Labor Economics Commons^™

How Do Pay Transparency Laws Impact The Gender Pay Gap In The United States?, Kendall Chapko

CMC Senior Theses

After much progress during the late 1900s, the gender pay gap has hardly closed in the last two decades. As policy makers look for new solutions, many governing bodies have turned to pay transparency laws, which make employee salaries transparent to employees. There have been several international studies on this topic, and almost all found that these laws are very effective in decreasing the pay gap. This research is extremely important, as it suggests that these policies push us further towards equality, and makes gender based discrimination less common in the workplace. In my study, I conduct a difference in …

Esop Shocks: Employee Ownership And Employment Stability In Public Firms During The Covid-19 Crisis, Richard Taylor Lennox

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Did employee ownership preserve jobs and firm-level skill retention during the COVID-19 pandemic? In the United States, employee ownership (EO) primarily takes the form of Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). Using a longitudinal dataset composed of Department of Labor Form 5500 – CompuStat Fundamentals matched data from 2010-2022, this thesis examines the relationship between ESOPs and employment stability during the COVID pandemic for a large sample of public firms in the US. A fixed effects specification, controlling for a vector of firm characteristics and the national employment-to-population ratio, suggests that ESOPs had an employment-cushioning effect in public firms during the …

Bekerja Tetapi Tetap Miskin, Apakah Permasalahan Kemiskinan Multidimensi?, Abdus Salam, Endan Suwandana, Watekhi Watekhi

Jurnal Ekonomi dan Pembangunan Indonesia

Working but still in poverty, is one of the phenomena of poor workers where they continue to work but their work does not guarantee them a better life. This study uses the concept of poverty from a monetary and multidimensional perspective. This study uses data from the March 2018 National Socioeconomic Survey (Susenas) and 2018 Village Potential Survey (Podes), and uses logistic regression to analyze whether the phenomenon of the working poor is a multidimensional poverty problem. The results of the study stated that poor workers have a close relationship with low education, millennial/young workers, a single parent, employees, a …

Three Essays On The Impact Of Debt On Young American Adults’ Lives After Graduation, Sylvie Sanou

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the impact of financial constraints due to debt on three aspects of young American adults' lives after graduation. The first essay examines the impact of student loan debt on the mental health of US young adults using restricted-access and publicly available data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). Prior studies found that debt negatively affects mental health. However, few papers focused on educational debt. Unlike other debt, student loan debt is special because it funds human capital investment, and borrowers expect to receive a significant return on the investment. Using a two-stage estimation model, …

The Effects Of School Autonomy On Student Achievement, Frank P. Kastl

Honors College Theses

This paper presents new evidence on the effects of school autonomy over personnel, budgeting, and curriculum on student achievement. I use the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data, a survey and assessment of students and schools in over 80 countries along with panel data methods. The empirical findings suggest that a greater degree of autonomy over schooling decisions improves achievement in math, science, and reading. However, these improvements are most pronounced in more developed countries.

Displaced Worker Angst And Far Right Populism, Thomas E. Lambert

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Background

Nothing causes more anguish and frustration than downward social mobility such as that experienced by less-educated workers and especially by displaced workers. Those who lose economic status lose more than income because they become so socially isolated that they are further frustrated through loneliness (Case and Deaton 2020). Hanna Arendt points out that lonely men are susceptible to authoritarian influence (1973, p. 475).

There is yet another aspect to the downward social mobility of low skilled men, namely that they are losing ground not only relative to social norms but also relative to the wages of low-skilled women. In …

The Effect Of Gender-Based Occupational Segregation On Women's Earnings In The United States And Canada, Jadyn Grace Milius

Honors Program Theses

The gender wage gap continues to prove a contentious topic with some going as far as to question its existence. However, scholarly works continue to prove it is real and impactful. More fruitful debates have arisen about the source of this disparity in wages. This paper seeks to analyze one possible explanation for the pay gap: gender-based occupational segregation. I used OLS regressions based on women working full-time between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five to measure this. I find a negative effect of segregated occupations on women’s earnings across countries and years. On a similar note, the percentage of …

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

Employment, Income, And Poverty In Kalamazoo City Core Neighborhoods, Val Klomparens

Reports

This report employs a traditional methodology using American Community Survey data to examine employment, income, and poverty in three neighborhoods in Kalamazoo, Michigan: Eastside, Northside, and Edison. These neighborhoods are studied with an emphasis on eligibility status for the Distressed Area Recompete Pilot Program, administered through the U.S. Economic Development Administration. Eastside residents are unique in that a larger share earn income through wages or employment than do Michigan residents, yet their median income falls below those at the county and state levels in a statistically significant way. The Edison neighborhood is characterized by greater income inequality than the other …

