We argue that hours per worker are at least as important as employment rates when it comes to projecting future labor market trends and potential output. Based on data for 18 European countries and the US over the two decades prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we document that hours worked per person fell in most countries, driven by a uniform decline in hours per worker. By contrast, employment rates increased in most countries. We present a stylized model in which a decrease in the fixed costs of working rationalizes the pattern of decreasing hours per worker and increasing employment rates. Although the COVID-19 pandemic increased the fixed costs of working in the short run, recent survey evidence from the US suggests that changing work arrangements since the pandemic had the opposite effect and are likely to persist into the future.

We present the first quantitative analysis of the impact of ending de jure segregation of Mexican-American school children in the United States by examining the effects of the 1947 Mendez v. Westminster court decision on long-run educational attainment for Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites in California. Our identification strategy relies on comparing individuals across California counties that vary in their likelihood of segregating and across birth cohorts that vary in their exposure to the Mendez court ruling based on school start age. Results point to a significant increase in educational attainment for Hispanics who were fully exposed to school desegregation

Objective Immigrant health discussions often focus on acculturation and omit discussions on historical events that may underlie health differences among immigrant older adults. This paper provides a historical overview of immigration policy and flows to the U.S. and examines insurance access and health difficulties by sending country. Methods We analyzed the “Immigrants Admitted to the United States, Fiscal Years 1972–2000” and 2015–2019 American Community Survey datasets to examine the number of admitted immigrants, sociodemographic profiles for current immigrant older adults, and the predicted probabilities of health insurance access and health difficulties. Results Our results highlight alignment of immigration flows with immigration legislation and vast heterogeneity in migration, health, and healthcare access of immigrants by sending country. Discussion/Implications Public health practitioners must consider how historical events and social factors contribute to the healthcare access and health of immigrant populations, as demographic shifts will require interventions that promote equitable healthy aging.

Economic growth might both increase and decrease income inequality, also at the city level. This paper examines the income-inequality relationship within US metropolitan areas and finds that it changes over time. A higher average income per capita level was associated with a lower inequality level in earlier years, but this association vanished later. For the 1980-2000 panel, increases in the average income per capita are associated with decreases in inequality. In contrast, increases in the average income per capita are asso-ciated with increases in inequality in the 2006-2016 panel. The obtained results hint at polarization re-sulting from technological change substituting middle-skill routine tasks.

We analyze the causal impact of improvements in the quality of communication infrastructure on the structural transformation of US counties. Our treatment is the quality of communication infrastructure in a county, measured by the average Internet speed offered to businesses. We use as an instrumental variable the spatial structure of ARPANET, a network funded by the Department of Defense that is considered the precursor of the Internet, and whose location we determine using historical government documents. We show that faster Internet stimulates short-run growth and increases the shares of employment and GDP in high-skilled services, while negatively affecting sectors such as retail, accommodation, and food services. Two mechanisms explain our results. First, input-output linkages since industries that buy more ICT inputs increase their weight on the local economy. Second, a rise in high-skilled workers in ICT-intensive occupations, which is consistent with the Rybczynski theorem of the Hecksher-Ohlin-Vanek model and with the presence of capital-skill complementarities. Lastly, we find that better Internet increases earnings inequality within U.S. counties. Such finding has implications for Internet subsidies across the country.

School choice programs break the link between residential location and school attendance, and should weaken the capitalization of school quality into house prices. For the first time, I quantify the effect of one such program—charter school expansions—across several states using a dataset covering charter entries and house prices. I embed an event study of charter entry into a boundary discontinuity design and find that, on average, school choice decreases the valuation of traditional schools by four percentage points. Suggestive evidence shows school choice can lead to neighborhood change through resorting as school boundaries become less important.

This paper investigates whether and to what extent long-run trends in population health affected income inequality in the United States over the period 1960–2000. To isolate exogenous variation in health over time, the analysis exploits the sharp decline in cardiovascular disease mortality across states that originated from medical advances in the treatment and prevention of these diseases after 1960. The results demonstrate that health improvements contributed to rising income inequality through mechanisms related to education.

