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I argue that the Delhi National Capital Region is emerging as a "migrant capital as it is fed by an increasingly migrant workforce in the manufacturing sector. In context of informalisation of work globally and deregulation of labour in India, I compare employment relations in a deregulated (the Special Economic Zone or SEZ in Noida) space with regulated spaces (the larger industrial region, non-SEZ), across two distinct sectors, low-skilled garment manufacturing units and high-skilled electronics manufacturing units. I also examine one Chinese owned and managed factory and resulting employment relations in the high-skilled sector between Chinese and Indian nationals. I analyse the industrial relations that arise because of interactions between a largely migrant workforce and their locally rooted employers. Employers embedded in local networks of power can create hybrid forms of regulation to adapt formal laws into informal practices across deregulated and regulated spaces, creating similar conditions in both irrespective of law. Even Chinese managers rely on the networks of locally embedded Indian managers to manage their migrant workforce through informal practices. Hybrid regulation is made possible due to a migrant workforce that lacks access to local informal networks of power being dis-embedded from local society. In the absence of effective formal legal protection, migrants adapt to rather than challenge the system of hybrid regulation through a variety of informal means. Using an embedded qualitative framework and ethnographic methods, I use the analytical tool of inter-regional migration and the category of the "local" to understand the dynamics of industrial relations that create spaces for an adaptation of formal law into informal practices. My thesis contributes by linking an informality of work that migrants experience as workers inside factories with an informality of life which they experience as outsiders in the city.

This thesis consists of three self-contained essays on the economics of Labour Supply. Chapter 2 surveys the Labours Supply behaviour in the UK over the past four decades (LFS 1975 - 2016) on three different aspects: static labour supply, life cycle labour supply and labour supply in trade unions. Over static and life cycle labour supply, I explore both the intensive margin and the extensive margin across different demographic characteristics: gender, marital status, economic activity, industry, occupation, education, ethnicity and sector. In the context of trade unions, I only explore the intensive margin, since the union premiums are conditional on people having positive working hours/wage. Our results suggest that Education affects working hours, but only for women. Whereas, men`s working hours are hardly different on average across all education levels; Despite the fact that men are much more likely to work full time than women, the proportion of part-timers amongst men has increased dramatically over time; The historically persistent hours gap between single and married workers has been closed in the recent decade due to the steady increase in married women`s working hours; The best remunerated workers are most likely to work a standard full-time working week, those working longer or shorter hours than standard are significantly less well paid. Education`s effects on lifecycle labour supply again are obvious only amongst women, where the higher the educational attainment, the higher the lifecycle profile lies. The effect of marital status on the lifecycle profiles can be understood by the division of labour within a family: it pushes up the lifecycle hours profiles of married men and lowers that of married women. Both union membership and union coverage rates have been falling over time, though the fall in the rates of male workers are more pronounced. The patterns are consistent by education, sector, industry and occupation; The union premiums (wage and hours) are consistent in patterns, with membership premium decreases and coverage premium increases over time. Chapter 3 provides renewed evidence for married couples` labour supply responsiveness to the change in their wages and nonlabour income in the UK. Taking advantage of the time series of reforms, I apply the difference-in-differences techniques to elicit the causal effect of tax and benefit on couples` labour supply behaviour at both margins (intensive and extensive). I find that women are more responsive than men at all margins. and wage changes have larger effects on the decision to work, and smaller effect on hours of work. The fact that women have much larger intertemporal substitution effects than their spouse, implies that women, especially the lowly educated are more prone to smooth their consumption across lifecycle. Union coverage has been declining over the past four decades. However, collective bargaining and trade unions are still of crucial importance concerning the regulation of many issues in labour market, such as wage setting; hours` regulating, especially overtime hours; and fringe benefits. Chapter 4 "Estimating trade union effects on working hours: Evidence from the UK 1996-2016" examines the effects of trade unions on people`s working hours. I explore the effects in three hours` dimensions: total usual hours, standard hours and overtime hours, all in weekly terms. I also differentiate the membership effects from the coverage effects, which proves to be important. There are three primary findings from the analysis. First, there are consistent and significant union effects on working hours, the size of the effects ranges from -6 hours to 6 hours depending on characteristics, such as gender, types of effects, groups of people etc., Secondly, the size of the effects are falling overtime, this may reflect the declining densities of unions. Lastly, our results also suggest that trade unions do use overtime as a means to stabilize working hours and expand membership. And trade unions do alleviate firms` greed on workers in terms of unpaid overtime hours.

This PhD thesis addresses one of the most pressing problems in developing countries: labour informality. The overall objective of the thesis is to illustrate the capacity of microsimulation techniques to analyse a broad range of topics related to this problem. To highlight the potential of the methodology we pose a motivating question: what are the barriers that informal workers face to becoming formal? Job contact networks and workers' social insurance contributions are analysed alongside other usual suspects such as the lack of human capital. The first chapter proposes a tax-benefit microsimulation exercise for Ecuador and Colombia in which we move informal workers to the formal sector. We found that a considerably high proportion of formalization income gains would be taxed away in both countries. The second chapter presents different behavioural models built on the static tax-benefit model for Colombia and considers labour supply responses and job availability constraints. A simulation exercise of pro-formality policies results in a modest to null effect on the composition of the pool of workers between the formal and informal sectors. Lastly, the third chapter presents an agent-based macroeconomic model with an informal sector that introduces the formation of job contacts on the job as a novel feature. After estimating several of the parameters for the Colombian labour market, our exploratory exercise indicates that a high degree of sectoral homophily in contact networks does not seem to contribute to labour market segmentation because the current propensity to use contacts for job search is not relatively high.

This thesis investigates the policy implementation of Universal Credit (UC), and how welfare behavioural conditionality is interpreted and co-produced by stakeholders and recipients in the United Kingdom (UK). It is inspired by neoliberal and government paternalist discourse which reveal that individuals can make mistakes, errors and failures in judgment. Hence, paternalist intervention by governments is warranted to correct failures and further one's own good and that of the whole society. This thesis challenges the paternalistic assumption that wellbeing can be defined by the government and achieved exclusively through correcting individual reflective behavioural processes. It provides a complex picture of how, when and why behavioural changes, including a broad discussion relating the implementation of welfare conditionality to wellbeing. Empirical data is collected through face-to-face, in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 32 respondents who have past experiences claiming working-age social security and UC, and 18 stakeholders in South London. Interview transcripts are analysed by employing selective, thematic and axial coding. Empirical findings are analysed using a broad discussion on stakeholders' perceptions and experiences dealing with UC recipients, and recipients' views and experiences with benefit claiming and responding to welfare behavioural conditionality, with a focus on change in benefit- and employment- related behaviour. Based on empirical findings, this thesis presents an ontological, epistemological and methodological contributions to knowledge, and re-conceptualises the meaning of harm - in policy implementation, and at community and social levels - highlighting that it is warranted to implement protections from institutional, communal and social barriers, and capital relationships in the neoliberal and digital era. Overall, this thesis contributes to understanding the appropriate state intervention and the legitimacy between the state and recipients.

The supply of highly educated workers has increased in most developed countries since the 1970s. However, in many countries the demand for these workers has not increased as rapidly as the supply, and education and skill mismatches have appeared. In Spain, the increase of university graduates started in the 1980s, and nowadays, Spain has one of the highest proportions of over-educated workers. Focusing on Spain, this thesis provides new empirical evidence on the education mismatch for university graduates in the Spanish labour market. First, I analyse the trend in the likelihood of university graduates being over-educated from 1995 to 2018. Second, I assess the effect that including cognitive skills heterogeneity has on the probability of being over-educated. Third, I foresee three possible scenarios for the future trend of the proportion of university graduates overeducated in the Spanish labour market. The results of the research demonstrate that first, the Spanish economy, and especially the private sector in Spain, has not adapted its jobs to the increase of the higher educated workers, especially for women. Second, accounting for skills' heterogeneity has little effect on the probability for university graduates being over-educated, even if it is small. Third, given the forecasted trend in the probability for a university graduate to be over-educated in the Spanish labour market some changes in the educational and labour market policies are needed to propel an improvement of the education match for university graduates in the Spanish labour market. Regarding policy implications, the results of this research suggest modifying the supply of and facilitating the demand for highly educated workers. On the supply side, those degrees which are more demanded in the labour market should be promoted, whereas it is recommended to change the education programme in those degrees which are less demanded in the labour market. In this sense, for instance, introducing some work experience might help to increase its suitability in the labour market. On the demand side, skill-biased technological change increasing the demand for skilled workers should be promoted.

This thesis takes the everyday, working lives of cycle-rickshaw drivers and their excursions through an increasingly dense and congested urban landscape as a point of departure for exploring the dynamics of urbanisation and change in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I argue that the working lives of rickshaw pullers represent a nonterritorially fixed way of being in the city and highlight those urban experiences and relations that cannot be pinned down to the geographical location of the city or the neighbourhood. I show that rickshaw drivers' journeys unfold in open-ended and unstructured ways and have traditionally lacked fixed points of arrival and departure. Similarly, their labour trajectories are often multi-local and span both city and countryside. The urban presence of rickshaw drivers therefore cannot be definitively tied to one particular urban habitat. Instead, their lives are caught up in the antagonistic tension between urban extension and implosion that characterises processes of urbanisation. The fact that the cycle-rickshaw itself is often seen as antithetical to a modern urban future, and is shrouded in temporal ambiguity, further reinforces this unfixed urban presence. Local urban policies have long aimed to "fix" this "rootless" group of people by tying them down to one particular neighbourhood, mode of employment or location. I seek to explicitly break with this sedentarist and residentialist framing, by presenting the city – rather than its people – as an inherently unfixed phenomenon. This thesis thus forms a deliberate effort to break with the tendency to interpret the city primarily as a place, home or habitat and the normative notions of stability and rootedness that inevitably lurk behind such an approach. Instead, I highlight the many ways in which the diffuse realities of work, movement and human activity that animate growing metropolitan areas like Dhaka do not gravitate towards a certain fixity or stability.