An Analysis Of The Factors That Affect Self-Employment, Stefani Broome

Dissertations

This dissertation research identifies the factors that affect self-employment in a three-essay format. Essay one builds a foundation on analyzing the determinants that affect self-employment in the United States through a country-level time-series analysis. Essay two includes a time-series panel analysis and comparative analysis between the United States and United Kingdom by expanding on Meager’s (1992) study of the relationship between unemployment and self-employment. This analysis focuses on the United Kingdom, an outlier in Meager’s (1992) study, which included a structural change to the motivation to enter self-employment after an economic shock in the late 1970s. Essay three utilizes a …

The Experience Of Faculty Strikers: Factors That Could Impact Higher Education Strikes, Giovanna Follo, Diane Huelskamp

The Qualitative Report

Higher education is being challenged as is the unionization of faculty. This combination could create a climate where faculty may need to strike. The purpose of this research is to describe the lived experiences of striking faculty to bring a greater understanding of what faculty may incur. This research utilized a phenomenological approach with a combination of composite narratives and in vivo coding to describe the lived experiences of striking. With the number of layoffs, strikes and threats of striking, this research is timely in understanding what striking entails and how it can best be navigated for the benefit of …

Social Work And The Platform Economy: A Labor Process Theory Analysis, Lauri Goldkind, Barbara Pohl, Lea Wolf

Social Service Faculty Publications

Therapy is now available via digital platforms brokering relationships between practitioners and clients. Licensed clinical social workers contract with direct-to-consumer digital platforms to provide tele–mental health services. We employ labor process theory (LPT) to explore the interpersonal work of therapy as a labor arrangement, arguing that the core theory of LPT is useful for analyzing the overlapping clinical and material dynamics of conducting social work in online environments. We extend LPT analyses of gig work to the behavioral health field. Although platforms attract social workers by promising autonomy, the managerial controls that platforms exert and the emotional labor that social …

The Differential Impact Of 4ps On Child Labor Before And During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Hannah Grace Villaret, Joey Anastacio, Yohana B. Burgos, Lyka May Pauline Fernandez, Paulynne J. Castillo, Roberto Raymundo, Joel Q. Tanchuco

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

Poverty is widely considered the root cause of child labor in the Philippines. Thus, the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) was designed to alleviate poverty and reduce child labor through financial assistance, conditional on welfare investments like children’s education. Using 2017, 2019, and 2020 data from the Annual Poverty Indicators Survey (APIS), the study estimated the differential impact of 4Ps on child labor before and during COVID-19 across varying demographic, socio-economic, and locational characteristics. Results from the propensity score matching (PSM) and difference-in-differences (DID) model indicated that since cash transfers cannot fully offset the opportunity cost of children’s education, children …

Behavioral Economic Factors In Collective Bargaining, Cristal Cardoso Sao Mateus Cardoso Sao Mateus

Masters Theses

The present study evaluated the effects of delay, stake, and hypothetical group size on labor valuation in the context of increasing and decreasing labor demand. Challenges in collective bargaining are associated with work stoppages, which can cause economic losses, lack of service, and worker stress. Participants were asked to value their labor given a set of conditions in two experiments. Participants in experiment 1 (n = 49) valued their labor in both increasing and decreasing demand context. Conversely, participants in experiment 2 (n = 139) valued their labor in only one of the contexts. Delay to changes, stake size, and …

The Determinants Of The Underemployment Gender Gap In The Philippines: A Decomposition Analysis, John Ichiro Arbole, Luisa Martina Gaston De La Paz, Therese Genota, Katrina Hernandez, Lawrence B. Dacuycuy, Maria Zunally Rapada, Krista Danielle Yu

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

Underemployment is a prevalent labor market issue around the globe. It reflects how an individual can be employed but is unable to work to their desired number of hours, receive sufficient wages, or fully utilize their skills, leaving them in precarious working conditions. Studies on underemployment and its gendered impact in the Philippines remains limited with most labor studies primarily addressing wage and unemployment. This study addresses this gap by identifying the factors contributing to underemployment and gender-based inequalities in the Philippines. Using quarterly data from the Labor Force Survey from 2012 to 2021, we distinguished between visible and invisible …

Essays On The Economics Of Hurricanes, Haishan Yang

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

This dissertation explores how Hurricanes Katrina and Rita affected the economy in New Orleans and nearby areas in Louisiana. Using a variety of econometric techniques, my dissertation aims to understand the effects of these storms on employment, wages, and housing prices.