Participants will be introduced to the various U.S. Bureau of Census surveys and how to access the available demographic data from the surveys using the data platform, census.data.gov. Additionally, participants will learn how to use the library GIS tool, Social Explorer, for demographic mapping and IPUMS to retrieve public use microsample data samples.

Intermarriage among ethnic groups belonging to the same panethnic category (e.g. Asian, Latino)is an important indicator of the strength of panethnicity. Yet, most of the work on panethnic inter-marriage uses older samples with significant data limitations. In this article, I use data on recentlymarried couples from the American Community Survey 2014-18 and Census 1980 to analyze thelikelihood of ethnic exogamy within the panethnic categories of Latino, East/Southeast Asian,and South Asian. I utilize a counterfactual marriage model that accounts for group size withinlocal marriage markets, eliminates immigrants married abroad from analysis, and controls forbirthplace and language endogamy. The results show that birthplace and language diversity aresignificant barriers to ethnic exogamy among Asians but not Latinos. Once birthplace and lan-guage endogamy are held constant, panethnic intermarriage is far more likely among Asians thanamong Latinos. East/Southeast Asian ethnic exogamy has increased over time, while Latino eth-nic exogamy has not. Furthermore, East/Southeast Asian and South Asian intermarriage remainsrare, suggesting that panethnic intermarriage among Asians occurs within two separate meltingpots.

We study the effect of expanding trade on societal coalitions through its impact on development. We combine a majoritarian political model with a spatial model of trade to argue that trade-induced economic change-by bringing new workers to locations closer to world markets-can lead to losses rather than gains in political power by the factors of production advantaged by increased trade. We study how this phenomenon explains rising protectionism in the US from 1880 to 1900. Using county-level changes in transportation costs induced by railroad expansion, our estimates indicate that falling costs increased population and land values but reduced the proportion employed in agriculture. Reduced transportation costs caused a reduction in vote shares for the Democratic party, which favored liberal trade policies, and an increase in an original newspaper-based measure of protectionist sentiment. Expanding trade alters not only political interests but also the geographic distribution of those interests.

Gender inequality remains a global issue in developing countries. In 2015, the United Nations included gender equality among its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. Recognizing why gender-biased norms emerge and persist across generations is crucial for closing gender gaps. This dissertation focuses on the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Africa. Chapter 1 reviews the literature on Female Genital Mutilation to understand why it exists in some societies. I assess the concept of paternity uncertainty, pastoralism, polygyny and slave trade and how it relates to FGM. In addition, I discuss several cultural beliefs held across different ethnic groups to explain why they practice FGM. Finally, I explore how the persistence of FGM can be examined from a cultural evolution perspective by focusing on the role of environmental conditions and kinship structures in sustaining social norms over time. In Chapter 2, I examine how deeply-entrenched ethnic norms determine FGM today. Using both ethnographic and contemporary survey data for over 130,000 women across nine African countries, I find evidence that (i) ethnic identity is associated with FGM; (ii) FGM prevalence in societies that traditionally practiced pastoralism (36-45% dependence level), plow agriculture and kinship tightness (score: 0.25) has declined across birth cohorts;(iii) FGM rates are rising among women from ethnic groups that historically had norms regarding premarital sexual behavior. Chapter 3 explores how laws affect attitudes. Specifically, I examine the short-term effects of the FGM ban on attitudes towards ending the practice. I use IPUMS-DHS data for women belonging to the Malinke and Peulh ethnic groups in both Guinea and Mali, pre and post-intervention, to examine the impact of the FGM law ban. I employ a differencein-difference approach that is made possible because of the artificial drawing of the African borders, which partitioned ethnic groups with identical beliefs and customs across countries. My result shows that the FGM law was associated with a 5.4 percentage point increase in attitudes that favored ending FGM. This negative attitude towards FGM was present regardless of the woman’s ethnic group.

