Land, Labor, and Colonial Economics in Thomas Morton's New English Canaan

Essays in Labor Economics

Title of dissertation: ESSAYS IN LABOR ECONOMICS Ye Zhang, Doctor of Philosophy, 2007 Dissertation directed by: Professor Jeffrey Smith, Economics Professor Judith Hellerstein, Department of Economics My dissertation is composed of two essays in Labor Economics. The first chapter examines how employers learn about workers’ unobserved productivity when learning is asymmetric between incumbent an...

Lectures in Labor Economics

Unholy Trinity: Labor, Capital, and Land in the New Economy

My theme in these lectures is the capacity of the methods of the Classical political economists, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and their critic, Karl Marx, to reveal the self-organizing character of the capitalist economy regarded as a complex, adaptive, non-equilibrium system. From one point of view this is an exercise in anachronism, since the language of complex systems theory a...

Essays in Labor Economics

The Economics of Labor

The majority of labor transactions throughout much of history and a significant fraction of such transactions in many developing countries today are "coercive," in the sense that force or the threat of force plays a central role in convincing workers to accept employment or its terms. We propose a tractable principal-agent mode! of coercion, based on the idea that coercive activities by employe...