In the first essay, I focus on employment in New Orleans. I find that Katrina led to significant and lasting job losses in nearly every sector, while the construction sector stood as an exception, recovering within just three months. Interestingly, wages increased in most sectors. This suggests that with fewer workers available, those who remained became more valuable, leading …

Match Effects And The Gains From Alternative Job Assignments: Evidence From A Teacher Labor Market, Mariana Laverde, Elton Mykerezi, Aaron Sojourner, Aradhya Sood

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper studies the relative importance of teacher-student match effects and general teacher effectiveness in producing student learning, and quantifies gains from alternative teacher assignments. We estimate a framework that separates these components, allowing match quality to vary with observable student characteristics and unobservable teacher-school factors. Using more than a decade of administrative data from a large urban district, we address endogenous sorting with quasi-random assignment variation induced by differences in driving time between teachers and schools. Match effects are similar in magnitude to general effectiveness. Teacher-acceptable reassignments can raise average test scores by about 0.13 standard deviations.

Predictive Analytics Supporting Labor Market Success: A Career Explorer For Job Seekers And Workforce Professionals In Michigan, Christopher J. O'Leary, Salomon Orellana, Kevin Doyle, Randall W. Eberts, Ben Damerow, Amy Meyers, Kenneth J. Kline, Anna Wilcoxson, Beth C. Truesdale, Scott Powell

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Career Explorer provides customized career exploration tools for workforce development staff and job seekers in Michigan. There are separate Career Explorer modules for mediated staff services and self-service by job seekers. The system was developed by the Michigan Center for Data and Analytics in collaboration with the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and Michigan Works! Southwest. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Workforce Investment and the Schmidt Futures foundation’s Data for the American Dream (D4AD) project. In this paper, we describe specifications of the models behind the frontline-staff-mediated version of Career Explorer, which are …

Scoring Soar, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Policy Papers

This paper estimates the benefits and costs of the incentive package provided to the proposed Ford battery plant in Marshall, Michigan. This project, announced in February 2023, involves a state and local business incentive package whose undiscounted value is $1.7 billion, and which is awarded to a plant that will eventually create 2,500 permanent jobs. The incentive package is analyzed using the Bartik Benefit-Cost Model of Incentives. The model’s estimates suggest that the incentive package has economic benefits whose present value is over 1.8 times the project’s incentive costs. Most of these benefits are higher earnings per capita for Michigan …

The Relationship Between Labor Market Institutions And Innovation In 177 European Regions Over The Period 2000-2015, Gaetano Perone

CBER Conference

The main goal of this paper was to investigate the relationship between a set of labor market institutions (LMIs) and innovation (proxied by patent density) in 174 NUT-1 and NUT-2 European regions, over the period 2000-2015. Fixed effects with Driscoll and Kraay's (1998) standard errors (FE-DK), ordinary least squares (OLS), the generalized method of moments estimation of the fixed effects (FE-GMM), and a multilevel model (MLM) were employed.

Minimum Wage Increases Reduce Racial Disparities During Hiring, Alec Brandon, Justin E. Holz, Andrew Simon, Haruka Uchida

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.

Minimum Wages And Racial Discrimination In Hiring: Evidence From A Field Experiment, Alec Brandon, Justin E. Holz, Andrew Simon, Haruka Uchida

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

When minimum wages increase, employers may respond to the regulatory burdens by substituting away from disadvantaged workers. We test this hypothesis using a correspondence study with 35,000 applications around ex-ante uncertain minimum wage increases in three U.S. states. Before the increases, applicants with distinctively Black names were 19 percent less likely to receive a callback than equivalent applicants with distinctively white names. Announcements of minimum wage hikes substantially reduce callbacks for all applicants but shrink the racial callback gap by 80 percent. Racial inequality decreases because firms disproportionately reduce callbacks to lower-quality white applicants who benefited from discrimination under lower …

Gender Gaps In Employment And Earnings After Job Loss, Ria Ivandić, Anne Sophie Lassen

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Hispanic Empowerment In New York's Municipal Workforces, 2021, Carlos Vargas-Ramos