This paper examines the role of agricultural diversity in the process of development. Using data from US counties and exploiting climate-induced variation in agricultural production patterns, I show that mid-nineteenth-century agricultural diversity had positive l ong-run effects on population density and income per capita. During the Second Industrial Revolution, agricultural diversity fostered industrialization, diversification within manufacturing, patent activity, formation of new labor skills, and the expansion of knowledge- and skill-intensive industries. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that diversity spurs the acquisition of new ideas and new skills because of the presence of c ross-sector spillovers and complementarities

Recently, enormous public spending has been devoted to funding unemployment insurance (UI), thus reigniting the perennial debate about the social costs and benefits of such programs, which can either disincentivize work or revitalize the labor market through a better allocation of its resources. We sought to analyze the heterogeneity in responses to unemployment benefits in terms of unemployment duration and their temporal evolution in the American context. We use fixed-effects models on data from the Current Population Survey and perform interactions between unemployment benefits and different groups of individuals across several age, gender, education, race, geographic origin, and time period classes. We discover greater responsiveness among women and the more highly educated to the generosity of benefits. Above all, we discovered a previously little-documented reality: that despite the growing generosity of unemployment insurance, individuals' responses to it gradually declined over the years, and drastically from the end of the 1980s. It then appears that the disincentive effect on work has become very negligible.

In this paper, I offer an empirical test for the effect of labor supply on the creation of new technologies. To do so, I utilize a large exogenous shock to the labor supply in the US agricultural sector caused by the termination of the Bracero agreements between the United States and Mexico in 1964. The Bracero agreements were a set of three bilateral agreements between the United States and Mexico to regulate bilateral flows of temporary low-skill labor, spanning 1942–1964 (Clemens et al. 2018). Varying substantially between crops, Bracero workers accounted for about 11% of the total seasonal farm workforce in 1964. The exclusion of those workers from the labor force generated a sharp decline in the labor supply in a very short period.

The research objective of this study is to document the growth and spatial distribution of the Asian American population from its initial inception in 1860 through the contemporary period. Because prior research on the Asian American population has been rather limited, we assemble data and statistics from various U.S. Censuses to document the long-term growth of the Asian American population. We also use descriptive statistics to analyze the distribution of the Asian American population across the four major U.S. Census regions as well as across the 50 U.S. states. The results show that this racial category has increased substantially both in absolute number as well as a percentage of the total American population. Most of this population growth occurred, however, after 1965. Accompanying this population growth is substantial spatial assimilation. The regional index of dissimilarity declined from 0.98 in 1860 to 0.24 in 2018. No longer located primarily in particular locales in the Pacific, our analysis reveals that the Asian American population now has significant presence in all of the U.S. states. Asian Americans have changed from being an isolated and tiny portion of the American population to a highly visible and widely recognized minority group. Ignoring Asian Americans in contemporary discussions of “race in America” is a lingering but outdated practice.

Objective: The objective of this study is to determine the linkage between multidimensional structural racism typologies and preterm birth (PTB), low birthweight (LBW), and small-for-gestational-age (SGA) birth among infants of White, US-born Black, and foreign-born Black pregnant people in Minnesota. Data Sources: The measures of structural racism were based on the 2017 American Community Survey 5-year estimates and the 2017 jail incarceration data from the Vera Institute of Justice. Birth outcomes of infants born in 2018 were based on birth records from the Minnesota Department of Health. Study Design: We conducted a latent class analysis to identify multidimensional structural racism typologies in 2017 and related these typologies to birth outcomes of pregnant people who gave birth in Minnesota in 2018 using Vermunt's 3-step approach. Racial group-specific age-adjusted risks of PTB, LBW, and SGA by structural racism typologies were estimated. Data Collection: Study data were from public sources. Principal Findings: Our analysis identified three multidimensional structural racism typologies in Minnesota in 2017. These typologies can have high structural racism in some dimensions but low in others. The interactive patterns among various dimensions cannot simply be classified as “high” (i.e., high structural racism in all dimensions), “medium,” or “low.” The risks of PTB, LBW, and SGA for US-born Black pregnant Minnesotans were always higher than for their White counterparts regardless of the typologies in which they lived during pregnancy. Furthermore, these excess risks among US-born Black pregnant people did not vary significantly across the typologies. We did not find clear patterns when comparing the predicted risks for infants of US- and foreign-born Black pregnant people. Conclusion: Multidimensional structural racism increases the risks of adverse birth outcomes for US-born Black Minnesotans. Policy interventions to dismantle structural racism and eliminate birth inequities must be multi-sectoral as changes in one or a few dimensions, but not all, will unlikely reduce birth inequities.

