We investigate the relationship between social distancing, as measured by encounter rates using cellphone proximity data, and COVID-19 infections and deaths. Consistent with the existing literature on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions, we find a positive and statistically...

This study examines the emergence of Business ProcessOutsourcing (BPO) in white collar occupations. Recent BPOpractices are compared to the offshore outsourcing of productionin the context of the shift from Fordist to flexible production. Thestudy considers BPO in light of Harry Braverman’s...

We explore the relevancy of subjects' risk preferences recovered using a subjective risk question to those recovered from the incentivized lottery experiments of Holt and Laury (2002), Gneezy and Potters (1997), and Johnson and Webb (2016). While a statistically significant relationship between...

We explore the consistency of the characteristics of individuals who participate in studies posted on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). The primary individuals analyzed in this study are subjects who participated in at least two of eleven experiments that were run on AMT between September of 2012 to...

This thesis sets out to give contemporary commercial context to a luxury business, whose products have been traditionally studied as art-objects. The provincial firm, under the Duesburys, was the country's pre-eminent producer of fine porcelain from c. 1770, a position no other domestic...

Choosing an appropriate equivalence scale is a prerequisite for comparisons of economic wellbeing income distribution, inequality or poverty. This is true for country specific work or for cross-national comparisons. Researchers generally either use a country specific equivalence scale (social...

Approximately 80 percent of Americans have a significant financial obligation. A substantial fraction of these individuals rely almost solely on labor income to meet these needs. Using a two-period model we demonstrate that when agents are risk averse, increasing the level of financial...

This study examines the emergence of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) in white collar occupations. Recent BPO practices are compared to the offshore outsourcing of production in the context of the shift from Fordist to flexible production. The study considers BPO in light of Harry Braverman's...

Recent empirical work has shown that the success of an economy depends largely on how successful it is in allocating inputs and outputs across businesses efficiently with minimum disruption and frictions. Reallocation of factors of production plays a major role in productivity growth and it is...

This thesis is comprised of three chapters. The first chapter (joint with John Haltiwanger, Julia Lane, and Kevin McKinney) explores a new way of capturing dynamics: following clusters of workers as they move across administrative entities. Information on firm dynamics is critical to...