This dissertation argues that the black church performs a complex and strategic role as an institution for economic development and entrepreneurial achievements. The church's definition and strategies for economic development and entrepreneurship have often been blurred. This study defines entrepreneurship as the actions of an individual(s) in the operation of a for profit enterprise that has as its core purpose the creation of profits that are generated in and for the black community. Economic development is defined, in part, as a collaborative effort of entrepreneurs and non-profits for the economic and social improvement of the black community. The entrepreneurial and economic development role of the black church is examined through the history of the African American church in general and the specific history of the Hartford Avenue Memorial Baptist Church of Detroit, Michigan. Under the leadership of Rev. Dr. Charles Adams, Hartford Church has forged a model of economic development and entrepreneurship that works in the peculiar environment of church, social, and pastoral obligations. Balancing the social and spiritual obligations of the Church against the conflicting need for profit-driven management decisions is difficult at best. However, Hartford Church has identified a business management philosophy by which the Church can serve both the principles of the Christian Gospel and the principles of the "bottom line." Second, this study emphasizes the black church's traditional institutional role in reconciling the dialectic between racial unity and class division within the black community. This is amply demonstrated through its entrepreneurial activities. The black church has had a historic presence in the promotion of and direct involvement in entrepreneurship within the black community. From the black farmer to the black banker, the church has maintained its role as advocate, incubator, and vocal supporter of economic activity. The black church has defied conventional wisdom by taking risks and making investments in African American communities, both middle-class and "under-class." As an "investor" in both these communities, which were not always physically separated, the black church has not abandoned the black under-class; it has instead constructed A new middle-class to replace the resources and leadership assets that have left the inner cities a "virtual black middle-class." Prior to desegregation, middle and under-class blacks lived in greater proximity and the church had access to both. The church has in many instances replicated the pre-integration class alliances around specific issues affecting inner-city economic development and entrepreneurship. Hartford Church has bridged the spatial gap between the black middle-class and the so-called black underclass. This church has remained true to the gospel expressed in the beatitudes and made impressive entrepreneurial investments that support the church's spiritual mission.

College educated couples are increasingly located in large metropolitan areas. These areas were home to 32 percent of all college educated couples in 1940, 39 percent in 1970, and 50 percent in 1990. We investigate whether this trend can be explained by increasing urbanization of the college educated or the growth of dual career households and the resulting severity of the colocation problem. We argue that the latter explanation is the primary one. Smaller cities may therefore experience reduced inflows of human capital relative to the past and thus become poorer.

Debate about the minimum wage most often focuses narrowly on its possible effects on the small segment of the labor force (around 6 percent) that earns the minimum wage. But if such a small segment is earning the minimum wage, why is it so significant in the public debate? The narrow focus has obscured the critical issue of the importance of the effect the minimum wage has on the larger number of workers who earn around the minimum wage and, hence, on the distribution of income.

When the minimum wage was first enacted in 1938, the fiercest opposition came from the South, where wages were considerably lower that in the industrial North. Today, that opposition is found to emanate from states that have right-to-work laws (regardless of location). Using census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) for the years 1940 to 1990, this paper looks at workers earning around the minimum wage by region and industry. It shows that, controlling for education and industry type, wages tend to be depressed more in states with right-to-work legislation than in high union density states. These effects on the wage structure have implications for the distribution of income.

This paper offers new evidence on the sources of cross-country income differences. It exploits the fact that competing theories differ sharply in their predictions for immigrant earnings. Neoclassical growth models with human capital imply that migrating from poor to rich countries leads to modest earnings gains because productivity is embodied in workers. In contrast, theories that attribute cross-country income differences to technology gaps predict much larger earnings gains because immigrants benefit from better technologies in rich host countries. The empirical evidence supports the prediction of large immigrant earnings gains. U.S. immigrants earn up to 12 times more than the neoclassical growth model predicts. By contrast, a simple model of country-specific technologies accounts for the broad features of immigrant earnings over time and across countries. This evidence is hard to reconcile with the view that differences in human and physical capital alone account for the bulk of the observed income dispersion across countries, but is consistent with Prescotts (1998) conclusion that accounting for cross-country income differentials requires a theory of total factor productivity.

Following Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) a growing number of studies suggest that neoclassical growth models, augmented by human capital, successfully account for the large cross-country income differences found in the data. This paper argues that such models are inconsistent with observations on immigrant earnings. Their central prediction, that migration from poor to rich countries generates only small earnings gains, is strongly violated in the data. A standard growth model with country-specific technologies, in contrast, accounts well for immigrant earnings across countries and over time.

