The first chapter investigates the quantitative importance of non-employment in the labor market outcomes for the United States. During the last 50 years, production has shifted from goods to services. In terms of occupations, the routine employment share decreased, giving way to increases in manual and abstract ones. These two patterns are related, and lower non-employment had an important role. A labor allocation model where goods, market services, and home services use different tasks as inputs is used for quantitative exercises. These show that non-employment could significantly slow down polarization and structural transformation, and induce significant displacement within the labor force.
The second chapter, coauthored with Bart Hobijn and Todd Schoellman, looks at the demographic structure of structural transformation. More than half of labor reallocation during structural transformation is due to new cohorts disproportionately entering growing industries. This suggests substantial costs to labor reallocation. A model of overlapping generations with life-cycle career choice under switching costs and structural transformation is studied. Switching costs accelerate structural transformation, since forward-looking workers enter growing industries in anticipation of future wage growth. Most of the impact of switching costs shows on relative wages.
The third chapter establishes that job polarization is a global phenomenon. The analysis of polarization is extended from a group of developed countries to a sample of 119 economies. At all levels of development, employment shares in routine occupations have decreased since the 1980s. This suggests that routine occupations are becoming increasingly obsolete throughout the world, rather than being outsourced to developing countries. A development accounting framework with technical change at the \textit{task} level is proposed. This allows to quantify and extrapolate task-specific productivity levels. Recent technological change is biased against routine occupations and in favor of manual occupations. This implies that in the following decades, world polarization will continue: employment in routine occupations will decrease, and the reallocation will happen mostly from routine to manual occupations, rather than to abstract ones.
Executive Casework, Inc. is a custom commercial mill working company based in San<br/>Jose, CA. Although the company originally only focused on cabinets, it has expanded to include custom reception desks and solid surface countertops to meet demand. The company founded by David and Mark Brown has humble beginnings, originally located in Mark's garage. Over the last two decades, the company has seen astronomical growth buoyed up by the fast increase in commercial real estate in Silicon Valley.<br/>However, the company is currently facing considerable uncertainty like many others in the industry. These resulting overhead costs, when paired with future uncertainty of demand created by geopolitical trends, work from home, and Covid-19, create a notable problem for Executive Casework, Inc. As such, this thesis will focus on strategic steps Executive Casework, Inc. can make to capitalize on current macrocosmic trends, as well as trends within their own industry. More specifically, it will be a strategic analysis identifying the key external forces driving the fluctuating revenues in the commercial custom mill working industry, followed by an analysis of these external forces (magnitude and longevity). We will end with a framework for capitalizing on these trends by organizationally and physically placing a company like our exemplar company, Executive Casework, in the best position to realize maximum profitability.
In the 1930s, George Beadle and Boris Ephrussi discovered factors that affect eye colors in developing fruit flies. They did so while working at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. (1) They took optic discs (colored fuchsia in the image) from fruit fly larvae in the third instar stage of development. Had the flies not been manipulated, they would have developed into adults with vermilion eyes. (2) Beadle and Ephrussi transplanted the donor optic discs into the bodies of several types of larvae, including those that would develop with normal colored eyes (brick red), and those that would develop eyes with other shades of red, such as claret, carmine, peach, and ruby (grouped together and colored black in the image). (3a) When implanted into normal hosts that would develop brick red eyes, the transplanted optic disc developed into an eye that also was brick red. (3b) When implanted into abnormal hosts that would develop eyes of some other shade of red, the transplanted optic discs developed into eyes that were vermilion. Beadle and Ephrussi concluded that there was a factor, such as an enzyme or some other protein, produced outside of the optic disc that influenced the color of the eye that developed from the disc.
Fruit flies of the species Drosophila melanogaster develop from eggs to adults in eight to ten days at 25 degrees Celsius. They develop through four primary stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. When in the wild, female flies lay their fertilized eggs in rotting fruit or other decomposing material that can serve as food for the larvae. In the lab, fruit flies lay their fertilized eggs in a mixture of agar, molasses, cornmeal, and yeast. After roughly a day, each egg hatches into a larva. The larva eats the material it finds itself in, and for four days it grows into stages of increasing size, called first-, second-, and third-instar stages. This figure shows a third-instar larva. Each larva has sections of tissue called imaginal discs, from which various parts of the adult anatomy develop. This figure shows the imaginal discs that will develop into antennae (colored purple), eyes (colored red), brain (colored blue), and wings (colored green). After four days, the larva turns into a pupa by making a casing, similar to caterpillars, and grows within the casing. After a four-day metamorphosis, the adult fly then emerges from its pupal casing. Adult males look somewhat different from adult females, as the males have darker rear abdomen segments than do females. The warmer the temperature around the eggs, the faster the flies develop to adults.