Growing scholarship critiques ideas of migration as a development tool, however it remains a key policy instrument for sending states who seek to foster development. These critiques point to the importance of how sending states perceive their roles in the lives of migrants abroad, suggesting that this relationship is often for the benefit of the state and not for the migrant. This research goes further by looking at the ethical implications of the ways sending states have discursively constructed their relationships with migrant laborers, asking what responsibilities are owed to migrants as they act as 'agents of development.' The thesis utilizes an ethical lens to examine sending states' responsibilities towards their migrant populations, incorporating literature on ethics, citizenship, and the role of the state to argue that sending states have moral duties and responsibilities towards their migrant populations under notions of emigrant citizenship. Ideas of emigrant citizenship are interrogated in the cases of Mexico and the Philippines, and how each state utilized discourses of nationalism, patriotism, and guilt to assign value to their migrants abroad are also examined. Interviews with key officials and a review of policy documents are used to analyze how this relationship manifested itself in the ways in which those states engage with and protect migrant workers, drawing also on interview data with migrants in the United States and Hong Kong. While both the Mexican and the Philippine states are quick to engage with their migrant populations, they often do so in a way that further commodifies them as resources for home country development. In doing so, this research argues that they neglect to protect fully their migrant populations, leaving migrants to piece together their own forms of social protection in the absence of the state. This research shows how state-migrant relations that commodify migrants as agents of development have ethical consequences, undermining states' duties and responsibilities to migrant welfare. Labor migration programs can do more to fulfill these responsibilities and redraw the way the state- migrant relationship is constructed, through practices of meaningful engagement and true emigrant citizenship.

This thesis is comprised of three independent chapters on topics in spatial, labour and development economics. I focus on South Africa for which there is a rich and under-exploited set of micro-data and where the peculiar history of the country - including restricted migration and separate development along race lines - makes for a particularly interesting setting. The first chapter provides some of the first evidence on the labour market impacts of female internal migration. Merging detailed migration data from censuses and labour market data from labour force surveys, I exploit substantial time-variation in female migrant inflows into over 200 districts. To identify causal effects, I make use of the unique history of South Africa to construct a plausibly exogenous shift-share instrument for female migrant concentration based on earlier male migration flows from reserves during the Apartheid period. I find that this migration increases the employment and hours worked of high-skilled women (due to substitution in household work) and leads to a reduction in the employment of low-skilled female non-migrants (due to increased competition). The second chapter examines how minimum wage legislation influences the labour market impacts of productivity shocks. Merging district-level high resolution weather data with high frequency data from South Africa’s labour force survey, I examine how the introduction of an agricultural minimum wage affects resilience to weather shocks in the short term using a difference-in-differences approach. I find strong evidence that the substantially increased (and inflexible) wage bill after the minimum wage law leads agricultural employers to retrench formally employed workers in the wake of negative shocks (whereas agricultural employment was more resilient in the pre-law period). In the third and final chapter, I estimate the magnitude of agglomeration externalities in South Africa using a unique geo-coded panel micro-dataset where workers are tracked as they move across the country. The few studies on developing countries to date have estimated much higher agglomeration elasticities than those found in developed countries, but these studies have generally been unable to control for sorting on unobservables or to work with the ideal geographic units. Employing individual fixed effects and an instrumental variable constructed from a novel dataset on historical population settlements, my preferred estimate for regional wage elasticity is approximately 0.03 - in line with estimates for developed countries.

The sharp increase in flexible and externalised work patterns over recent decades has caused concern on the part of trade unions and national and international organisations promoting labour interests. Industrial and employment relations academics have sought to measure and document the changes and consider the space for alternative approaches and outcomes that are more favourable to workers and their unions. While the literature is dominated by pessimistic perspectives regarding the negative consequences of global trends of flexibilisation and employment degradation, research on the potential for the state and other actors to exercise agency and regulate the use of labour market flexibility is of the utmost importance. Against this background, this thesis makes a notable contribution. It provides in-depth, contextual case study analysis from South Africa of both current strategies of temporary employment services (TES) firms and of experts’ views regarding the current and likely impact of legislative interventions aimed at regulating temporary agency work. In South Africa the comparatively privileged political and institutional position of trade unions combined with prevailing societal views regarding the necessity to protect workers against abuse, has underpinned a radical intervention by government in the form of legislation mandating parity in treatment between temporary agency and permanent employees, and including a provision whereby temporary employment service workers are ‘deemed’ to be employees of the client firm after a period of three months. This thesis presents empirical evidence on trends and drivers in temporary agency work in South Africa, uniquely drawing on in-depth interviews with industry experts addressing the experience and perspectives of the primary players, namely temporary employment firms, clients, workers and trade unions. This data is supplemented by interviews with various legal experts regarding the likely consequences of the regulatory changes and other secondary evidence. The findings highlight the quantitative scale of temporary employment services in South Africa. The need for some qualification of dualisation theories is suggested in that many workers remain on the books of TES firms and can therefore be seen as ‘partial insiders.’ While experts reported a reduction in prevalence of the most unscrupulous and unregulated TES firms as a consequence of the new legal framework, increasing use of ‘master vendor’ contracts seeking to avoid regulatory scrutiny was also identified. The legislation, as interpreted in recent court decisions, has the potential to effect very significant change in employer responsibilities towards TES workers. However, the potential for this to materialise in practice was seen to be limited due to the weakness of labour market enforcement mechanisms. For their part, South African trade unions are faced with multiple internal and operational challenges that impede their effectiveness in representing TES workers. The findings highlight the value of in-depth case study research of temporary employment practices within national institutional and regulatory frameworks and contribute to debates around actor agency and social movement responses to dominant economic trends. Limitations and suggestions for further research are identified.

This doctoral thesis consists of three chapters on the impacts of fiscal policy in the presence of informal labour and goods markets. In developing countries, the presence of large informal sector as well as weak financial and economic institutions makes the conduct of the economy partially different from developed world. The structure of the goods and labour markets are different in both formal and informal sectors of the economy. For a better understanding of the response of an economy to external and internal shocks, it is important to have knowledge about the responses of the formal and informal sectors to these shocks. The first chapter "Macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy shocks in the presence of informal sector", develops a New-Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to analyse the impacts of five fiscal policy shocks in economies with large informal sector. The model shows that government expenditure and government consumption impact multipliers are larger than one in the presence of informal economy. The government expenditures shocks are more stimulating at increasing the level of formal sector output in the first few quarters, whereas decreases in capital and labour income taxes are more effective in the longer horizon. The analysis shows that, the increases in government expenditures and decrease in consumption tax, which are financed by increasing the labour and capital income taxes, increase the size of the informal economy. The size of the informal economy decreases on impact of a decrease in labour income tax, whereas a cut in capital income tax decreases the size of informal economy after ten quarters. This chapter also finds that an increase in labour mobility amplifies the impacts of fiscal policy shocks on both formal and informal segments of the economy. The government expenditures present value multipliers for aggregate and formal sector output increase when labour is highly mobile across both sectors. Additionally, the negative impacts of cuts in capital and labour income taxes are more pronounced on the output of informal sector, when there is a high degree of labour mobility. The second chapter "Optimal capital taxation in the presence of informal labour and goods markets", contributes to the literature of optimal fiscal policy by incorporating the informal labour and goods markets in a neoclassical growth model. The objective of this study is to find the optimal tax rate on capital income in the long run. The model assumes that the set of the tax instruments is not complete. This chapter analyses the Ramsey problem in the context, where taxes cannot be collected from the consumption of informal goods and working in the informal labour market. According to Chamley (1986), the optimal tax rate on capital income is zero in a neoclassical growth model. There are several studies which show that the capital income tax rate is not zero if the modelling framework is modified in certain ways. In the lines of these papers we find that the optimal tax rate on capital income is different from zero in the presence of informal labour and good markets. The third chapter "Fiscal multipliers and the choice of exchange rate in an open economy with informal sector", gives the impact and present value multipliers under fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes in a small open economy New-Keynesian DSGE model. This study shows that the fiscal policy is more effective at increasing the level of formal sector output in economies where the exchange rate is fixed. The informal sector responds strongly to flexible exchange rate regime. The difference between the size of impact multipliers under the both exchange rates is smaller than implied by the traditional Mundell-Fleming model. The results also reveal that, in an economy with segmented labour markets, the impact of fiscal policy becomes stronger and fiscal policy multipliers increase under the fixed exchange rate, when friction in the labour market decreases. An increase in the labour mobility does not have any significant impact on fiscal policy multipliers under flexible exchange rate regime. This implies that an increase in the labour mobility across the sectors widens the gap between the government expenditure multipliers associated with fixed and flexible exchange rates. We also analyse the effectiveness of the fiscal stimulus under different debt financing strategies. The fiscal multipliers are higher when debt is financed through an increase in the consumption tax under both exchange rate regimes, while capital tax financing scheme is found to be less effective. The difference of impact multipliers between the most and least effective schemes is larger under fixed exchange rate. We also report that the fiscal policy impact multipliers decrease with the increase in the size of informal economy under both exchange rate regimes but this effect is more pronounced when the exchange rate is fixed.

Young people have always been argued to be disadvantaged in labour market opportunities and avoiding insecurity. Yet most of these arguments have been based on theoretical, anecdotal, and qualitative accounts, and they focus on aggregate measures of youth unemployment, which tend to hide inequality. The purpose of this thesis is to provide missing nationally representative empirical evidence on the extent of and inequality in insecurity in the contemporary English youth labour market, and in comparison to the past. After reviewing the existing literature (Chapter 1), the first analysis (Chapter 2), using data from the 1985 and 2015 Labour Force Survey, shows that there is a lot more nuance to the blanket claims of most types of insecurity increasing over time for most workers. The following two chapters (Chapters 3 and 4) investigate, using the longitudinal data from the Next Steps dataset, the mechanisms through which young people find themselves in insecure forms of employment for two groups: early-leavers from education, including those experiencing spells in NEET, and further-education graduates. My findings show that it is previous experiences of insecurity, and underlying structural factors, such as one’s socio-economic position, sex, and caring responsibilities, rather than the non-participation in education, employment, or training, that puts young people in insecure jobs later in their labour market transitions. A major policy implication of these findings is that pushing young people into employment without considering its security, both in terms of career progression and stability, might potentially make youth transitions more chaotic and less advantageous. Furthermore, my findings put recent government strategies of shifting responsibility onto young people and away from the state, and increasingly conditional welfare support, into question, because they fail to address the structural inequalities in access to, and returns from, education for young people in different socio-economic positions.

