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Over the past decade in Canada, student work has become a topic of public criticism, legal action, academic research, and labour activism. Cultural industry employers’ use of unpaid, low-paid, and flexibilized labour in the form of internships and other kinds of ‘work experience’ raises questions about the future of work in already precarious fields such as news production, advertising, television, and film. Against the backdrop of neoliberal processes still shaping universities and labour markets, the student worker emerges as a strategic figure in the contested politics of cultural work. This thesis offers a theoretical and empirical investigation of the dominant discourse and counter-discourse through which work experience is constructed, legitimized, critiqued, and re-visioned. Drawing on autonomist Marxist theory, critical philosophies of education, and feminist political economy, I situate cultural work experience as a discursive site where struggles over knowledge production and labour rights become visible and urgent.
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Models of reference dependence have improved the connection between economic theory and documented labour supply behaviour. In particular, the Kőszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007, 2009) [hereafter "KR"] theory of expectation based reference dependent preferences appears to be a disciplined way to unify the conflicting wage elasticity estimates, and recent laboratory and natural experiments suggest this theory may work in practice as well. I take this theory to the field in a pair of laboratory-like experiments designed to test if expectations determine the effort of a group of impoverished individuals involved in piece-rate work in Northeast Brazil. I use Abeler, Falk, Goette, and Huffman's (2011) experimental mechanism, which is a clear test of KR preferences in effort provision, in two experiments: first to test if rational expectations act as a reference point that influences effort, and second to test if adaptive expectations act as a reference point that influences effort. In both experiments, I find that although people do not behave in accordance with KR preferences, they do not behave as though they make their decisions following canonical lines either. I then outline a speculative rationale for the observed behaviour in these experiments—the adaptive heuristic of regret matching—where workers are able to evaluate their ex-post feelings of regret, even if they do not know the source of those feelings, to optimize behaviour going forward.
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In this dissertation, I explore several social economic topics, including health, labour, and the environment. Although the chapters of this dissertation explore diverse subjects, the overall theme is to analyze important social issues and their policy implications. I made use of a variety of rich datasets, as well as employing various econometric analyses, often supported by a theoretical model, to examine the research topics identified in each chapter. In Chapter 1, I explore a 1997 policy change, which altered eligibility requirements for Disability Insurance (DI). While DI in Canada provides income support to millions, it has also been criticized for creating a disincentive for labour force participation. The 1997 change affected some Canadians, but not others, creating a natural experiment setting in which to explore this policy. I found that, following the tightening of eligibility requirements, relative labour force participation for women did increase, but their level of employment did not. There was little effect for men. This distinction between labour force participation and employment is a crucial one in this context: it indicates that what may appear to be individuals returning to work after not being eligible for DI may instead be individuals returning to the labour force, but unable to find suitable employment. In Chapter 2, I examine whether searching for health information on the internet acts as a complement or substitute for the demand for information from physicians (proxied by physician visits). I found that the effect on physician-based information hinged on an individuals prior trust in the formal medical sector: those with high prior trust tended to use health information searching on the internet as a complement for physician visits, whereas, those with low prior trust substituted away from physician visits in favour of information found online. The results were very similar when a telehealth program was examined instead of internet-based information. Further, those who were online health information searchers also tended to be more likely to use a telehealth program. This is a reassuring result, as it may mean that those who substituted out of the formal medical sector, in favour of health online information, may also be using the more quality-controlled telehealth programs. In Chapter 3, I explore how attitudes towards the environment affect behaviours in five key areas of environmental-related household consumption: waste generation and recycling, energy use, organic food consumption, personal transport, and water use. Prior studies have not examined these areas together, often due to data restrictions, and not in the context of environmental attitudes. Using a modelling procedure that allows for the errors in these five areas to be correlated, I found that attitudes were often a more significant predictor of ones behaviour than the financially driven policy implemented in the area.