It has been noted in other work (Clotfelter and Feenberg, 1990) that the value of federal income tax deductions, such as the home mortgage interest deduction (MID), varies across geographic regions, Taxpayers in regions with relatively high incomes, state and local income taxes, and housing costs should be more likely to utilize deductions, that is, to itemize, to have a larger deduction conditional on itemizing, and to get a larger tax benefit . ..

We use exogenous variations in fertility due to twin births to measure the impact of an unplanned child on married women's labor supply and earnings. Although the overall effects of an unplanned birth on labor supply are small, we find significant effects in the years immediately following the unplanned birth, especially in 1970. We estimate that declining fertility explains between 6 and 13 percent of the increase in married women's labor supply between 1970 and 1980. Twin births are also associated with a substantial short-run loss in earnings. This effect persists longer than the labor supply effects, though it does eventually disappear.

In this study, we utilize multilevel techniques to analyze the effect of the demand for female labor on gender differences in labor force participation across metropolitan area (MA) labor markets after controlling for micro-level factors known to influence participation. We develop measures of the gendered demand for labor by indexing the degree to which the occupations in a labor market are skewed toward usually male or female occupations. Logistic regression techniques are used to compute standard micro-level models of labor force participation for young adults from the NLSY and 1990 PUMS. We then test to what extent gender differences in labor force participation co-vary with our measure of the demand for female labor across MAs. In both the NLSY and PUMS data, a higher demand for female labor is significantly related to a smaller gender penalty in the odds of labor force participation, even after extensive micro controls.

Economic inequality is higher today than it has been since 1939, as measured by both the wage structure and wealth inequality. But the comparison between 1939 and 1999 is largely made out of necessity; the 1940 U.S. population census was the first to inquire of wage and salary income and education. We address what the returns to skill were prior to 1940 and piece together the first century-long history of skill premiums, the dispersion of the wage structure, and returns to formal schooling. We use the 1915 Iowa State Census, a remarkable and unique document, as well as several less-obscure but untapped reports. Using all of these sources, we find that the wage structure narrowed at several moments in the first half of the 20th century, not just in the 1940s, both coinciding with major economic disruptions brought about by war. The returns to education were in fact higher in 1914 than in 1939, and the enormous expansion in secondary schooling beginning in the 1910s was a contributing factor to the decrease in educational returns. Inequality and the returns to education across the entire century, therefore, first declined before their more recent and steep ascent.

Average schooling in US states is highly correlated with state wage levels, even after controlling for the direct effect of schooling on individual wages. We use an instrumental variables strategy to determine whether this relationship is driven by social returns to education. The instrumentals for average schooling are derived from information on the child labor laws and compulsory attendance laws that affected men in our Census samples, while quarter of birth is used as an instrument for individual schooling. This results in precisely estimated private returns to education of about seven percent, and small social returns, typically less than one percent, that are not significantly different from zero.

In 1920, the U.S. Census reported that, for the first time, a larger share of the nation’s population was living in urban places (with more than 2,500 inhabitants) than was living in rural places. Though it can be said that we had become an urbanized economy by this date, the process of urbanization both began considerably earlier, in the first half of the nineteenth century, and continued down through the end of the twentieth century. Though we know the general outlines of the nation’s urbanization, we know very little about the forces at work at the individual or household level that resulted in these broad patterns. This essay offers some evidence of how those forces operated. It employs data on several thousand native-born males linked across the 1850-60 and 1860-70 decades and provides the first micro-level analysis of the causes and consequences of migration to America’s small town and cities for the nineteenth century

This dissertation creates a dynamic population and labor supply model. This model is linked with the LIFT model of the INFORUM research group. The estimated equations for the fertility and the participation rates are created from both a cross-section study of the U.S. decennial censuses, and from a time-series analysis of age-specific fertility and participation rates.The cross-section analysis includes a detailed study of the effects of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on fertility. Across a number of specifications and samples the EITC is found to positively effect the probability of observing a birth.A number of simulations of the model are presented and show that there are important relationships between the economy and population that can only be addressed with a fully endogenous population model. The DPM model is compared with the 1997 Social Security Administration (SSA) projections for fertility and participation rates. The simulations show that the SSA boundaries are in fact bounds on reasonable forecasts of fertility and labor force participation. However, the simulations call into question the ability to use SSA forecasts for policy analysis.Finally, this dissertation explores the effects of the 1997 Family Tax Relief Act enacted by Congress. The act, among other things, created a $500 child tax credits for families with dependent children and less than $110,000 in income. The simulations suggest that the credit (if allowed to grow with prices) will increase fertility in 1998 by 9% and in 1999 by 21%. These increases have profound impacts on the population and the economy. The young increasingly dominate the population. The economy initially experiences a decline in growth due to reductions in the female labor force participation rates. However, later in the forecast the economy experiences increased growth and a change in the distribution of output.