Many policies have dynamic features, linking actions to outcomes at different points in time. Are people aware of these dynamic features, and how does this affect their choices over the life cycle? This thesis contains three chapters which aim to answer these questions. The first two chapters examine the salience of time limits on entitlement to welfare programmes. In Chapter 1, I identify a feature of policy in the UK which generates a large and foreseeable reduction in benefit income, arising from children ageing out of eligibility for Child Tax Credit. By studying labour supply responses to the benefit reduction, I find evidence that the age-related eligibility rules are non-salient. I also provide evidence of salience increasing through experience. The results also allow me to explicitly rule out a number of competing mechanisms which are indistinguishable from non-salient incentives in other settings but have different implications for welfare and policy. Then, in Chapter 2, I develop a structural model of life-cycle labour supply in which the age-related eligibility rules may be non-salient. I estimate key parameters of the model by indirect inference, matching the empirical results to identify the proportion of claimants who are uninformed of the rules separately from their labour supply responsiveness. I find that nearly 85 percent of claimants are unaware of the benefit rules, and show that the welfare cost of being unaware that the benefit will expire is substantial. Finally, in Chapter 3, I study salience of financial incentives in a different dynamic setting: retirement saving. I exploit the substantial heterogeneity in private pension schemes in the UK to study differential salience of the financial incentive to continue working. I estimate peak value models of retirement, allowing for different responses to incentives from different types of pension. I find that similarly-sized labour supply incentives have different effects depending on the part of the system that generates them, indicating differential salience. And labour supply responses are smaller for individuals with more complex pension arrangements (as measured by the number of pensions they hold).

This dissertation, based primarily on 10-month fieldwork in the Weida factory in Dongguan, China and home visits with workers I met there, explores the subjective experience of nongmingong, rural-to-urban migrant workers, confronting China’s recent ICTs-driven economic restructuring in both work and leisure. This study contributes to sociology of labour research in China by addressing the new complexities brought about by digital technologies, and internationally to debates of digital labour and the future of work from the vintage point of the subjective experience of working class in Global South developing economies. Whether supported by the state or driven by market forces, digital technologies are becoming integrated into nongmingong’s life at an unprecedented pace, adding new complexities to the process of class formation. Incorporating the theory of the mutual shaping of technology and user/society into the larger framework of working class formation, this research takes nongmingong’s ICTs-enabled practices as the starting place for an intersectional analysis that considers class and gender, in order to understand their ICTs-mediated politics of class formation in terms of work and leisure. The findings show that ICTs-enabled jobs provide nongmingong with opportunities to improve the harsh factory working conditions and contribute to their economic security at a time of economic turbulence, allowing them to address their felt responsibilities and concerns in ways that are classed and gendered, especially as regards the family’s subsistence and upward mobility. The findings show further that taking up these opportunities positions nongmingong in various technologically-mediated production regimes, engendering different dynamics of exploitation and resistance. Politics of production aside, in the cultural realm the commercially-produced and politically-censored ICTs-enabled media entertainments allow them to negotiate alienating dagong (working for a boss) life, but they also confine them in a web of dominant meanings. In face of this discursive domination, nongmingong actively select and interpret media meanings, accepting some while rejecting others, according to a bitter and precarious structure of feeling.

This thesis examines the effects of a large and ever-present development sector on the labour market of aid-dependent low-income countries, using Sierra Leone as a case study. The thread that connects the substantive chapters of this thesis is the positioning of the development sector as a third sector in the labour market. Alongside the public and private sectors, the development sector is also an employer and skills developer in host-countries. Embedding the development sector as a sector in itself, makes apparent a channel of aid transmission in the domestic economy, via the labour market - a channel that is often overlooked in both academic and policy discourses. This in turn brings to the debate the short-term and the long-term effects on the labour market of host-countries. The thesis is novel as it applies analytical methods that are primarily used in the economics discipline, to the types of questions which sit within critical development studies. The main findings are that the presence of a large development sector affects occupational choice of graduates and the skills available in the labour market. These effects interplay with: (i) cognitive ability of graduates – higher ability graduates are more likely to choose employment with a donor organisation, non-governmental organisation or international non-governmental organisation; (ii) patronage in the labour market – in low trust environments where patronage exist in the labour market the development sector emerges as a more transparent recruiter and thus attracts talent; and (iii) skills training programmes at vocational and university levels have been directly affected by donor policies and actions. This process of change in the labour market and skills composition is important in itself; but there are also potential implications for sustainable home-grown growth and continued aid dependence.

This thesis consists of a short introduction, an overview of the context and data used, three self-contained analytical chapters on migration and human capital in developing countries, and overall conclusions. The first paper documents detailed patterns of internal mobility and estimates the predictors of migration by gender and reasons for moving using a Linear Probability Model and a Multinomial Logit Model, respectively. My main finding is that young migrants are a very heterogeneous segment of the population and that “favourable selection” only holds for those who move for studies. The second paper explores the impact of internal migration on cognitive and psychosocial skills by estimating a 2-Stage Least Squares (2SLS) model, using weather shocks as instruments for migration. My key finding is that migration affects both cognitive and psychosocial skills, but these effects differ across migrants depending on their reason for moving: those that move for studies have higher cognitive and psychosocial skills than non migrants do, whereas those that moved for family formation have lower cognitive skills than non-migrants do. Lastly, the third paper focuses on whether age at migration has an impact on cognitive and psychosocial skills. I use sibling pairs to estimate a household fixed effects-2SLS model, using weather shocks as instruments for migration. My main finding is that younger migrants perform better than older migrants, although this effect can be offset or even dominated by input responses as a result of migration. In conclusion, this thesis provides evidence of the heterogeneous character of young migrants, as well as supports the claims that migration matters for skills formation and that the earlier it takes place, the better.

The thesis contains three chapters, each of which studies a separate dimension of inequality in modern labour markets. Each chapter analyses the individual-level behaviours of workers or firms that underpin regional and aggregate distributional features of labour markets. Together, they address cross-sectional wage inequality policy at the national level, the propagation of labour market inequalities between regions, and the impacts on employment inequalities of long term structural changes in the labour market. The first chapter considers the labour market propagation mechanisms of minimum wages, a policy commonly used to support low-wage workers. Extensive evaluations of minimum wages around the world typically find that higher minimum wages do not generate increased unemployment but are associated with substantial decreases in lower-tail wage inequality. The chapter provides the first empirical test of one explanation; a substantial search and labour supply response is behind the observed patterns. The chapter identifies the impact of minimum wages on search, distinguishing the decision of whether to search (extensive margin) from the decision of how hard to search (intensive margin) for both non-working and working individuals. The analysis combines data on UK workers' search behaviour with quasi-experimental analysis of the UK minimum wage policy structure. Results find an increase in the number of individuals searching, but a decline in search intensity, and a corresponding increase in the duration of unemployed search. There is no evidence that workers already employed in low-wage jobs are discouraged from searching for higher paying jobs. The chapter shows that these results are consistent with search explanations of minimum wage labour market consequences. The second chapter switches to addressing the spatial dimension of inequality, particularly the mechanisms that generate diverging outcomes between regions. The chapter models the individual firm employment responses to local shocks and the contributions these make to driving unequal employment rates between local regions. The chapter builds a spatial network of the universe of UK firms with near pinpoint location accuracy and estimates the response of the local network to adverse employment events. Results show that firms in close proximity to a large mass layoff in turn reduce their own employment and that these negative spillovers are highly localised. The strength of the negative spillovers approximately halves for every kilometre further away from the event. The spillovers are also very persistent, with further localised employment losses continuing for at least five years after the event. In effect, a negative spiral is triggered at the local firm level, through a combination of sluggish individual firm adjustment and local agglomeration forces, and this can be used to explain the persistence in local labour market outcomes. The chapter also develops a new method for analysing spatial variation, and outlines the large costs associate with using more traditional techniques. The third chapter, which is co-authored with Antonio Dias Da Silva and Filippos Petroulakis of the European Central Bank, is themed around the impact of long term, structural changes on employment inequality. Technological progress and deepening global integration have contributed to reduced middle-skill employment in a process commonly referred to as employment polarisation. Simultaneously, there has been a large decline in the number of hours worked per worker in European economies. The chapter investigates the relationship between hours per worker and employment polarisation, asking whether hours per worker follow similar polarisation patterns. The analysis categorises occupations based on their task content, in particular the type and degree of routinisation involved. Results find large relative declines in hours per worker in routine manual jobs – precisely the occupations most negatively affected by employment polarisation from routine-biased technical change. A lower relative decline in hours per worker is observed in higher skilled jobs growing through polarisation. The patterns affect all age, gender and education groups approximately equally. The chapter concludes by evaluating the contribution of the hours per worker margin to overall employment polarisation.

Since European Union enlargement in 2004 there has been substantial migration from Central and Eastern Europe into the United Kingdom. This thesis focuses upon Polish and Romanian migrants and examines their involvement in the labour market of the UK. It examines the initial labour market experiences of these groups, along with subsequent career mobility, and identifies key influences affecting each. Regarding the former, a comprehensive investigatory framework is adopted which encompasses skill-based, social, structuring, and agency-related factors. Regarding the latter, a theoretical framework which utilises Dual Labour Market, Cultural Capital, and Strength of Weak Ties theories is used. Combined, the theories enable the rationalisation of labour market structure, migrant skill-based competencies, and network-based relationships respectively which holds intuitive appeal to both research concerns. Qualitative methods were used due to the complexity of issues under investigation, with semi-structured interviews yielding the detailed motivation- and experience- based data necessary to perform thematic analysis. Key findings concerning the initial labour market experience focus upon how migrant tolerance of low-skilled work ranges beyond goal-oriented notions of ‘temporariness’ advocated by previous literature, and how network entrenchment in trajectories of low-skilled agency employment is not necessarily guaranteed. Key findings regarding the mobility experience draw upon theory to outline the relative utilities of language, experience, and qualifications as factors conducive or prohibitive to labour market advancement at different points in the occupational hierarchy. Such contributions are significant as they either develop accepted notions as to why migrants tolerate low-skilled work, use resource-based considerations to challenge network entrenchment, or add definitional rigour and chronology to how migrant occupational mobility is defined.

This thesis aims at providing better understanding about gender differences in the labour market in Vietnam. In the first empirical chapter, we investigate within the context of Vietnam how circumstances at age 15 or 16 relate to completion of upper secondary education four years later. We exploit the longitudinal elements of Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) to identify household and commune characteristics and emphasise how the effects of these characteristics vary by gender. The gender differences we find suggest that unequal treatment of girls within their households has a negative impact on their educational attainment and that in the absence of such unequal treatment the reverse gender gap would be even larger. In the second empirical chapter, we examine the factors that are associated with the allocation of male and female labour into wage/salaried employment or selfemployment in the urban labour market by using the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey (VHLSS). Having more education increases the propensity for both men and women to be in wage/salary sector. We find that the probability of working in the wage/salaried sector decreases for both genders due to the burden of the child care. However, sharing child care with the elderly in the household may be the way for women to exit self-employment to be wage-earners. We find significant gender differences in employment allocation. Men are more likely to work in the wage and salaried sector whereas women are more likely to be selfemployed. However, in practice, most self-employment jobs in Vietnam are ownaccount vendors, which reflects insecurity rather than flexibility. The third empirical chapter examines the gender wage gap in urban Vietnam, using the Vietnamese Household Living Standard Survey (VHLSS). Since men are more likely to be employed in the wage-salaried sector while women are more likely to be self-employed, we employ the Heckman two stage and the Dublin and McFadden methods to correct for selectivity bias in employment sectoral allocations. We find that women, on average, earn around 8 percentage points less than men. However, after the selection bias correction, the gender wage gap becomes even bigger, with women earnings around 40 percentage points less than men's. Additionally, the gap is predominantly attributable to unexplained factors vis. discrimination.

