Labor Economics Commons^™

Covid-19 And Nevada Counties: Employment Data, May 2019 And May 2021, Joshua Padilla, Katie M. Gilbertson, William E. Brown Jr.

Economic Development & Workforce

This fact sheet displays county-level employment data and unemployment rates for 17 counties in Nevada, as reported by The Daily Yonder article “Rural Employment Grew in May, but Fewer People Are Seeking Jobs” in July 2021. Bill Bishop and Tim Marema compiled data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for each county in the United States for May 2019 and May 2021.

Covid-19: Creative Class Job Loss In The Mountain West, Katie M. Gilbertson, Kelliann Beavers, Peter Grema, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Economic Development & Workforce

This fact sheet summarizes Mountain West data on creative economy job losses in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, as reported in a recent Brookings report “Lost Art: Measuring COVID-19’s Devastating Impact on America’s Creative Economy.” Richard Florida and Michael Seman discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on job losses in “creative industries, which are comprised of firms and establishments that produce goods and services relating to music, film, design, advertising, fashion, art, and more.”

Domestic Workers In The Mountain West, Olivia K. Cheche, Saha Salahi, Katie M. Gilbertson, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr., Eshaan Vakil

Economic Development & Workforce

This fact sheet explores the number of domestic workers employed in the Mountain West (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah), as originally reported in the Economic Policy Institute’s “Domestic Workers Chartbook.” Data for domestic worker median wages compared to the median wages of nondomestic workers are also included.

The Insertion Of Syrian Refugees In The Egyptian Labor Market: With Special Focus On Food And Restaurants Sector, Mai Ali Hassan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is about the insertion of Syrian refugees in the Egyptian labor market. It specifically focuses on this insertion in the food and restaurants sector. It reviews the theoretical literature that tackled the economic integration of refugees and asylum seekers. It also examines the legal framework governing refugees in Egypt as well as the legal apparatus provisions related to their employment. Both are factors determining the access of refugees to the Egyptian labor market. The thesis finds that other economic and social factors also determine and facilitate the access of Syrian refugees to the Egyptian labor market. In the …

Entitled To Property: Inheritance Laws, Female Bargaining Power, And Child Health In India, Plamen Nikolov, Shahadath Hossain

Economics Faculty Scholarship

Child height is a significant predictor of human capital and economic status throughout adulthood. Moreover, non-unitary household models of family behavior posit that an increase in women’s bargaining power can influence child health. We study the effects of an inheritance policy change, the Hindu Succession Act (HSA), which conferred enhanced inheritance rights to unmarried women in rural India, on child height. We find robust evidence that the HSA improved the height and weight of children. In addition, we find evidence consistent with a channel that the policy improved the women’s intrahousehold bargaining power within the household, leading to improved parental …

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 …

An Inferentially Robust Look At Two Competing Explanations For The Surge In Unauthorized Migration From Central America, Nick Santos

Dissertations

The last 8 years have seen a dramatic increase in the flow of Central American apprehensions by the U.S. Border Patrol. Explanations for this surge in apprehensions have been split between two leading hypotheses. Most academic scholars, immigrant advocates, progressive media outlets, and human rights organizations identify poverty and violence (the Poverty and Violence Hypothesis) in Central America as the primary triggers responsible. In contrast, while most government officials, conservative think tanks, and the agencies that work in the immigration and border enforcement realm admit poverty and violence may underlie some decisions to migrate, they instead blame lax U.S. immigration …

Brain Drain In Mississippi, Clifford Adam Conner

Honors Theses

Brain drain is the out-migration of educated individuals from an area. It is a problem with which Mississippi is overly familiar. This thesis uses data gathered from a survey of 965 respondents to identify who is leaving the state and for what reasons. The data gathered suggest confirmation that brain drain is an issue for the state, with roughly two-thirds of respondents having left the state or seriously considering doing so. The impetus for this varies with each individual, but respondents underscore economic and societal factors within Mississippi as pushing them away from the state. Quality of life factors are …

Barriers To Post-Secondary Success, Douglas Swanson, Najeana Henderson, Maritza Sloan

Dissertations

This study reviews factors that prior studies have identified or failed to consider as barriers to post-secondary success. The three main areas include academic success for Latinx students after high school, organizational systems and their impact on African-American students’ postsecondary readiness, and what workers think of their high school education with regards to career preparedness.

