Among the most significant changes to the agricultural sector in the twentieth century include a sharp decline in employment and the numbers of farms, a decline in the proportion of total value that accrues to agricultural producers, and an increase in farm level and regional specialization....

A significant portion of sociology has always taken as its central focus the underlying relationship between economy and society. This dissertation continues this tradition by examining how self-service and its `do-it-yourself' ethos is changing the U.S. economy and the way in which Americans...

This thesis is comprised of three chapters. The first investigates the implications of industrial clustering for labor mobility and earnings dynamics. Motivated by a theoretical model in which geographically clustered firms compete for workers, I exploit establishment-level variation in...

The common view in the organizations literature is that, in the new economy, traditional worker hierarchies have now been replaced by flat, team-based arrangements. However, there have been few empirical studies that have tested this phenomenon. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the...

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 60-07, Section: A, page: 2569.

This dissertation addresses the problem of informational and legal restrictions on employment screening processes such as educational requirements and standardized testing. For the past two decades, the legal system in the U.S. has struggled with this issue and has labeled certain information or...

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 59-06, Section: B, page: 3103.

The proportion of a unit of government's budget devoted to labor costs determines whether cost reductions at the metropolitan level are achieved through fragmentation or consolidation. Consolidating capital intense functions at higher levels of government is the optimal cost-reducing strategy....

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 58-04, Section: B, page: 2164.

A series of three laboratory experiments examined effects of affirmative action (AA) employment policies, decision set (in terms of accepting or rejecting applicants), and selection ratio (ratio of applicants to available positions) on amount, duration, content, and sequence of information...