Although the feminisation of migration has been widely discussed, little attention has been paid to the ways in which implicit bias and gender bias permeates governance systems. This thesis analyses the governance of domestic worker migration in Southeast Asia, with a specific focus on Malaysia, and investigates to what extent, and in what ways, a gendered governance system has developed. Policy actors’ perceptions have been neglected in research on the governance of migration which is problematic as we cannot understand governance without understanding the perspectives of the actors within the governance system. This study seeks to contribute to closing this research gap by adopting an actor-centred approach to look inside Malaysia’s governance system for labour migration. The empirical material comes from 41 in-depth interviews and structured questionnaires with key policy actors in Malaysia and the wider region. Whereas most research on migration governance has analysed governance system ‘outputs’, this thesis looks ‘inside’ the policy-making process to analyse: i) how policy actors within the governance system develop their understandings of the causes and consequences of the migration of domestic workers, ii) how they develop policy narratives based on these understandings, and iii) how gendered ideologies shape actors’ understandings and decisions. Through the development of an organisational perspective on the governance of migration which combines framing analysis with sense-making approaches, this thesis argues that various actors’ intuitive understandings about migration are shaped by ideas about gender and that these strongly influence the ways in which domestic worker migration is categorised and responded to.

This thesis consists of three chapters, all of which make extensive use of Italian administrative data. The first chapter studies strategic delays in the timing of layoffs around an age-at-layoff threshold entitling workers to a four month increase in potential unemployment insurance (UI) benefit duration. After having documented sizeable manipulation of age at layoff near the threshold, we show that the ensuing increase in UI benefit receipt is 81% mechanically due to higher coverage and only 19% the result of moral hazard responses. The second chapter documents the effects of increased import competition from China on the Italian labour market. In the first part of the paper, we show that areas that were initially specialized in import-competing industries suffered larger losses in manufacturing employment. However, these effects are modest in size. In the second part of the paper, we show that incumbent manufacturing workers did not suffer long-term economic losses. Although they spent less time at their initial employers, they were able to carry out successful transitions towards other sectors, in areas with better job opportunities. The third chapter studies the labour market outcomes of individuals starting an apprenticeship and compares them with those of similar individuals starting temporary contracts that, at least formally, do not provide training. I show that while apprenticeships increase the probability of conversion to open-ended contracts, especially at the initial firm, they also decrease the probability of obtaining further temporary contracts. Quantitatively, this second effect prevails, generating a negative effect on the probability of obtaining any job.

This research analyses the skills mismatch dynamics in the labour market using an agent-based model which is grounded in economic theory. The findings show the persistence of skills mismatch due to cyclical and structural factors in the economy. The output analyses highlight the sensitivity of skills mismatch to the initial endowment or characteristics of skill demand and supply in the region. This result is further supported by assessing policy response of skills mismatch. Training and investment policies are studied and the findings suggest that if a policy suitable to the region is implemented it can result in a reduction of skills mismatch and an increase in social welfare of the economy. Sectoral analysis of skills mismatch for Essex care sector finds issues such as failure of wage adjustment and ability of wages to signal shortages causes the persistence of skills mismatch in the sector. The research further analyses the impact of peer effect on skills mismatch to find that peer effect does affect the matching process by changing the supply of skills in the economy. Causal effects of exogenous frictions are thus found to impact the job search process. Analysis of spatial frictions in a single region and two-region setting is also conducted. The key findings from the regional analysis suggest that a high growth neighbouring area can decrease total skills mismatch of the system and of the local labour market but it comes at the cost of migration of high skilled workers to the neighbouring region leaving the local area pre-dominantly low skilled. Spatial frictions measured by commuting cost does not significantly impact these dynamics. The importance of regional and sectoral disaggregation while assessing skills mismatch and the measure of skills mismatch are recognized as the key considerations while designing policies aimed at addressing the labour market skills mismatch.

This thesis extends the existing literature on the response of labour markets to different types of economic shocks. First, we examine the effects of sector-specific fluctuations in job separation and job finding rates on the overall unemployment, sectoral allocation of labour and wages by solving a two-sector search and matching model with heterogeneous workers. The simulated results show how sector-specific shocks spill over the rest of the economy, causing workers to relocate between sectors in search of jobs. Inter-sectoral reallocation depends on the distribution of worker productivity in the affected sector. When an adverse shock hits a sector that attracts workers with relatively low productivity, the most productive among displaced workers move to compete for jobs in the sector with higher productivity. This offsets some of the increase in unemployment, subject to the ability of unaffected sector to employ additional workers. Next, we conduct meta-analysis to explain discrepancies between estimated effects of immigration shocks on wages in the literature. The results show that wage impact of immigration tends to be small in magnitude and negative significant. Labour market conditions at the period of study play a significant role in explaining the differences in measured impact. The estimates vary across countries and are related to the choice of modelling approach and estimators. Finally, we use EU-LFS dataset to analyse unemployment and labour market flows in Europe between 2006 and 2016. We identify the relative impact of shocks to job finding and separation rates on unemployment and investigate the role of socio-demographics, urbanisation and immigration status in shaping worker flow patterns in Europe. We find that over the studied period job losses accounted for three quarters of the rise in unemployment. The analysis of socio-demographic characteristics of the unemployed shows that young and less educated workers contributed the most to employment losses. Recent and intermediate immigrants in cities contributed to employment losses.

This thesis consists of two chapters aimed at advancing the understanding of the behaviour of labour markets over the business cycle. Chapter 1 examines how workers in different occupations are affected in recessions in terms of job separation and subsequent job finding probabilities. The analysis is motivated by Jaimovich and Siu (2015)'s recent research on the link between jobless recoveries and the disappearance of routine occupations. While this relationship has been examined at the aggregate level, the underlying individual level transition patterns have not been studied so far. Using administrative data from Germany, I track workers' transition patterns at different points in the business cycle. I show that, conditional on observable characteristics, workers in manual occupations have disproportionately high probability of job separation in recession. The same group of workers have a disproportionately low job finding probability during subsequent recoveries. These findings suggest that firms restructure their occupational composition during downturns. Chapter 2, a joint work with George Chouliarakis and Franciscos Koutentakis, evaluates the labour market conditions in the aftermath of the world financial and Euro zone crises in comparison with normal recessions in those economies that experienced depression-like labour market conditions, namely Greece, Portugal and Spain. This is motivated by the significant rise in the unemployment rate that has been witnessed in a number of advanced economies since the Great Recession. A growing literature has studied the underlying causes of the cyclical dynamics of unemployment in the largest of these economies, notably the UK and the US. But, so far, no attention has been paid towards the behaviour of worker flows into and out of unemployment in economies with relatively larger unemployment fluctuations. The goal of this chapter is to address this gap in the literature. The results in this chapter uncover substantial heterogeneities in the significance of the separation and job finding rates across our sample and between business cycles. In turn, these heterogeneities can be traced to cross-country differences in labour market institutions.

Drawing on a multi-sited psychosocial ethnography of the fine-dining sector in Istanbul, Turkey, this thesis explores the vicissitudes of love and affective labour under post-Fordism. It studies (i) discourses and imagery of love for culinary work circulating around the world, and their particular articulation in the Turkish fine dining context, (ii) how local actors are enticed by, act on, embody, reify and perform the ethos of love inscribed in these representations, and (iii) how the performance of love is implicated in cooks’ affective labour, subjectivity, wellbeing and working conditions. The thesis is based on a new research methodology developed through cross fertilisation between multi-sited organisational ethnography and psycho analytically inflected research. The fieldwork was designed to trace the ethos of love in discourses, images, artefacts and performances across culinary sites. Theoretical insights from Freud and Lacan are employed to interpret the ethnographic material, shedding light on its unconscious and affective facets. The thesis engages with post-Fordist thought, the affective labour debate and psychosocial studies. It contributes to the scholarly literature by providing a rigorous analysis and elaborate theory of symbolic identification with the post-Fordist ethos, imaginary identification with cultural representations, performance of these identifications as part of affective labour, and ambivalence toward one’s job. Intricate connections between these moments in the psychosocial process of subject formation are revealed and theorised. A novel and psychoanalytically-inflected definition of affective labour is also offered, which emerges as the performative work of reproducing individuals and collectives requiring human contact, interpersonal skills, emotion management, embodiment of cultural imagery and social roles, and love. The thesis disentangles the hegemonic ethos of post-Fordist work and develops a comprehensive theory of its affectivity.

Standard models of within-country mobility assume that all migration is speculative: workers move to search for jobs in other labour markets. I establish a new stylised fact showing that the majority of cross-regional migration in the US is in fact with a job in hand, as a result of a job offer from another region. The fact that a significant fraction of migration is a result of cross-regional hiring, and that this hiring is subject to search and matching frictions, has important implications for the level of regional mobility and hence regional differences within a country. In the first two chapters, I show empirically that the availability of cross-regional employment opportunities does matter for workers’ migration behaviour. Using US panel data, I demonstrate that the observed gap in migration propensity between the more and less educated workers can be partly explained by differences in labour market frictions. The less educated workers find job search in more distant regions much more difficult, which limits their options to move for a specific job and reduces their overall mobility. This result opens a new policy channel in addressing regional differences and those left behind: the importance of the ability to find a job before moving suggests a large social return to improving regional search and matching for less educated groups. In the third chapter, I explore the theoretical implications of an imperfect search and matching process on the existence and persistence of regional disparities. First, I show that if the efficiency of the search and matching process increases in the size of the labour market, migration will serve to exacerbate, not equilibrate, the differences in regional economies. A bigger labour market will experience higher wages and lower unemployment rates, attracting migrants from other regions and thus accelerating the process of regional divergence. At the same time, larger labour market frictions in the smaller regions reduce firms’ incentives to hire there, curtailing cross-regional hiring and hence the opportunity to move for a specific job. The interaction of these two forces give rise to multiple equilibria and explain how, in the presence of labour market frictions, regional disparities can be large and persistent at the same time.

