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My dissertation (in one full document) is available for download here:
Dissertation
The papers will be available for individual download soon. In the meantime, here are the abstracts:
Paper 1: National Context and Atypical Employment
The first paper takes a macro approach, examining the causes of three types of atypical
employment (fixed term, part time, and self employment) in OECD countries. Support
is found for three hypotheses: Atypical work arrangements are more prevalent in more
entrepreneurial cultures; when there are legal constraints on firms; and when economic
constraints force workers to accept atypical employment. The paper also qualitatively looks
at countries’ legislative and judicial histories with respect to atypical work and suggests
future policy directions.
Paper 2: The Fixed Term Wage Gap
The second paper uses propensity score matching and multilevel regression analysis to
show that fixed term workers’ wages are lower than comparable permanent workers’ wages.
Second, it shows that in countries with strict employment protection legislation, strong
unions, and high unemployment rates, fixed term wages are relatively lower. This can
result from several different conditions such as firms in strict legislative environments using
fixed term work as an extended probation period; unions advocating disproportionately for
permanent workers; and inferior workers being sorted into fixed term work in a weak labor market.
Paper 3: Employment Intermediaries
The third paper takes a theoretical turn, introducing a micro-simulation of job-worker
matching with intermediaries (i.e. temp agencies). While many suggest that firms hire
workers through intermediaries to save money on compensation, this paper finds that in
a world of limited information and geographically limited job search, intermediaries’ human
resources ability could be a strong enough incentive independent of wages. The study
also has some auxiliary finding showing that higher intermediary fees can ultimately generate
greater use of intermediaries through organizational ecology; that traditional temp fee
structures encourage firms to use intermediaries for low-skill hires; and that firms are more
likely to use intermediaries when there is more worker heterogeneity. Through the empirical
model validation, it also becomes clear that survey data on temp work in the United
States is not trustworthy, largely because individuals are uncertain who their employer is.
Paper 4: Academic Employment Networks
The final chapter continues from the organizational perspective, looking at inequality
across organizations instead of across workers. Research has found a correlation between
academic departments’ rank and their centrality in academic hiring networks. This relationships
might result from the fact that highly ranked schools train more PhDs, their graduates
are more likely to continue in the academic labor market, and that the highly ranked
schools have more faculty. This study is the first to consider the relationship between university
departments’ rank and their position in the academic hiring network independent of
department size and training. If academics move between institutions for various reasons
like wages, location, and specialty areas, there should be no correlation between hiring
network centrality and rank. Nevertheless, this paper finds that the correlation persists,
suggesting academics are more willing to make career switches to top ranked departments
or between them. This preference would give top departments a competitive advantage and
positive returns to their rank. This could be one possible explanation for static academic rankings..
New Projects:
This project uses agent based modeling to explore the interaction between two dynamics: citizens' mobility & their voting behavior in a devolved political environment. The model tests whether these dynamics could motivate residential segregation or inequality in taxes. It is currently being updated to test a federal government intervention designed to equalize revenue across localities. slide show I plan to eventually redesign this simulation to be applicable to the question of US educational funding, property taxes, residential mobility, and residential segregation.
Another project I'm working on considers the geographic density of outsourced workers, and tests how that influences the wages of workers who are in the same occupation and geographic area as the outsourced workers, but in direct employment relationships.
A third paper I am currently working on is an offshoot of the second paper in the dissertation. While conducting that analysis, I also found that the penalty to fixed term work varies significantly by education, occupation, and experience. Eventually these results will be in their own paper about stratification.
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