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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Three Essays In Public Economics, Joylynn Michelle Pruitt Jan 2022

Three Essays In Public Economics, Joylynn Michelle Pruitt

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This dissertation presents three chapters related to each other in their application to public economics. In the study of how utility-maximizing or goal-seeking units achieve economic outcomes, this dissertation presents results for a diverse range of agents including prosecutors and liberal arts colleges. Co-authored with Dr. Bryan McCannon of West Virginia University, the first chapter examines an interesting feature of prosecutor elections, where the pool of potential challengers to an incumbent comes primarily from subordinates within the office. We develop a signaling model that analyzes whether entry into the political race by a subordinate provides voters with useful information. In …


The Historical And Legal Creation Of A Fissured Workplace: The Case Of Franchising, Brian Callaci Oct 2019

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 …