Low-pay and limited opportunities for progression are major contemporary concerns in UK labour markets. A number of individual and job-related factors have been shown to influence the likelihood of low-paid workers advancing to higher-paid employment. However, the effects of the characteristics of the local labour market in which workers live are under-explored. This gap is addressed through examining two specific local labour market factors which theory suggests may impact on progression from low pay. Existing studies find that on average workers in (large) cities experience faster progression – cities act as ‘escalators’. This research tests whether such an effect also exists for low-paid workers. First transitions from low pay to higher pay are analysed initially using a national low pay threshold, finding a size effect particularly concentrated on London. However this measure is sensitive to existing geographic wage variations. When using an alternative occupation-based measure of wage progression, little evidence is found that those in (larger) cities see their pay grow more quickly. The second empirical chapter responds to concerns about the potential effect of job polarisation on social mobility and the ability of low-paid workers to move up the occupational ladder. The results show that the extent of ‘hollowing out’ of the local occupational structure during the 2000s had little effect on occupational mobility for those starting in low-paid occupations, suggesting that fears over the impact of job polarisation on the upward mobility of low-paid workers may have been overstated. Taken together, the research suggests that the two main local labour market characteristics considered – size and the degree of polarisation – do not have a substantial impact on progression from low pay, at least in relative terms and when defining local labour markets as Travel-To-Work-Areas. The thesis suggests that the issue of limited mobility from low pay effects all areas of the UK. The policy implication of this is that addressing the lack of advancement from low pay requires a consideration of the individual, sectoral and institutional factors which are constraining progression. Further work should investigate potential other local labour market processes that may be contributing to the lack of progression that many low-paid workers currently experience.

This dissertation explores the lives of Haitian women in Santiago, the capital of Chile, with a focus on their everyday encounters with Chilean state agents and private employers. It analyses the experiences of Haitian women as they navigate bureaucratic institutions and practices, negotiate their working conditions with employers and public defendants, train as care and domestic workers, seek modes of subsistence as street vendors, and understand themselves as migrant workers and working mothers. I argue that Haitian women’s efforts to transform their lives in a new country reveal the nature of state institutions in Chile, in the context of the legacies of its military dictatorship and the experience of an immigration boom not seen in its recent history. My account is based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Haitian women and their families living in Santiago, state agents involved in migration management and control, and employers of Haitian women. The dissertation uses migration as a case study to contribute to anthropological understandings of states and bureaucracies, work and markets, sameness and difference, and their effects on people’s lives. I begin with an overview of the project’s main themes of migration, states, bureaucracy, legality, and formality, and I reflect on encounters as a critical site through which anthropology can make sense of difference and social change. Chapter two draws on historical and statistical data to show how the relationships between Haitian women and the Chilean state are underpinned by the country’s history of migration, the configuration of racial hierarchies, and the neoliberal foundations of market democracy. Chapter three uses processes of visa application to analyse how Haitian women devise different strategies to ensure residence and labour formality through bureaucratic practices of speculative legality. Chapter four then draws on job-seeking encounters to analyse the consequences of these processes, revealing how gendered and racialised differences produce a landscape of servitude, in which migrants’ value as workers is continuously negotiated. The two successive chapters focus on Haitian women’s encounters with social protection programmes that seek to integrate migrants in the country’s national project. Chapter five explores the relation between human rights discourses and work in the formal economy for the Chilean state. Chapter six describes Haitian women’s experiences of pregnancy in Chile and the contradictory effects the status assigned to motherhood has in Haitian women’s lives. The final chapter follows the experience of Haitian women who have failed to secure formal employment and who make a living as informal and wageless traders in neighbourhood markets. Altogether, encounters between Haitian women and Chileans transform the state’s definitions of migrant legality and labour formality through economic practices of black markets, humanitarian rationales, gendered and racialised moral discourses, intimate body transformations and the normalisation of urban poverty. As a result, this ethnography enables the understanding of state formation and belonging as multi-scalar relations and affective processes that contribute to the anthropological knowledge of states, migration, and intersectional encounters.

The thesis is driven by the increasing number of the Directorate General of Taxes (DGT) employees who voluntarily left the organisation following the first phase of its organisational reforms that ended in 2008. Some changes were made to the reforms, including improving the employee compensation scheme, developing a more conducive working environment, setting up standard operating procedures to clarify job ambiguity, and implementing a job rotation system. The expectation following these changes was that employees would perform better and continue their employment in the DGT. During the second phase of reform between 2009 and 2014, 280 DGT employees decided to quit their jobs. The DGT claimed it had lost many tax specialists, tax auditors and managers, who play a crucial role in enabling the DGT to perform its function of collecting tax revenues This thesis seeks to understand the underlying causes of employee turnover in Indonesia’s DGT. It employs Price and Mueller’s model of employee turnover as the analytical framework to systematically examine the research problem. The research is based on two case studies in Jakarta’s regional tax offices, and it includes former and current DGT employees, as well as officials who are responsible in implementing the human resource regulations. Data for the research were collected through questionnaires and interviews. Price and Mueller’s comprehensive approach to the turnover problem was expected to be a useful tool to raise awareness for further examination of employee turnover problems. The thesis reveals that the model is substantially useful to explain job satisfaction among DGT employees (stayers), however, it is not fully effective in capturing employee turnover problems in Indonesia’s DGT. The model assumed organisational stability, while organisational change is more prevalent not only in the private sector, but also in the public sector. This research concludes that employees’ intentions/decisions in staying or leaving the DGT were rooted in organisational change and changes in its HR practices. The uncertainty tied into the reforms was found to be an important factor in influencing employees’ attitudes and behaviour toward their jobs.

This thesis contains three studies on the topic of labour market search. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the studies. Chapter 2 reports an experimental study which examines how social comparisons affect behavior in a sequential search task. In a control treatment subjects search in isolation, while in two other treatments subjects get feedback on the search decisions and outcomes of a partner subject. The average level and rate of decline of reservation wages are similar across treatments. Nevertheless, subjects who are able to make social comparisons search differently from those who search in isolation. Within a search task we observe a reference wage effect: when a partner exits, the subject chooses a new reservation wage which is increasing in partner income. We also observe a social learning effect: between search tasks, subjects who have been paired with a more patient and successful partner increase their reservation wages in the next task. Chapter 3 reports a study in which we provide the first microeconometric estimates of the hazards to matching on both sides of a labour market, decomposed into two constituent parts. Namely, (i) the rate at which job-seekers and vacancies contact each other (i.e. having interviews), and (ii) the probability that a contact results in a match. To do this, we use unique data which contains information on job-seekers, vacancies, interviews and interview outcomes. We use a specification which addresses the problems of the temporal aggregation bias and spatial spillovers highlighted by the two-sided estimates. Our estimates suggest that market tightness affects the matching rates mainly through affecting the meeting rates. In both the raw data and the estimates, we find the decline in the matching hazard is driven by the decline in the contact hazard, and not by a fall in the matching probability. And we also report the effects of various characteristics on matching decomposed into the effects on meeting and matching probability. Using the same data as Chapter 3, Chapter 4 provides further evidence on the mechanism by which job-seekers and vacancies decide whom to contact during their search. Since the data features an environment where both sides of the market have access to a database (or marketplace) of potential partners, a natural model of search is one of stock-flow matching, and we show that the predictions of this model outperform those of a simple random matching model. Our descriptive and econometric evidence shows that it is the inflow rate of new agents, rather than the total stock of agents, which determines the contact rates of existing agents, consistent with the predictions of the stock-flow model. Chapter 5 summarizes the findings of this dissertation and concludes.

This PhD thesis focuses on determinants of labour market outcomes in development economics with a special interest in South Africa and China. After an introduction in chapter 1, the key chapter 2, Ethnic Diversity and Labour Market Outcomes: Evidence from Post-Apartheid South Africa joint with Sara Tonini, investigates how ethnic diversity amongst black South Africans affects their employment opportunities in the post-Apartheid era. We find that ethnic diversity has a positive impact on the employment rate of the black South Africans, and it only affects ethnic groups with relatively large population size. To address the endogeneity of ethnic composition, we explore the location of historical “black homelands” and argue that districts more equally distant to multiple homelands are more ethnically diverse. In our instrumental variable regressions, a one standard deviation increase in ethnic diversity index increases employment rate by 3 (5) percentage point in 1996 (2001), which is around 8% (13%) of the average employment rate. We then propose a model of a coordination game to explain these findings. A more ethnically diverse place requires a higher rate of inter-ethnic communication to maintain social connection. As inter-ethnic communication requires more skills than intra-ethnic connection, people in ethnically diverse districts are motivated to invest more in social skills to be able to communicate with those outside their own group. The acquisition of these social skills makes them better equipped for the labour market. The remaining two chapters look into the intergenerational transmission of socio-economic status in South Africa and China. Chapter 3, Returns to Education, Marital Sorting and Family Background in South Africa joint with Patrizio Piraino, applies the model of Lam (1993, JPE) which combines intergenerational transmission of ability and assortative mating to investigate the relative explanatory power of father-in-law’s and father’s background for male wages. In the empirical analysis, after correcting for potential measurement errors in earnings and education, we find that father-in-law’s schooling is more correlated with male workers’ labour market earnings, employment rate and labour force participation than own father’s schooling in contemporary South Africa. This difference is more obvious when parental educational levels are higher. Chapter 4, Higher Education Expansion and Intergenerational Mobility in Contemporary China, studies how higher education affects the upward mobility of people from relatively disadvantaged families. Intergenerational occupational mobility is stimulated when children from different social classes end up in similar occupations. Whether or not they have similar occupational status depends not only on their level of education but also the occupational returns to education. Given there is already a convergence in educational achievements between children from different social classes in contemporary China, in this paper, I focus on their occupational returns to education. Occupational status is measured by the widely-accepted ISEI scaling system ranging from 16 to 90 points with large number indicating higher occupational status. I take advantage of an exogenous college expansion policy in 1999 as a natural experiment and find that one additional year of education increases the occupational status of their first job by 2.243 (2.774) points on average along the ISEI scale in OLS (IV) regressions. And children from upper-class families do not necessarily have higher returns to education than children from other social classes. The average occupational returns to education are higher for the most recent job than the first job, but the difference among social classes is still not significant.