Five factors are identified as major barriers for Latinx students to continue in a higher education system. A survey of former students from Saint Louis, Missouri, and Dallas, Texas, metroplex area identified 56 Latinx students that participated in an initial survey. This led to a …

The Case For Public Investment In Higher Pay For New York State Home Care Workers: Estimated Costs And Savings, Isaac Jabola-Carolus, Stephanie Luce, Ruth Milkman

Publications and Research

This report explores one potential solution to the mounting home care labor shortage in New York State: substantially raising wages for the state's home care workers. The analysis presents detailed projections, based on the best available data, of the economic effects of such an intervention, estimating the costs and benefits that would result. We find that public funding to raise home care wages would require significant resources, but those costs would be surpassed by the resulting savings, tax revenues, and economic spillover effects. The net economic gain would total at least $3.7 billion. Lifting wages would also help fill nearly …

Labor Market Monopsony And Wage Inequality: Evidence From Online Labor Market Vacancies, Samuel I. Thorpe

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper estimates the effects of employer labor market power on wage inequality in the United States. I find that inequality as measured by interdecile range is 23.7% higher in perfectly monopsonistic labor markets than in perfectly competitive markets, even when controlling for commuting zone and occupation fixed effects. I also decompose these results into 50/10 and 90/50 ratios, finding much larger impacts on inequality among low earners. These results suggest that monopsony power has significant and policy-relevant impacts on wage inequality, and particularly harms the lowest earning subsets of the labor force.

The Effects Of Racial Capitalism On Poor White Laborers, Amy Whittaker

Liberal Studies (MA) Final Essays

While always remembering that racial capitalism’s very nature ensures that non-white Americans suffer incomparable racial oppression, this paper will endeavor to expose the devastation caused to American society as a whole by explaining the ways in which racial capitalism destroyed poor white labors ability to participate fully in the economic system and strangled its chances of living the American dream. It is my hope that by discussing the missing piece of the poor white laborers’ experience under racial capitalism will unite poor white laborers and poor black laborers to work together to end racial capitalism, policing, and the carceral system. …

The United Kingdom's Corporate Bond Secondary Market Scheme (U.K. Gfc), Claire Simon

Journal of Financial Crises

In late 2008, at the height of the Global Financial Crisis, increased liquidity premia and risk aversion in the secondary market hindered companies’ ability to issue corporate bonds. In response, in January 2009, Her Majesty’s Treasury authorized the Bank of England to establish a facility to purchase commercial bonds through the Asset Purchase Facility. In March 2009, the Bank of England published details on the Corporate Bond Secondary Market Scheme, in conjunction with its quantitative easing program. Under the scheme, the Bank acted as a market maker of last resort in the secondary bond market, making regular purchases of a …

The Primary Dealer Credit Facility (Pdcf) (U.S. Gfc), Karen Yang

Journal of Financial Crises

On March 16, 2008, the Federal Reserve created the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, or PDCF, to provide overnight funding to primary dealers in the tri-party repurchase agreement (repo) market, where lenders had become increasingly risk averse. Loans were fully secured by (initially) investment-grade securities and offered at the primary credit rate by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The eligible collateral was significantly expanded in September 2008, after rumors of Lehman Brothers potentially filing for bankruptcy, to include all of the types of instruments that could be pledged at the two major tri-party repo clearing banks. The PDCF was …

Lessons Learned: A Conversation With Paul A. Volcker, Andrew Metrick, Rosalind Z. Wiggins, Kaleb B. Nygaard

Journal of Financial Crises

On March 26, 2019, Andrew Metrick, the Janet Yellen Professor of Finance at the Yale School of Management and Founder and Director of the Yale Program on Financial Stabilitysat down with Paul A. Volcker to discuss his perspectives on the Federal Reserve, central banking autonomy, “too big to fail,” and how his perspectives on these topics have changed over the decades.It turned out to be one of the last interviews given by the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve System who passed away on December 8, 2019, at the age of 92.

