force. A difference-in-differences design finds census places with protests experienced a 15% to 20% decrease in police homicides from 2014 through 2019, around 300 fewer deaths. This decrease was prominent when protests were large or frequent. Potential mechanisms behind the reduction include police agencies obtaining body-worn cameras to curtail force and depolicing following a so-called `Ferguson Effect.' Fewer property crimes, but more …

Changes In Work Hours During The Covid-19 Pandemic By Sex, Marital Status, And Parental Status, Margaret Hayes

Honors Theses

In the past several decades, there has been a cultural movement towards women being employed in the labor force rather than working in the home. With the Covid-19 pandemic, as many workers began to work from home, boundaries between home and work became less clear. Using pooled cross-sectional data from the 2019-2020 American Time Use Survey I examine how the work hours of different groups were impacted during the pandemic, with respect to sex, marital status, and parental status. I find that work hours decreased most significantly for partnered mothers who did not work from home. Partnered mothers likely reduced …

Cotton: A Historiographical And Instructional Exploration: 1835-2020, Chad Joseph Rosenbloom

History - Master of Arts in Teaching

I.Synthesis Essay……………………………...2

II.Primary Documents and Headnotes……...36

III.Textbook Critique…………………………...45

IV.New Textbook Entry………………………..49

V.Bibliography………………………………….53

Database Formation Of Labor Profiles In Upskilling And Reskilling Programs To Prepare The Philippine Labor Force For The 4ir, Breanna Michaela S. Alaras, Malakai Rei F. Feliciano, Salian Idhanth, Abijah Kathryn B. Sta Ana

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

The policy focuses on data management of opportunities for upskilling/reskilling and the profile management of individual laborers’ professional information to effectively integrate the influence of technology on day-to-day life (Schwab, 2016). Laborers that register onto the platform will be matched with programs that can help them meet demands that emerged due to the evolution of their job description. The registration is done to make workers capable of integrating new technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) into their workflow. Reskilling and upskilling can evolve operators of the past into “smart operators” that can work with augmented reality, virtual reality, and …

Budgetary Obstacles To Police Reform: The Case Of San Francisco, Hayden Anderson

Master's Projects and Capstones

In response to the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement issued a statement calling on cities to Defund the Police. The event sparked a nationwide reckoning that has reshaped the narratives and strategies for remedying the racial bias and police brutality apparent in the criminal justice system. The shift in police reform efforts embraces notions guiding police budgeting decisions. Today's advocates are transforming their approach to police reform to include budgeting decisions by promoting a municipal practice known as police budget reform. This Capstone explores the feasibility of successful police budget reform under current …

The Digital Revolution Revisited: Artificial Intelligence & Employment, Nicholas Lavy

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a quickly advancing technology that has the potential to displace a great deal of workers. Unlike past automation-based technologies, I find that high skilled labor is more impacted by AI than lower skilled labor. In order to analyze the impact that AI will have on the labor market, I utilize a fixed effects model for a historical case of automation’s impact on employment and a fitted parameter methodology to analyze the careers most and least exposed to artificial intelligence. My results suggest that an increase in exposure to automation technologies by one percentile leads to a …

Covid-19 Pandemic And Nepal: Issues And Perspectives, Basu Sharma, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

Asta-Ja USA and Asta-Ja RDC published the book “Issues and Perspective on the Covid-19 and Nepal” in December 2020. Edited by Basu Sharma and Ambika P. Adhikari, the book contains 12 papers by 17 authors. The 173-page book is a part of Asta-Ja’s Occasional Paper Series and addresses some of the key impacts of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic in Nepal, and proposes some policy recommendations to mitigate those impacts. The book covers the areas of how agriculture, food production, employment, urban planning, economy, public health and research activities are impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. The authors review the pandemic’s impact …

Miamian Meets Mariel Boatlift Refugees: A Reevaluation Of The Effect Of The Mariel Boatlift, Derrick Lee

Theses and Dissertations

In the 1980s, a boatlift brought 125,000 Cuban refugees to Miami, known as the Mariel Boatlift. Using data from David Roodman’s blog and from National Bureau Economic Research and the synthetic control method, I examine the effect of the Mariel Boatlift on low-educated female non-Hispanic ages 18-65’s wages. The results suggest there is little to no effect of the Mariel Boatlift on the wages of low-educated female non-Hispanic aged 18-65.