This thesis examines self-employed individuals in the UK labour market, creating a new division that differentiates those who sustain by self-employment from those who move between self-employment and employee jobs. The thesis begins with an exploration of the characteristics of the different self-employed groups, compared to employees; then estimates earnings returns to human capital accumulation for the different groups; and scrutinises labour market transitions before and after the 2008 financial crisis, to see if the recession impacted behaviours. The analysis begins by establishing the criteria for partition between the self-employed, based on observation of the labour market behaviours of workers in our sample. We use an amalgamated dataset, the British Household Panel Survey, from the years 1991 till 2008, and its successor the United Kingdom Longitudinal Study, from years 2010 till 2014, following the same respondents in the UK for 23 years. We identify three categories of workers: those who we consider as ‘sustaining’ in self-employment; those who ‘dabble’ in self-employment [switching between self-employment and employee jobs] and those who are employees. The first empirical chapter sets out the criteria for the categorisation of individuals into sustained and dabbled self-employed and employees and describes the motivation for this additional distinction – not least the fact that most labour market studies consider ‘employees’ and ‘the self-employed’ as separate and distinct categories of worker. In this first chapter, we compare the characteristics of individuals in our two categories of self-employed with those of employees in our sample, using a Multinomial Logit Model. The analysis lends support to our categorisation of the two sets of self-employed workers. The sustained self-employed have characteristics that we more traditionally associate with the self-employed, for instance they are older, more male-oriented, non-white, non-UK born, and non-English native speakers. In contrast, those who we consider as dabbling in self-employment exhibit a unique set of attributes that place them in a distinct position when compared to both the sustaining self-employed and employees. They are found to be more advantaged than the wage earners, with respect to their observed socio-economic characteristics; not from ethnic minority groups, more male-oriented, UK nationals, native English speakers, middle-aged group of workers with good health status, reporting higher degrees of achievement and working in higher skilled industries. Also, they are more skilled than the sustained self-employed, with respect to their qualifications and skill levels, but are not well embedded in self-employment like the latter group. Sustainers are better off with respect to their home ownership, report higher work satisfaction, have fewer working partners, with a higher percentage of previously self-employed parents. What we expected to find was that dabblers were a disadvantaged group, pushed into self-employment because they cannot have access to paid employment, but what we found was that their movement between forms of self-employed and employee jobs seems to reflect a labour market ‘power’ of sorts and not a deficiency. They can move between forms of employment depending on the returns they perceive and are pulled rather than pushed. Hence, this does not fit with our original expectations and does not align with the disadvantage theory on which we base the formulation of our hypotheses. This implies that we have a sequential of highly professional and advantaged portfolio workers possibly making the best out of self-employment and paid employment jobs as they arise. The second empirical chapter estimates the returns to formal education for the ‘amalgamated’ group of self-employed and paid employees, without considering any heterogeneity within or among this group of workers in our data. We then estimate the returns for our categorisation and compare the results. We use the Log-Mincerian function to estimate the earnings returns for our workers, and the Ordinary Least Square model, Random Effect model, Fixed Effect model and Instrumental Variable techniques to interpret the results, and to deal with the potential endogeneity of education. We also employ the Heckman selection model to account for non-random selection into employment. The results from the [preferred] Fixed Effect model indicate that the returns for additional years of education are lower for the dabbled self-employed in comparison to paid employees. Similar findings are also shown when using credentials, although in both cases dabblers report a higher number of years of education and higher levels of educational attainments than paid workers. This validates with our own hypothesis, where we argue that dabblers are not able to enjoy higher returns to their human capital accumulation than paid employees, because they are unable to secure or ensure long term paid employment. Hence their lower returns to formal education might be explained by their oscillating pattern between paid employment and self-employment. Another possible explanation is that their agile way of working does not help us truly capture their earnings returns and for that reason the aggregate returns are shown to be lower. Moving towards the sustained self-employed, we could not find any robust evidence about higher returns in comparison to the dabbled self-employed and the always employed, although the estimates found lead towards this direction but do not hold any significant values. Hence, we could not validate our own hypothesis, based on the extension of the personal control theory, where we argue that sustainers should enjoy higher returns than dabblers because they have more planning advantages, continue longer in self-employment and are more established than dabblers. Also, sustainers should enjoy higher returns than paid employees because they are not bound by organisational rules since they are their own boss, they have more control over their own work and better use of their personal human capital. Furthermore, we could not detect any differences in the earnings returns between the general/amalgamated group of self-employed and paid employees, whereas our categorisation showed that the two subgroups of self-employed are different from each other and from paid workers, with respect to their observed socio-economic and demographic characteristics and their earnings returns. Although our results do not show any differences in the returns of the sustained self-employed, the returns for our dabblers seem to be lower, even though they are on average more advantaged. Hence, at the very least, we have found a group of workers not previously identified in studies that seem to suffer from some form of labour market disadvantage, when we consider their returns to education and account for the selectivity in occupational choice and endogenous problems of education. By doing so, we have contributed to new micro-econometric evidence on the heterogeneity of earnings returns to education for the self-employed in the UK labour market and offered a new comparable type of heterogeneity in the labour market that can be looked through in other studies and established in other countries. The third and last empirical chapter of this study looks at the transitions of workers in our sample, prior to and after the economic downturn and impact of the 2008 financial crisis on the behaviour of our division groups. This chapter explores the short and long-term trends in self-employment in the UK labour market, the changes in the nature of jobs and the demand and supply of workers in the market, the growth in self-employment in the UK labour market following the recession and the policies adapted as a response to the crisis. The aim is to find out if the transition behaviour of our workers helps us explain the overall changes in growth in self-employment that occurred in recent years within the UK labour market.

The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe are a large minority group that experience widespread marginalisation and social hardship. This research is focused on a substantial Roma community in the Republic of Macedonia, called Shuto Orizari. The work explores the construct of ethnic identity for this group, the way they participate in society through their acculturation orientations, and the influence these factors have on outcomes within the labour market. Seventeen people took part in the study across a range of backgrounds and a standpoint methodology was used to articulate the views of social reality for the participants. Information was collected through semi-structured interviews to which grounded theory was then applied. The findings support existing theories on the construct of ethnic boundaries and social identity. 'Being Roma' is important to all who took part in the study, yet unlike other Roma communities this identity is free and unthreatened. Participants chose two ways to acculturate in society; roughly half of the participants integrated with the majority ethnic Macedonian community and portrayed a comfortable balance with their heritage culture often not seen in other Roma communities. The remaining participants followed a separatist path within purely Roma circles. This introversion produced extremely negative outcomes, most notably the poor psychological and sociocultural experiences within the labour market. The work concludes that although modes of identity construct within this community are different to other Roma groups, a person's acculturation orientation can still dramatically affect life outcomes. This conclusion can help steer policies to improve the experiences of social participation for the Roma of Shuto Orizari, or potentially other large ethnic groups.

Across the globe, social networks influence labour market outcomes. This thesis investigates job networks-networks in which individuals exchange jobs and information about vacancies - in cities of developing countries. Using the example of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, I describe such networks, analyse how individuals use them for their economic benefit, and show how the networks respond to external shocks. Chapter one presents experimental evidence on job referrals in informal urban labour markets, investigating the relationship between social network centrality and persistence in labour market outcomes. I provide day work opportunities to young casual workers and vary the conditions by which they can refer their neighbourhood contacts to the same job. I find that central individuals are more likely to receive job referrals, and that there is a strong norm of reciprocal referring. While both factors lead to productivity losses and continuous neglect of peripheral workers, I show that socially excluded workers establish and consolidate new links when they can refer someone to the job. This suggests that individuals can integrate into job referral networks when given the opportunity. Chapter two studies information sharing about job opportunities in the social networks of young job-seekers, who collaborate in job search by sharing expenses and information about vacancies across the city. A job search assistance intervention, targeting only one individual in a pair of job-seekers, can break such collaborative informal arrangements. It is important to consider such social network externalities when evaluating the impact of labour market activation programmes. Chapter three contributes to the literature on the measurement of urban social networks, with a particular focus on job information exchange among individuals. I show that using truncated or local network data - such as from census-blocks - can introduce a bias when the network of interest is spread over larger spaces like whole cities. I compare two different network elicitation methods - pre-populated census-based rosters and open-ended, memory-based listings. I show that within geographically limited and tractable entities such as neighbourhoods, the former method yields more connections than the latter, which systematically underreports women and older contacts and relies more strongly on bilateral links.

This thesis contains three essays on behavioral responses to social insurance and taxation. The first chapter documents and analyzes an important and puzzling stylized fact about retirement behavior: the large concentration of job exits at specific ages. In Germany, almost 30% of workers retire precisely in the month when they reach one of three “statutory” retirement ages, although there is often no incentive or even a disincentive to retire at these thresholds. To study what can explain the concentration of retirements around statutory ages, I use novel administrative data covering the universe of German retirees, and I take advantage of unique variation in retirement incentives as well as in the location of statutory ages across individuals created by the German pension system. Measuring retirement bunching responses to 644 different discontinuities in pension benefit profiles, I first document that financial incentives alone fail to explain retirement patterns in the data. Second, I show that there is a direct effect of “presenting” a threshold as a statutory age, which is substantially larger than that of financial incentives. Further evidence on mechanisms suggests the framing of statutory ages as reference points for retirement as an explanation. A number of alternative channels including firm responses are also discussed but they do not seem to drive the results. The second chapter analyzes bunching responses around reference points and argues that bunching methods are naturally suited to quantify reference-dependent preferences. Using a standard labor supply model, the workhorse of the bunching literature, I first show that different types of reference dependence all have a key prediction in common: They imply sharp bunching of the outcome at the reference point. Observed bunching can be linked to underlying parameters, which motivates both structural and reduced-form estimation methods to implement an empirical bunching approach to reference dependence. Finally, I present two applications in the context of retirement decisions. First, I find significant bunching responses at a type of “pure” reference point, namely round retirement ages. Second, I complement the analysis from chapter 1 with structural estimation and find a quantitatively important role of reference dependence at statutory retirement ages. Counterfactual simulations highlight that shifting statutory ages via pension reforms can be an effective policy to increase actual retirement ages with a positive fiscal impact. The third chapter turns to a topic from the realm of taxation. Modern systems of firm taxation typically feature a combination of payroll, valued-added, and corporate income taxes. However, they often exist alongside special presumptive tax regimes targeted at small and medium enterprises (SME), such as a single turnover tax. This chapter uses novel administrative data from S ̃ao Paulo (Brazil), including data on inter-firm trade, to shed light on the effects of such dual tax systems on firm growth, market competition, and production decisions. First, we show that the firm size distribution is distorted by the eligibility threshold for the presumptive tax system. Second, ineligible (larger) firms are adversely affected by reductions in the tax and compliance burden for SME. Third, we study the relationship between tax systems and production choices. The presumptive tax mainly replaces a payroll tax and a value-added tax by a turnover tax in our context. Accordingly, we find that firms in the presumptive tax regime use relatively more labor input and source more of their intermediate input from other firms in the same regime. This leads to partial segmentation of the trade network between firms in the two systems. We show that heterogeneity in firm production choices drives part of these correlations, but there is also a causal effect of tax regimes on input choices.

