College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item INEQUALITY AND THE HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY(2018) Pepin, Joanna; Sayer, Liana; Cohen, Philip; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Intrahousehold finances offer a window into the crossroads between the market domain’s emphasis on self-reliance and the family domain’s emphasis on interdependence. Modern couples confront tensions between ideals of mutual family interests and values of individualism, a departure from fitting themselves into culturally expected family arrangements of the past. How these social changes impact progress towards gender equality is not well understood. The dissertation aims are to: (1) identify mechanisms associated with different types of money arrangements in families, and (2) examine the association between financial arrangements and gender inequality in families. To meet these aims, I used data from two sources. First, I used multinomial modeling of 2012 International Social Survey Programme data to show cohabiting couples in countries with greater gender equality partially integrated their money instead of keeping it separate. Married couples pooled money regardless of country-level gender equality. Findings suggest that different cultural logics operate in married and cohabiting partnerships across gendered contexts, rather than cohabitation functioning as a weaker form of marriage. Second, I devised a novel survey experiment to collect the first nationally representative sample of U.S. adults’ attitudes about income sharing in families. Results challenge the notion that marriage distinctively encourages support for financial integration in families. Findings also revealed that respondents believed higher-earning partners ought to hold back a greater absolute value of their earnings for personal use, allowing inequality in labor market rewards to perpetuate unequal conditions within families. I also used this data to disentangle the mechanisms associated with perceptions of decision-making authority. Findings indicated higher relative-earners within families were not regarded as entitled to the final word in decisions. Whether respondents considered earnings individually or community owned did not explain the lack of association between relative earnings and decision-making clout. Instead, findings showed a significant association between the fictional decider’s gender and respondents’ perceptions of fairness. Specifically, when women were presented as the decider over monetary family choices, unilateral decision making about monetary items was viewed more favorably. Collectively, these findings suggest gender socialization theories are essential to explaining persistent gender inequality in families.Item THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS: PUBLIC HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND INCOME INEQUALITY(2015) McDonald, Michael Kelly; Haufler, Virginia A; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What happens to the welfare of people, especially in developing countries, when their government strengthens intellectual property rights (IPR)? Existing research provides conflicting answers. This project is one of the few to provide large-N analysis of the impact of IPR on social outcomes: specifically health, education, and inequality. Results suggest that stronger IPR are associated with better outcomes on some key indicators of health, education, and inequality, and worse outcomes on other indicators. A detailed case study suggests that the process of IPR reform, the motivations behind IPR reform, and the institutions involved in the adoption and enforcement of IPR partially determine the impact of IPR on each set of outcomes.Item Does Foreign Aid Lead to Armed Civil Conflict? Examining Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnic Exclusion(2014) Kishi, Roudabeh; Wilkenfeld, Jonathan; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The impact of aid flows and ethnic exclusion on civil conflict in Africa is explored. Ethno-politics and informal institutions dictate discriminatory spending allocations (in the form of political patronage flows) in most African states. The unequal allocation of these resources can foster grievances in excluded populations. When states gain access to non-tax revenues (i.e., foreign aid), it is often allocated in a similar fashion. When inequalities in access to resources lie along ethnic lines, the likelihood and intensity of conflict is higher as ethnicity can offer an important mobilizing source in organizing political action. Using newly-available disaggregated data to explore these relationships at the subnational-level, statistical results are found supporting this theory. Additionally, micro-level analysis of these mechanisms bolsters the statistical findings in a country-case study of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the locations of aid projects, ethnic group settlement patterns, and civil conflict sites are mapped using geographic information systems.Item Location Choice, Product Choice, and the Human Resource Practices of Firms(2007-05-10) Freedman, Matthew L.; Haltiwanger, John C; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)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 agglomeration to explore the impact of clustering in the software publishing industry on labor market outcomes. The results show that clustering makes it easier for workers to job hop among establishments within the sector. Further, workers in clusters have relatively steep earnings-tenure profiles, accepting lower wages early in their careers in exchange for stronger earnings growth and higher wages later. These findings underscore the importance of geography in understanding labor market dynamics within industries. While the first chapter reveals striking relationships between the human resource practices and location decisions of high-technology establishments, the second chapter (joint with F. Andersson, J. Haltiwanger, J. Lane, and K. Shaw) draws key connections between the hiring and compensation policies of innovative firms and the nature of their product markets. We show that software firms that operate in product markets with highly skewed returns to innovation pay a premium to attract talented workers. Yet these same firms also reward loyalty; that is, highly skilled workers faithful to their employers enjoy higher earnings in firms with a greater variance in potential payoffs from innovation. These results not only contribute to our knowledge of firm human resource practices and product market strategies, but also shed light on patterns of income inequality within and between industries. Building on this final idea, the last chapter (joint with F. Andersson, E. Davis, J. Lane, B. McCall, and L. Sandusky) examines the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to within-industry changes in earnings inequality. We find that the entry and exit of firms and the sorting of workers and firms based on worker skills are key determinants of changes in industry earnings distributions over time. However, the importance of these and other factors in driving observed dynamics in earnings inequality varies across sectors, with aggregate shifts often disguising fundamental differences in the underlying forces effecting change.Item INEQUALITY, INSTITUTIONS AND REDISTRIBUTION(2005-07-29) Aysan, Ahmet Faruk; Betancourt, Roger; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the role of efficiency of redistributive institutions (ERI) on redistribution. The first substantive essay proposes a theoretical model to explain the lack of strong empirical evidence in favor of a positive relationship between income inequality and redistribution. This chapter first shows that even exogenously given ERI affects the relationship between income inequality and redistribution. Then, it introduces three specifications to endogenize ERI. In these various specifications, increasing inequality reduces the ERI when (1) ERI is an increasing function of average income or (2) political influence on ERI is positively associated with income or (3) the median voter has some prospect of upward mobility. There is one common element in these various specifications. While income inequality increases the pressure for redistribution it also increases the incentive to reduce the efficiency of redistribution in order to constrain aggregate redistribution. Hence, the main conclusion is that one needs consider these conflicting effects in order to account for the puzzling lack of strong empirical evidence for a positive relationship between income inequality and redistribution. The second substantive essay empirically analyzes the role of efficiency of redistributive institutions on redistribution in the form of social security and welfare spending. When measures of ERI are incorporated into the existing empirical specifications of income inequality and redistribution, cross-sectional and panel data regressions show that the ERI significantly increases redistribution. However, we find weaker evidence for the role of income inequality on redistribution. Income inequality does not appear to be strongly significant in various specifications of the redistribution equation. Based on this evidence, this chapter concludes that ERI plays an important role in redistribution but this effect does not resolve the fiscal policy puzzle that is emphasized in the theoretical chapter. Moreover, this chapter also explores the determinants of ERI. Our empirical results confirm the theoretical model that an increase in GDP per capita and democracy increases ERI. However, there is less convincing evidence for the negative role of income inequality on the ERI. Among the other determinants of ERI, freedom of the press and trade openness improve ERI considerably.