CUNY Centro, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies

One of the markers of political empowerment of historically marginalized groups in society is not simply the election and appointment of representatives from those groups to governmental institutions; their participation as employees and contractors in the governmental apparatus that provides services and goods to residents of towns, cities and counties also reflects the levels at which members of the community are included and represented. New York City has the largest municipal workforce in the country. New York is also one of the most socially diverse communities in the United States. Yet, as varied as New York City’s municipal workforce is, …

Will The Philippine Development Plan 2023-2028 Targets Be Met?, Jesus Felipe

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

EARLY THIS YEAR, President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. signed the Philippine Development Plan 2023-2028 (PDP). The document contains hundreds of targets. Some of the key targets to be attained by 2028 are as follows (in fact, the Plan provides yearly targets):

1.) an annual growth rate of 6.5-8% (since 2024); 2.) a gross national income per capita of $6,044-$6,571 (50% higher than that in 2023); 3.) inflation between 2%-4% (from 2.5%-4.5% in 2023); 4.) a government fiscal deficit of 3% (from 6.1% in 2023); 5.) a debt-to-GDP ratio of 48%-53% (from 60%-62% in 2023); 6.) an unemployment rate of 4%-5% (from …

Casar Public Lecture: Mapping The Journeys Of Enslaved People From Zanzibar To The Gulf, The Prince Alwaleed Center For American Studies And Research Casar

Performances, Events, and Presentations

Part of the CASAR October lecture series and in partnership with AUC’s history department, this event featured guest scholar John Thabiti Willis, an associate professor of history at Clarendon College in Northfield Minnesota. For the last ten years Thabiti has dedicated himself to the study of African contributions to the history and heritage of pearling in the Gulf. In this event, AUC had the honor of listening to how Thabiti uses geographical information systems (GIS) to organize primary evidence gathered from manumission statements to analyze enslaved peoples journeys from Zanzibar to British political agents in Bahrain, Muscat, and Sharjah between …

Jobseekers’ Beliefs About Comparative Advantage And (Mis)Directed Search, Andrea Kiss, Robert Garlick, Kate Orkin, Lukas Hensel

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Worker sorting into tasks and occupations has long been recognized as an important feature of labor markets. But this sorting may be inefficient if jobseekers have inaccurate beliefs about their skills and therefore apply to jobs that do not match their skills. To test this idea, we measure young South African jobseekers’ communication and numeracy skills and their beliefs about their skill levels. Many jobseekers believe they are better at the skill in which they score lower, relative to other jobseekers. These beliefs predict the skill requirements of jobs where they apply. In two field experiments, giving jobseekers their skill …

Los Porteadores Del Camino Inca: Conversaciones Y Perspectivas Sobre Los Efectos Del Turismo, Joshua Lipscomb

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Este estudio investiga las condiciones de trabajo, experiencias y percepciones sobre el turismo de los porteadores del Camino Inca. Para ello, se realizó trabajo de campo y entrevistas en profundidad a los porteadores. También se entrevistó a guías y ex-porteadores con el objetivo de conocer sus condiciones laborales: seguros, salarios, peso transportado, nutrición, equipamiento, oportunidades de empleo, sensación de trato justo e impacto sociocultural. En este trabajo se sostiene que todas las partes implicadas: el gobierno peruano, las agencias de turismo y los propios turistas, tienen una clara responsabilidad de mejorar las condiciones de estos trabajadores. La investigación ha puesto …

“Without Water, Nothing”: Examining The Water Saving Practices Of Women In Amman Under Periodic Water Supply, Rory Dixon

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Jordan is among the most water-scarce countries in the world. Consequently, water is only pumped to households once a week and households store water in tanks to last them until the next water day. Women conducting housework do so under conditions of environmental stress that this research calls resource-scarce domestic labor. In this study, I apply an eco-feminist lens to examine the water-saving practices women employ to manage and conserve domestic water supplies. I explore the larger causes of these behaviors including climate change, government management, and regional politics. Resource-scarce domestic labor is not a practice unique to Jordan and …

Tackling Misperceptions About Immigrants With Fact-Checking Interventions: A Randomized Survey Experiment, Syngjoo Choi, Chung-Yoon Choi, Kim

Research Collection School Of Economics

We conduct a randomized online survey experiment to study the impact of fact-checking offers and financial incentives on misperceptions about immigrants. We find that natives overestimate the number of immigrants and the social and economic costs of immigration. Offering a free check of the factual information about immigrants reduces these misperceptions; it becomes more effective when combined with financial incentives. However, more than half of the participants never took up offers to check factual information. Using a model of information search with limited attention, we identify the presence of non-negligible costs of information search and processing, which limits the effectiveness …