Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation bridges empirical and theoretical insights from multiple disciplines to improve our understanding of individual labour supply decisions and, in turn, the optimal design of public policy. Chapter 1 examines the labour supply effects of the Working Income Tax Benefit (WITB) in Canada. An in-depth analysis of institutional details surrounding WITB reveals that low-income Canadians lack knowledge of the program. Consequently, WITB can be treated as a lump sum cash transfer rather than as an earnings subsidy. Using variation in WITB receipt both within and between individuals over time, results suggest that, contrary to the predictions of the standard labour-leisure choice model, WITB receipt had a robust, significant positive effect on the labour supply of single low-income workers. Chapter 2 investigates how the interaction of social norms and public childcare provisions impact maternal labour supply. Using data from the US, this chapter exploits exogenous increases in minimum school entry-age laws across states and time to measure how increasing the age at which children are eligible for public school impacts the labour supply of mothers. The results suggest that increasing the school starting age significantly decreases the labour supply of married mothers at the extensive margin and single mothers at the intensive margin. Additional analysis reveals that the negative labour supply effects are concentrated among mothers in states with progressive gender norms. Implications for public policy are discussed. Chapter 3 provides a critical evaluation of the assumption that work is a disutility, which underlies the standard model of labour supply used widely in economics, and in turn, public policymaking. The assumption implies that individuals supply labour to the market for the sole purpose of purchasing goods. This chapter reviews the work of William Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall, both of whom were critical in the development of the standard labour-leisure choice model, but of the opinion that work is not, in its entirety, a disutility. I then modify the standard model of labour supply to re-incorporate the positive utility of labour by making the marginal utility of leisure dependent on the amount of time spent working. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of the intrinsic benefits of work for the design of public policy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".