How Did Medicaid Expansion Affect The Provider Labor Market?, Aaron Wu

Honors Theses

One provision of the Affordable Care Act was to expand Medicaid eligibility for a greater number of low-income patients. The resulting increase in demand for care was largely explored, but the effect of the 2014 Medicaid expansion on the physician and advanced practitioner labor market has not been well researched by economists. Using pooled cross-sectional data from the 2010 – 2018 American Community Surveys, this paper examines whether the Medicaid expansion has caused notable changes in physician, physician assistant, and nurse practitioner hours, compensation, and overall employment. The literature shows that practices that employ nurse practitioners are far more likely …

The Historical And Legal Creation Of A Fissured Workplace: The Case Of Franchising, Brian Callaci

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the consequences of institutional change in capitalist firms, focusing on vertical dis-integration, the legal boundaries of the firm and what David Weil has called workplace "fissuring," in which corporations place intermediaries (subcontractors, temp agencies, or franchisees) between themselves and workers, often with negative consequences for workers. It focuses specifically on franchising, a type of fissured workplace in which one firm outsources retail operations to smaller, legally independent franchisees. The first chapter uses archival sources to identify the legal and policy changes driving workplace fissuring in the franchising context: specifically the relaxing of antitrust prohibitions on vertical restraints …

Public Authority And Private Prisons: How Private Prison Labor Contributes To National Employment Precarity, Kaitlyn Oder

International Political Economy Theses

Private uses of prison labor are illegal internationally, and not without reason. A lack of public oversight and regulations of wages mean that prison labor is often exploited in exchange for increased profitability for private prisons and sometimes the private companies they contract with. This paper will explicate the ways in which private uses of prison labor contribute to wage and employment precarity and ultimately cost numerous non incarcerated low wage individuals in the United States their jobs and livelihoods. It offers potential policy solutions and paths forward for new research to better link the sociological and economic considerations of …

Anticompetitive Mergers In Labor Markets, Ioana Marinescu, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Mergers of competitors are conventionally challenged under the federal antitrust laws when they threaten to lessen competition in some product or service market in which the merging firms sell. Mergers can also injure competition in markets where the firms purchase. Although that principle is widely recognized, very few litigated cases have applied merger law to buyers. This article concerns an even more rarefied subset, and one that has barely been mentioned. Nevertheless, its implications are staggering. Some mergers may be unlawful because they injure competition in the labor market by enabling the post-merger firm anticompetitively to suppress wages or salaries. …

Immigration Policy Today, Susan Pozo

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Vocational Training Programs And Youth Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence From Nepal, S Chakravarty, M Lundberg, Plamen Nikolov, J Zenker

Economics Faculty Scholarship

Lack of skills is arguably one of the most important determinants of high levels of unemployment and poverty. In response, policymakers often initiate vocational training programs in efforts to enhance skill formation among the youth. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we examine a large youth training intervention in Nepal. We find, twelve months after the start of the training program, that the intervention generated an increase in non-farm employment of 10 percentage points (ITT estimates) and up to 31 percentage points for program compliers (LATE estimates). We also detect sizable gains in monthly earnings largely driven by women who start self-employment …

La Pena Negra: Mexican Women, Gender, And Labor During The Bracero Program, 1942-1964, Mayra Lizette Avila

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Most research on México and the Bracero Program has centered on the experiences of men. The scholarship details their decision to leave México, their experiences crossing the border and working in the fields, and their return migration home. "La Pena Negra: Woman, Gender, and Labor, During the Bracero Program, 1942-1964" adds to Bracero scholarship by looking at how the Mexican consulate dealt with Bracero treatment and death. However, the program did not only impact male laborers, but their spouses and family who they left behind in México. Women and families' survival depended on the female ability to adapt and negotiate …

Opioids And Unemployment, David Robinson

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

There has been a ton of research in economics about the effects of drugs on the employment status of individuals. These papers have looked at the effects mainly pertaining to Marijuana and Cocaine, however this paper will be examining the effects of the opioid Heroin. As a first of its kind paper I will examine the relationship between employment and heroin use. To test this connection I have compiled data from the National Survey on Drug Abuse and Health. Through the use of two econometric models: OLS and Two Stage Least Squares models I will uncover the connection we can …

Automation, Work, And Ideology: The Next Industrial Revolution And The Transformation Of "Labor", Anthony Jack Knowles Ii

Masters Theses

Over the last several decades, scholars and commentators from a variety of different fields, expertise, and ideological positions have written on automation technologies and their potential to cause technological unemployment. As a sociological analysis and critical examination of how experts ideologically frame these issues, this thesis demonstrates that ideology plays a crucial role in the revived debate over automation and technological displacement. Weberian ideal types are developed to demonstrate how three major ideological positions—liberal, conservative, and radical—approach and frame the link between automation, technological displacement, and the potential for technological unemployment. The qualitative tools of ideal type construction and theme …

Trade Union Trade-Offs: Unions, Voters, And The Rise Of Right-Wing Populism, Kim Gabbitas

Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference on the European Union

Trade union membership in European Union member states has been in decline for decades, which has many concerned about the future of workers’ rights. While existing work examines the reasons for this decline, my research shifts the focus from union density to the functions unions serve and how these functions affect and are affected by changing electoral behavior. I examine the rise of right-wing populist movements in Europe and how these movements and the challenges today’s labor unions face can be traced to the same underlying forces. I argue that, as the relevance of trade unions declines for blue-collar workers, …