Contemporary High-Skilled Mexican Immigrant Entrepreneurs In Texas, Elizabeth Salamanca, Jorge Alcaraz

Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center Research

The number of Mexican entrepreneurs relocating to the United States has significantly increased during the last decade and their profile, as well as that of their businesses, have changed. This study develops a typology of Mexican migrant entrepreneurs living in the U.S., particularly in Texas, and of the business ventures that they undertake, and it determines the association between the entrepreneurs' profile and the kind of businesses they create. Through the analysis of migrant entrepreneurs' profiles, this paper identifies in what kind of transnational activities these entrepreneurs participate. The research follows both a qualitative approach based on the Gioia methodology …

Covid-19: Projected Job Loss In Mountain West States, Marie A. Falcone, Caitlin Saladino, William E. Brown

Economic Development & Workforce

This Fact Sheet highlights Mountain West data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report titled, “States are projected to lose more jobs due to the coronavirus: 14 million jobs could be lost by summer.” The original data source provides figures on the estimated job loss from private sector employment in retail, leisure, and hospitality. This Fact Sheet examines the data for large metropolitan Mountain West states (including Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah) with projected job loss in the coming months due to the coronavirus.

Understanding The Impact Of Psychological Empowerment, Workplace Motivation, And Social Capital On The Job Performance Of Farmers In Honduras: A Mixed Methods Study, Susan Lale Karimiha

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

A farmer’s job performance is critical to the production of raw materials such as food, fiber, and fuel and is therefore an important concern for individuals, businesses, and economies across the world. The literature on improving farmers’ job performance has focused more on introducing new technologies, and less on the psychosocial factors that improve job performance. The primary purpose of this study was to examine the impact of psychological empowerment, workplace motivation, and social capital on farmers’ job performance in Honduras.

A mixed methods approach was used to collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data. For quantitative data, a …

Do Public Program Benefits Crowd Out Private Transfers In Developing Countries? A Critical Review Of Recent Evidence, Plamen Nikolov, Matthew Bonci

Economics Faculty Scholarship

Precipitated by rapid globalization, rising inequality, population growth, and longevity gains, social protection programs have been on the rise in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in the last three decades. However, the introduction of public benefits could displace informal mechanisms for risk-protection, which are especially prevalent in LMICs. If the displacement of private transfers is considerably large, the expansion of social protection programs could even lead to social welfare loss. In this paper, we critically survey the recent empirical literature on crowd-out effects in response to public policies, specifically in the context of LMICs. We review and synthesize patterns from …

The Importance Of Cognitive Domains And The Returns To Schooling In South Africa: Evidence From Two Labor Surveys, Plamen Nikolov, Nusrat Jimi

Economics Faculty Scholarship

Numerous studies have considered the important role of cognition in estimating the returns to schooling. How cognitive abilities affect schooling may have important policy implications, especially in developing countries during periods of increasing educational attainment. Using two longitudinal labor surveys that collect direct proxy measures of cognitive skills, we study the importance of specific cognitive domains for the returns to schooling in two samples. We instrument for schooling levels and we find that each additional year of schooling leads to an increase in earnings by approximately 18-20 percent. The estimated effect sizes—based on the two-stage least squares estimates—are above the …

The Global Child: A Roadmap For Becoming Culturally Responsive Educators, Ana I. Berdecia Med, Caitlin Kosec Mpp, Kamili O. Leath Ms, The John S. Watson Institute For Public Policy For Thomas Edison State College

Center for the Positive Development of Urban Children

The program strategies and the assessment tools encourage early childhood teachers to adopt 26 strategies across three competency areas: 1) classroom design; 2) teachers’ rhythm and temperament; and 3) instructional strategies during the 10-month program year. Mentors are assigned to each teaching team and through supportive site visits and assessment visits help the teams change their thinking and practices to be more culturally and linguistically responsive.