This thesis examines some features of the labour market, and their macroeconomic consequences. The first paper relates the observed flatter Phillips Curve to the rise in labour turnover and temporary employment. In a New Keynesian model of sticky wages, workers or unions discount future wage income with a low discount factor if there is a strong flow of job turnover. In the New Keynesian wage Phillips Curve, this implies that future inflation is discounted more heavily than without job turnover. In the long run, the Phillips Curve is much flatter, and is no longer vertical or near-vertical; in the middle and long run, the curve appears flatter as turnover creates a bias if it is not accounted for. The second paper studies the impact of a rise in monopsony in the labour market: wages are set by employers instead of workers/unions. If rigid wages are set by monopsonistic employers and there is inflation, the fall in the real wage lowers the labour supply. In such a world, inflation is contractionary: the Phillips curve is inverted. The paper then examines a model where employers and employees both have market power, and use it to bargain over wages. The slope of the bargained Phillips Curve depends on each side's relative power. An increase in employers' power flattens the Phillips Curve. The last paper accounts for the possibility of featherbedding (or overmanning) in the labour market. In such a case, unions are able to impose a level of employment above the firm's optimum. In other words, the wage is above the worker's marginal rate of substitution, and above the firm's marginal product of labour. In this case labour market rigidities act as a distortionary tax on profits rather than employment; this generates a different source of inefficiency. While these distortions are very costly in the long run, removing them can be detrimental to employment in the short run.

This thesis investigates the possibilities and forms of subaltern politics through an empirical study of Brazilian domestic workers' mobilisations. Domestic work, often described as a legacy of slavery in Brazil, is characterised by the intersection of gender, race and class matrices of oppression, which makes domestic workers a subaltern group. As a result of their subaltern status and characterisation as 'non-standard' workers they are expected to be harder, or even impossible, to organise and represent. Yet, Brazilian domestic workers have been organising since 1936; they formed their own autonomous trade unions, and won partial recognition in 2015 when the Brazilian Congress approved a law extending basic labour rights to them. Thus, my thesis examines how this subaltern group has been able to organise, and argues that instead of considering subalternity as an impediment to collective action it should be understood as a potential resource for mobilisation. I have identified three paradoxes of subaltern politics. First, I show how the professional identity 'domestic worker' is both necessary for political recognition in the Brazilian corporatist state, but also rejected, as it re-inscribes domestic workers into the raced-gendered power relations they want to challenge. Furthermore, I find that while the intersecting nature of their oppression is what has constructed domestic workers as a subaltern group, it has also enabled the formation of broad-based alliances with women, black and workers' movements, thereby turning subalternity into a resource for collective action. Finally, domestic workers have used their perceived vulnerability to force recognition from the Brazilian state, yet, this has led to a paternalistic mode of recognition and a certain demobilisation of the domestic workers' local unions. As domestic workers gained partial recognition as workers, they were also forced into an industrial relations model that did little to respond to the complex and multi-sided forms of oppressions they face, posing new challenges to their modes of organising.

Labour market deregulation has been one of the core policies recommended by international institutions to countries struggling with their employment levels. However, lowering employment protection and disempowering or decentralising collective bargaining mechanisms can have unintended consequences. This thesis examines three related levels of labour market deregulation, considering both its consequences and evaluating different approaches to protecting workers in the labour market, with a focus on the most vulnerable. The first study deals with employment protection rules, and analyses the effects of labour market deregulation on dimensions relate to the risk of poverty, comparing the labour market performance of three countries with different levels of employment protection legislation: Italy, France and the UK. The second focuses on the level of collective bargaining, and analyses the different outcomes of Spanish and Italian reforms on derogations to collective agreements, showing how social actors responded differently depending on union strength and the employers' approach to industrial relations as shaped by the levels of precarious employment of each labour market. The third analyses the critical case of a local campaign by vulnerable workers that led a British university to bring its cleaning services back in-house after years of outsourcing, showing the successful strategy of an independent union in organising precarious and migrant workers. Each of the three studies explores one of three means of improving workers conditions; variations in employment protection legislation, traditional collective bargaining institutions and disruptive action of independent unions. Findings show that deregulation of employment protection is not the best route to improving the economic chances of the most vulnerable workers, whereas unions' action can secure better conditions for the workers, both in the formal setting of collective bargaining institutions and in the more confrontational context of local collective action.

This thesis explores a heterogeneous migrant labour force, particularly Kurdish workers from the south-east of Turkey, working in a private steel mill outside Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The wider context is one of war, population displacement, political disintegration, and economic fluctuation. The dissertation builds on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a period of 16 months between November 2014 and February 2016 in the south-west of Erbil, ten miles away from the town of Gwer, the ISIS–Iraqi Kurdistan war front. It demonstrates how political and economic fragmentation created a zone for the appropriation and super-exploitation of cheap material and human resources and facilitated an expansion of unregulated capitalism. In this process, capitalist production became freed from the cost and constraint of a moral economy of labour, as political disintegration and Kurdish nationalism created consent and coercion for the corporate control of local resources. Industrial production constituted a field of experimentation in labour relations for both management and labourers, in a manner exemplary of contemporary capitalism. The dissertation opens with a discussion of relational and holistic approaches to the expansion of capitalism and inequality; it then moves to examine the Hiwa neighbourhood as a frontier landscape between the relative stability and security of Iraqi Kurdistan and the insecurity and uncertainty of the war zones of Iraq, Syria and Eastern Turkey. Chapters 1 and 2 describe how production and destruction, formal and informal economies, and deregulation and criminalization are interconnected and integral to the recycling of war scrap on which the expansion of the steel mill depends. Chapters 3 and 4 turn from the environment to labour, and examine the heterogeneous work force composed of migrant men from India, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and the rest of Iraq. Their labour has been made cheap through distinct formal and informal work practices within the wider dynamics of war, displacement, and informalization in the region. Complementary to this structural analysis, Chapters 5 and 6 turn to individual life stories of migrant labourers, focusing on how they experience incertitude, from gruelling everyday uncertainties concerning unstable work to life-threatening disease. In so doing, the thesis aims to document the moral and material consequences of contemporary capitalism in Iraqi Kurdistan for migrant labour at a more intimate level.

The interest in the effects of immigration on the UK labour market has increased in the past decade. According to the ONS, the upsurge of non-EU citizens in the UK began in 1997 and peaked in 2004 before declining thereafter. Following the A8- accession in 2004, the migration of EU citizens has witnessed a cyclical pattern by increasing till the recession, declining, and then increasing again in recent years. Migration patterns have also changed regionally. For example, traditionally immigrant attracting regions such as London saw the lowest percentage increase in foreign born workers, whereas regions like the North east of England, Wales and Scotland gained popularity between 2005 and 2016. This thesis aims at understanding the impact of immigration on UK regional wages between 1991 and 2016. The analysis presented in this thesis is split by the pre-and post-recession periods using the BHPS and the UKHLS datasets. The instrument variable based estimation results suggest that at the regional level, immigration had an insignificant impact on native average wages in the pre-recession period (1999-2009) but had a negative impact in the postrecession period (2009-2016) in Great Britain. For England, the results were negative in the pre-recession period possibly indicating the importance of migration to the labour markets of Scotland and Wales. Allowing for imperfect substitution between natives and immigrants, at the wage distribution level of the natives, the results concluded that in the pre-recession period, immigrants had a negative impact on the 10th wage percentile. In the post-recession period, the impact was concluded to be positive at all percentiles and insignificant at the 10th wage percentile. The analysis was also extended by including the regional role of capital adjustment with imperfect substitution between immigrants and natives. The results indicated that immigrants had a negative impact on regional average wages of England from 2009-2016.

This thesis examines UK doctors’ labour supply from the intensive margin. Initially, it explores trends in average weekly hours of work using data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS). Next, it compares how average weekly hours of work vary over the lifecycle for doctors and compare to with other professionals’ hours (lawyers and accountants). Finally, as doctors continuously report being stressed and unhappy, this thesis explores data from the Annual Population Survey (APS) to assess whether hours of work could alter self-reported wellbeing levels for doctors and other workers. This thesis is made up of five chapters with three main essays on the topic of interest. Chapter 1 conveys an extensive background on what we know about doctors’ labour supply in the UK and other countries. Chapter 2 exploits the LFS to examine main trends in doctors’ weekly hours of work (GPs and hospital doctors) over 21 years (1994-2014). It proposes a definition of total hours worked that encompasses total usual hours in main job (basic hours and overtime hours, paid or unpaid) plus total hours in second job. The chapter is mostly descriptive and focuses on changes in average weekly hours of work of the headcount of doctors over the period and on variation across different characteristics. It also portrays irregular working patterns, second job hours and desired hours of work (both more and fewer hours). The main finding conveys that despite training more doctors every year and the increasing female participation in the medical profession, hours of work have fallen over time and the sharpest fall occurs between 1994 and 2004. From 2004, this trend attenuates but continues falling though at a reduced rate. Chapter 3 estimates labour supply models over the lifecycle for a representative agent using a pooled cross-section dataset from the LFS for ‘partner’ GPs (Selfemployed), ‘salaried’ GPs, hospital doctors, lawyers and accountants. The main finding posits that the reduction in female doctors’ average weekly hours of work – especially ‘salaried’ GPs – has been larger than those of lawyers and accountants. This is attributed to lifecycle effects and, particularly, children. Chapter 4 examines self-reported well-being outcomes (anxiety, happiness, life satisfaction and worthwhile levels) and variables relating health problems (depression, hypertension or whether having a health problem limits activity to work). We examine the relationship between hours of work and well-being levels. Although there is considerable literature on doctors’ job satisfaction, especially GPs, and, also, there are numerous studies on the issue of burnout, this is not the case for well-being of physicians which is underexplored. The few existing studies come from small snapshots and unrepresentative samples. This chapter explores a large well-established dataset using conventional screens to examine the distribution of well-being and their proximate determinants. The information is available in the Annual Population Survey (APS) from 2011 quarter 2 to 2015 quarter 1, covering four fiscal years (2011/12 to 2014/15). Our main finding conveys that, contrary to popular belief, and the assertions of the professional bodies for physicians, doctors appear to be more satisfied, happier, feel that their life is more worthwhile, and they are less anxious than other professionals. The chapter also makes an economic contribution on labour supply: hours of work, at the margin, have virtually no significant effect on the measures of well-being. This means that individuals are on their labour supply curve but those reporting to work more hours may have lower values of the well-being measures. This is true for lawyers and accountants but not for doctors, which is viewed as evidence of intrinsic motivation driven by mission orientation among doctors. So, there is scope for expanding supply along the intensive margin, which may be both an inexpensive and quick solution to the alleged supply shortfall, relative to the current policy of expanding supply along the extensive margin. Chapter 5 sums up the main findings and contributions.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the effectiveness of Active Labour Market Policies (ALMP) in reducing unemployment in European transition and non-transition economies. The theoretical framework proposed to analyse the effectiveness of ALMPs in reducing unemployment indicates that these policies affect unemployment through several different mechanisms. ALMPs can facilitate the matching process, increase productivity, increase labour supply and competition in the labour market, reduce welfare losses of the unemployed and serve as a stimulus to unemployed individuals' willingness to work. This research is based on both a country-level analysis using a sample of European transition and non-transition economies (for 2005-2015) and individual-level analysis using cross-sectional data (2012) for Kosovo. The country-level analysis assesses the ALMP effectiveness using two different strategies. The first one investigates the effect of ALMP expenditure (as share of GDP) on the flow from unemployment to employment using a Fixed-Effects panel model and finds a positive effect, in line with expectations. The economic significance of this finding, however, is questionable since the increase in the outflow from unemployment is relatively small. The second strategy investigates whether the ALMP expenditure (as share of GDP) reduces the unemployment rate in a dynamic panel analysis, using a Generalised Methods of Moments (GMM) estimator. This strategy, also, investigates the relative effectiveness of different measures by separately including variables to account for: Training, Employment Incentives, Supported Employment and Rehabilitation, Direct Job Creation and Start-Up Incentives. The results from the second approach find no significant effect of any of the ALMPs in reducing the unemployment rate. The analysis of the ALMP effectiveness at the individual level in Kosovo explores the following measures: On the Job Training, Internship Scheme and Institution and Enterprise Training. This analysis focuses on the following outcomes: beneficiaries' probability of finding a job post-participation; beneficiaries' probability of increasing job search and beneficiaries' probability of having an employment contract. The empirical findings indicate that participation in one of these active measures is associated with a higher individual's probability of being employed compared to a non-participant, however the results differ subject to model specification. In addition, the findings also suggest that among employed individuals those that participated in ALMPs are more likely to be in informal employment. Finally, an assessment of the policy implications for European economies seeking to increase and sustain employment through active measures is provided based on the empirical evidence presented in this thesis.