Network Effects On Labor Contracts Of Internal Migrants In China- A Spatial Autoregressive Model, Badi H. Baltagi, Ying Deng, Xiangjun Ma

Center for Policy Research

This paper studies the fact that 37 percent of the internal migrants in China do not sign a labor contract with their employers, as revealed in a nationwide survey. These contract-free jobs pay lower hourly wages, require longer weekly work hours, and provide less insurance or on-the-job training than regular jobs with contracts. We find that the co-villager networks play an important role in a migrant’s decision on whether to accept such insecure and irregular jobs. By employing a comprehensive nationwide survey in 2011 in the spatial autoregressive logit model, we show that the common behavior of not signing contracts …

The Rise Of The Maquiladoras And Crimes In Mexico, Christelle K. Bamona

Master's Theses

While it is generally argued that a stronger labor market is negatively associated with crime, there exists a “consensus of doubt” around the relationship between employment and crime. This paper examines the impact of the rise of female labor participation in manufacturing on various types of crimes in Mexico from 1998 to 2012. A fixed effects specification and an instrumental variable approach with regional and time fixed effects are employed to compare the crime rates in municipalities that were heavily exposed to local factory openings to municipalities that did not receive a labor shock of the same magnitude. By introducing …

Garment Workers In Kentucky Oral History Project (Fa 865), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project FA 865. Interviews conducted by Lisa Karen Miller containing details about the lives of garment workers in Kentucky and Tennessee. Some of the topics included were technological changes, job layoffs, and labor unions.

Making The Male Manager: Can Non-Cognitive Skills Explain The Glass Ceiling?, Nora Paget Harrington

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Abstract: This project examines whether men and women’s non-cognitive skills —or personality characteristics— influence their respective occupational attainment. I take an interdisciplinary approach to inform my hypothesis by incorporating psychological and sociological theories on the production and reproduction of gender roles in order to understand why men and women may systematically differ along some personality dimensions. I use linear probability and probit models to measure the effect of the non-cognitive traits, locus of control, self-esteem, and risk tolerance on the probability of being a manager. In both models I find that an internal locus of control, high self-esteem, and high …

Still Here: Life In A New York Garment Factory, Veronika Bondarenko

Capstones

After the majority of clothing production jobs left the US for Asia in the 1990s, a new market of smaller factories that employ mostly immigrant women in their forties and fifties to create high-end clothes with a “Made in the USA” label emerged. But as factories struggle to survive in New York, large numbers of workers still endure long hours, on-job injuries, and lack of overtime pay in the name of homegrown fashion — often with little oversight.

http://lifeinanewyorkgarmentfactory.info

Three Essays On Sustainable Development In China: Social, Economic And Environmental Aspects, Ying Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

The first essay focuses on the role of the hukou (i.e. Household Registration System) with full awareness of the economic system it operates under, and the development model it assists. I find that hukou’s main role in the planned economy was to assist socialist industrialization while averting the Lewis development model, a development strategy based on unlimited supply of labors from the rural sector, largely adopted in developing countries. In the market reform period, hukou performed exactly the opposite function, which is to assist the Lewis model based on the unlimited supply of rural surplus labor “released” from the …

The Effects Of Globalization On An Emerging Economy: The Case Of South Africa, Oluwasheyi S. Oladipo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how globalization influences selected aspects of an emerging economy, using South Africa as a case study. The dissertation consists of three chapters: two microeconomic studies and one macroeconomic paper on the effects of globalization on some of the factors affecting economic growth. One micro paper explores the impacts of openness on inequality (Chapter 1), another investigates the impacts of trade liberalization on manufacturing sector wages (Chapter 2), and the macro study, which is the final chapter, examines the effects of inflation targeting on exchange rate pass through to domestic prices (Chapter 3).

In 1994, apartheid ended in …

James Livingston Interview, Jennifer Thomson

Bucknell: Occupied

Jennifer Thomson, assistant professor of History at Bucknell University, interviews James Livingston, professor at Rutgers University in the department of History about his new book tentatively entitled F--- Work. Thomson and Livingston discuss cultural ideas about work and full employment. Livingston describes the cultural changes necessary for the adoption of ideas related to transfer payments.

“Men Of Good Timber”: An Archaeological Investigation Of Labor In Michigan’S Upper Peninsula, Aaron Howe

Masters Theses

This study approaches the material assemblage of Coalwood, a cordwood camp that operated from 1900-1912 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, with a dialectal method and a theory of internal relations in order to understand how daily life was produced and reproduced. Common sense notions often see home and work as separate entities that only relate to one another externally. My archaeological and historical research abstracts domestic labor as a set of social relations that are dialectically and internally connected to the processes of capital accumulation. My archaeological analysis concludes that both productive and reproductive labor was conducted within the home and …