Essentializing Labor Before, During, And After The Coronavirus Pandemic, Deepa Das Acevedo

Faculty Articles

In the era of COVID-19, the term essential labor has become part of our daily lexicon. Between March and May 2020, essential labor was not just the only kind of paid labor occurring across most of the United States; it was also, many argued, the only thing preventing utter economic and humanitarian collapse. As a result of this sudden significance, legal scholars, workers’ advocates, and politicians have scrambled to articulate exactly what makes essential labor “essential.” Some commentators have also argued that the rise of essential labor as a conceptual category disrupts—or should disrupt—longstanding patterns in the way the nation …

Rethinking State Economic Development Strategies: Or, How To Maximize Benefits For State Residents’ Earnings Per Capita, Timothy J. Bartik

Presentations

No abstract provided.

The Legalization Of Street Vending In Los Angeles: Exploring The Impact On Vendors And Their Livelihoods, Karen Alpuche Caceres

Pomona Senior Theses

This thesis aims to unpack the impact the legalization of street vending and the subsequent regulation had on sidewalk vendors. Although legalization occurred state-wide through Senate Bill 946 in September of 2017, the rules and regulations for vending were passed at a city-level, and I am focusing on the City of Los Angeles specifically. Through interviews with government officials, non-profit partners and advocates, and vendors from different parts of the City, I analyze information around the policy itself, its history, and the impact it has and is expected to have on vendors and their businesses. While vendors have been central …

The Pain In Spain: Examining Andalusia's Youth Unemployment Crisis, Bianca D. Lennon

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

This paper examines the youth unemployment crisis in the autonomous community of Andalusia by assessing employment policies that are currently in place. Since the economic crisis nearly a decade ago, there has been very little change in the high rates of Andalusian youth unemployment, which as a whole, has left the region, the country and the European Union at risk due to a lack of inefficient policies. By utilizing anecdotal evidence paired with facts and figures released by the European Union, recommendations to adjust employment policies such as the Youth Guarantee and PRAEM are given in order to shine a …

Restoring Unemployment Insurance As Social Insurance, Christopher J. O'Leary

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Are Mexican And U.S. Workers Complements Or Substitutes?, Raymond Robertson

Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center Research

Fears of NAFTA in the United States were largely based on the belief that Mexicans and U.S. workers were substitutes: lowering barriers would allow competing products into the United States and investment outflows that would cause U.S. workers to lose their jobs to Mexico. While this may have been true when NAFTA first went into effect, subsequent production specialization between Mexico and the United States may suggest that Mexican and U.S. workers are now complements. In particular, NAFTA may have induced production restructuring throughout North America to generate integrated value chains in which workers in the three NAFTA countries work …

What Factors Drive Individual Misperceptions Of The Returns To Schooling In Tanzania? Some Lessons For Education Policy, Plamen Nikolov, Nursat Jimi

Economics Faculty Scholarship

Evidence on educational returns and the factors that determine the demand for schooling in developing countries is extremely scarce. Building on previous studies that show individuals underestimating the returns to schooling, we use two surveys from Tanzania to estimate both the actual and perceived schooling returns and subsequently examine what factors drive individual misperceptions regarding actual returns. Using ordinary least squares and instrumental variable methods, we find that each additional year of schooling in Tanzania increases earnings, on average, by 9 to 11 percent. We find that on average individuals underestimate returns to schooling by 74 to 79 percent and …

Entrepreneurship Education Empowers Youth To Change Their Lives, Marianna Brashear, Jason Riddle

National Youth Advocacy & Resilience Conference

The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) aims at equipping Title 1 schools with free, hands-on, engaging materials that any teacher can facilitate either individually or in a classroom setting with no background in entrepreneurship necessary. These versatile lessons, courses, and workshops teach the entrepreneurial mindset optimizing opportunities for grades 8-12 students no matter which life/career path they choose.

Understanding The Decline In Manufacturing Employment, Susan N. Houseman

Presentations

No abstract provided.