Essays on Environmental and Labor Economics
This dissertation is the collection of three papers on environmental and labor economics. The First chapter is on environmental economics. The main objective of this chapter is to explore the effect of local community pressure on the corporate environmental management effort expended by factories regulated under the Clean Water Act. Many factors influence corporate environmental management, which I interpret to include the full spectrum of pollution control techniques from reactive end-of-pipe treatment techniques to proactive pollution prevention protocols. The analysis of this chapter empirically exploits to two survey-based measures of local community pressure. One captures the perceived need to respond to local concerns over the natural environment. The other measure captures the economic importance of the polluting facility in the local community. These two measures capture countervailing forces. While the first reflects greater local environmental pressure, the second reflects less local environmental pressure. Our results reveal that local community pressure positively influences corporate environmental management in general; however, in certain cases, the two local dimensions reveal distinctions between a community’s desire for environmental protection and economic activity. The second chapter is also on environmental economics, which serves as an extension to the first chapter. Here, I explore the effect of spatially defined local community characteristics on the wastewater management environmental choice by constricting rings of community characteristics within 1,5,10 and 15 miles of the regulated facility location. The study includes not only economic characteristics of the community, but also socioeconomic, demographic and political community characteristic that serve as proxies of local community pressure. In addition, to empirically answer the question whether local communities promote water pollution control, this study assesses whether the communities are environmentally discriminated against on demographic characteristics or social instability. Results reveal wealthier communities appear to induce facilities to increase their environmental efforts and improve wastewater management practices but this effort fades as the distance to the facility grows. The third chapter of this dissertation studies the effect of terrorist attacks on the labor market to provide empirical evidence on the economic consequences of terrorism on the labor supply. It Is a co-authoring work with William Duncan. We develop a set of hypotheses from classical labor economic theory around the consumer maximization problem and propose a threshold for endangerment costs that, when reached, causes individuals to choose not working and less consumption, rather than work and face the danger of terrorism and violence. As such, I hypothesize that increased endangerment costs lead to fewer people working, less hours worked per week, lower wages, and less job permanence. The importance of this kind of research cannot be understated, as the mechanisms through which terrorism impacts a society are still not clearly understood. Many studies of terrorism focus on more advanced countries (Eckstein and Tsiddon 2004). But in Iraq, one of the major economic consequences of the conflict and subsequent terrorist activity has been the shocks to the labor supply. In addition, understanding the impact of terrorist attacks on labor supply of countries under severe pressure from terrorism may provide future motivation for research into refugee crises and labor policies of destination countries. The main contribution of this chapter to the ongoing literature is study the effect of terrorism in Iraq on the labor supply, using several measures of the labor force: employment status, wages, hours worked per week and job permanence. Moreover, I generate a geospatial variable to incorporate potential spillover effects of terrorism. To do this, we use a nationwide household socio-economic survey conducted in 2007 by the Iraqi Organization for Statistics and Information Technology (COSIT), Kurdistan Regional Statistics Office (KRSO) and the World Bank. This data was only recently released, and thus is largely unexplored. I generate two different data sets (panel and cross-sectional) based on both the Arabic and English version of the household socio-economic survey. To the best of my knowledge, this might be the first study that empirically explores the economic consequences of terrorism on the labor market within a country that faced sequential terrorist attacks such as Iraq. Briefly, the preliminary results show strong evidence in favor of each hypothesis.
Environmental economics, Labor economics, Environmental management, Female Labor force, Labor Market, Local community pressure, Terrorism, wastewater
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