This thesis presents three empirical chapters on local labour markets, mineral booms, beliefs, conflict and uncertainty. All the analysis was conducted using Peruvian data and context. The first chapter finds that Peruvian individuals exposed to violent events during their impressionable years trust less government institutions, and feel less identified with their neighbours, while more identified with religious groups. The estimated effect is small and heterogeneous depending on the identity of the perpetrator. The effect on identification with groups of population is also heterogeneous by the indigenous origin of the individuals. Owners of an agricultural plot embedded in a cooperative setting at the local level exhibit even smaller levels of identification with their locals while higher levels of identification with their ethnic group. In line with recent literature, these findings suggest that conflict has a small but persistent effect on the formation of trust and identity, which is a central feature to understand the interaction between culture and institutions, and ultimately to understand the persistent consequences of wars. The second chapter studies the relationship between democratic beliefs and economic uncertainty. I explored whether uncertainty experienced during the impressionable years of the individuals is a key factor behind the formation of the democratic beliefs. Results showed that this type of uncertainty had no effect on the determination of democratic beliefs. Combining uncertainty with the exposure to authoritarian regimes did not change the result. This result is robust to different definition of rural individuals, the interaction of uncertainty and degree of experienced authoritarianism, and different formative periods. Current uncertainty, on the other hand, was unable to fully explain the formation of democratic beliefs. The final chapter investigated the local labour effects of mining booms. Using two rounds of population census for 1043 districts in Peru I documented that large-scale mining activity had a positive effect on local employment over 14 years. The effect was differentiated by industry, skill and migration status. Employment grew by 4% faster by one standard deviation increase in the mineral prices. Both high and low skilled workers enjoyed similar employment increase, however only low skilled workers experienced a decline in unemployment. Using data from 10 annual household surveys I found that, consistent with a model of heterogeneous firms and labour, wages for low skilled workers in districts close to the mining activity was 5% higher by every standard deviation increase in the index of mineral prices. Additional evidence with the census data suggested that to a large extent locals working in the mining or the agricultural sector filled the new employment opportunities. Together these findings suggest that large-scale mining activity increases the demand for mining and agricultural local employment, and the wages in the local economy.

This PhD thesis compares and contrasts various new employment and social policies in Chongqing and Shenzhen to determine how these policies affect rural migrant workers' employment security and social security in each area. Chongqing and Shenzhen have followed two distinct socioeconomic developmental paths, known as the Chongqing experiment and the Guangdong model, which respond to the development of neoliberalism and rural-urban migration in China by several means, including new local employment and social policies and local hukou system reform policies. The thesis applies the theoretical concepts of the precariat, the informal economy, and the segmentation of labour market (SLM) and dual labour market (DLM) to the case of China. Three indicators - the signing of labour contracts, the level and regularity of salary payment, and the possession or absence of social insurance - are explored to assess rural migrant workers' employment security and social security. This thesis is based on qualitative research, drawn from one year of fieldwork study with two-month follow-ups in both Chongqing Liangjiang New Area and Shenzhen Longhua and Futian districts, as two representative sites for each model in order to research new-generation rural migrant workers in the hi-tech processing and assembly industry. It draws on the primary data from semi-structured interviews based on an interview guide, analysed through comparative and qualitative methods, to argue that rural migrant workers in both cities can be categorised as members of the precariat, who are engaged in informal working conditions and precarious employment security, and suffer from limited social security within the formal economy, because they are stuck within the secondary labour market in 3 urban China. However, the thesis also argues, contra Guy Standing, that the precariat is not a class for itself in China, due to many divisions within the supposed class. Instead, the thesis suggests that rural migrant workers in both Chongqing and Shenzhen, who make up one part of the precariat, might represent the formation of a new class of "gongyou" 工友 ("workmates"), which is a new previously un-analysed term formed from the native Chinese grassroots rather than the Western-inspired scholarly concept of the precariat. Members of the gongyou class are potentially dangerous to the state and to firms, because of their increasing willingness to take collective action against the mainstream of global neoliberalism and the growing precariatisation of employment in China.

One of the common debates in the European Union revolves around the argument that labour mobility in the EU is too low and well below the general expectations. Since the implementation of neoliberal policies in the 1980s, the EU has increasingly favoured ‘high labour mobility levels within the EU’ and has desperately been trying to increase them ever since. In particular, in the last decade the EU has implemented various programmes in order to boost labour mobility between the member states. This thesis challenges the current view of EU institutions with their call for higher mobility levels between the EU member states. According to migration theories (the neoclassical theory of migration), individuals move in order to profit from economic advantages, i.e. they move to regions with better prospects of earning higher wages. In other words, under this lens migration takes places between economically different regions. In addition, the EU has been trying to achieve convergence between the regions by implementing cohesion polices, which means the reduction of economic disparities between regions. Through semi-structured interviews, the motivations of EU-migrants between converged and non-converged regions are explored and compared. The outcomes of this research study bring into question the perspective of the EU institutions by providing evidence that high mobility levels cannot be achieved in converged regions as both ambitions correlate from the same source, namely wage differentials. The EU is thus following paradoxical aims.

This study examines how institutional actors interpret, influence and respond to skills availability in the labour market for graduates. It researches and draws lessons from the Maltese experience of managing graduate employability over three decades, focusing on the three fastest-growing economic sectors, namely, Accountancy, Pharmachem and ICT, each of which is the subject of a case study. The study investigates the interaction of governments, firms, higher education institutions and professional associations in identifying skills shortages and gaps, as well as in devising policy frameworks and skills regimes at national, sectoral and corporate levels. Drawing upon theories of employability and employee skills, first, there is development of an analytical framework to examine how these institutional actors affect the labour market, which informs the analysis of the three case studies. The qualitative research involved an interpretative analysis of key policy documents related to graduate employability and seventy in-depth interviews with interlocutors positioned in strategic policy making, senior management, academic, expert and professional leadership roles within government, regulators, major corporations, higher education institutions, training providers and professional associations. The data was thematically analysed. Twelve key themes emerged from the in-depth interviews, which included the following: use of different language; the meaning of employability; the value of credentials; the role of the University; perceptions; expectations; competitiveness; modes of training provision; labour mobility; placements and incentives; collaboration and skills gap. The institutional actors across the three focal sectors, namely, accountancy, pharmachem and ICT tended to emphasise some themes more than others, these having previously been identified in scholarly literature (Appendix 1). Both patterns and inconsistencies emerged from a comparison of the accountancy, pharmachem and ICT sectors. In so far as the labour market is concerned, the study revealed a lack of technical skills and major non-technical graduate skills gaps, specifically, in the aspects of communication, teamwork and problem-solving. A number of professional characteristics or behaviours were also identified as lacking with Accountancy, Pharmachem and ICT graduates, namely, attitude, confidence, drive, professional outlook, independent working, personality fit and a ‘can do’ approach. The study revealed the absence of permanent systemic connections between the formulation of national and sectoral economic strategies on the one hand, and higher education and training policies on the other. Consequently, state higher education institutions have been responding reactively to labour market needs, which could explain the endemic skills gap which the study found. The study concludes by discussing limitations and limits to this research as well as recommending policy initiatives and further research that could contribute to the science and practice of public policy in this field.

In this Ph.D. thesis, I study the role of inactive workers (i.e., individuals classified by standard statistical measures in the labour market as non-participants or as out-of-labour force) in the context of a frictional labour market model.

This thesis sheds new light on the study of law in Japan by exploring legislative interventions and dispute resolution processes in the Japanese field of employment. The academic literature about the legal system of Japan has produced valuable research about various areas of Japanese law, from attempts at explaining patterns of rights assertion in the country to more recent studies about the legal reforms launched by the government of Japan starting from the 2000s. However, it has rarely considered the employment field as a fruitful subject for research. Nonetheless, in the past thirty years, employment has been one of the areas of Japanese law to experience considerable reform. Against the backdrop of the changes in the composition of the Japanese workforce and the bursting of the economic bubble of the beginning of the 1990s, the government of Japan assumed a more prominent role in the regulation of employment relations. In light of these developments, this thesis contributes to the debate on the role of law in Japan by examining this rarely investigated area of the Japanese legal system. Specifically, it focuses on the legislative interventions of the Japanese government to regulate the peripheral workforce of the labour market, namely women and part-time workers, and procedures for the resolution of employment disputes. In doing so, it demonstrates that the efforts of the legislators to enhance the creation of a more inclusive labour market have been fundamentally constrained by ideological and institutional factors, and resulted in an uneven distribution of legal resources among workers which exacerbated existing employment status divisions. This, in turn, has translated into unequal access to justice, affecting the extent to which different categories of workers can obtain redress through the legal apparatus.