This paper analyzes how computerization affected the labor market outcomes of older workers between 1984 and 2017. Using the computerization supplements of the Current Population Survey (CPS) we show that different occupations were computerized at different times, older workers tended to start using computers with a delay compared to younger workers, but computer use within occupations converged to the same levels across age groups eventually. That is, there was a temporary knowledge gap between younger and older workers in most occupations. We estimate how this knowledge gap affected older workers' labor market outcomes using data from the CPS and the Health and Retirement Study. Our models control for occupation and time fixed effects and in some models; we also control for full occupation-time interactions and use middle aged (age 40-49) workers as the control group. We find strong and robust negative effects of the knowledge gap on wages, and a large, temporary increase in transitions from work to non-participation, consistent with a model of creative destruction in which the computerization of jobs made older workers' skills obsolete in birth cohorts that experienced computerization relatively late in their careers. We find larger effects on females and on middle-skilled workers.

We analyze differences in mode of transportation to work by sexual orientation, using the American Community Survey 2008–2019. Working individuals in same-sex couples are significantly less likely to drive to work than working men and women in different-sex couples. This gap is particularly stark among men: on average, almost 12 percentage point (or 13%) lower likelihood of driving to work for men in same-sex couples. Working individuals in same-sex couples are also more likely to use public transport, walk, or bike to work. Men and women are 7 and 3 percentage points more likely, respectively, to take public transportation to work than those in different-sex couples. Working men are also more likely to work from home–while working women are less likely–than those in different-sex couples. These differences persist after controlling for demographic characteristics, partner’s characteristics, location, fertility, marital status, occupation or industry, and family income. Additional evidence from the General Social Survey 2008–2018 suggests that these disparities by sexual orientation may be due to lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals valuing the environment more than straight individuals.

Parents’ time devoted to unpaid care for their children remains persistently gendered and is a key driver of gender inequality at home and work. At the same time, both mothers and fathers report a strong desire for more time with children, driven by norms prescribing an intensification of parenthood. These care pressures may be alleviated by work-family policy, an institutional tool that provides financial and normative imperatives for (re)shaping gendered arrangements of paid work and unpaid care. This dissertation explores how work-family policies aimed at or available to fathers – reserved paternity leave and workplace flexibility – shape parents’ time with children in Canada and the United States. These three chapters innovate on the conceptualization of parent-child time, considering a broader scope of time (total co-present time) and the co-presence of the other parent (solo versus family time). First, I examine how a state-provided reserved paternity leave policy in the quasi-experimental setting of Québec impacts fathers’ and mothers’ time with children. This policy led to a plausibly causal increase in fathers’ “responsibility time”, i.e., solo parenting time across activities when co-present with children. Similarly, this policy led to a plausibly causal increase in mothers’ solo parenting time in routine childcare, likely because of a corresponding decrease in housework time. Second, looking at employer-provided policy, I investigate how workplace flexibility policies are associated with fathers’ time with children in the United States. Flextime (control over start and stop times) and flexplace (work from home or remote work) are associated with increased “family” time with children – when the mother is also present – across activities. Taken together, these studies show that work-family policies aimed at or accessed by fathers can reshape gendered arrangements of unpaid care for children. However, this depends on the policy design (near-universal, state-provided reserved paternity leave versus selective, employer-provided flexibility policies) and the dimensions of parent-child time examined (total co-present time; solo or family time). Ultimately, this dissertation expands knowledge on and presents methodological considerations for the relationship between work-family policies and parent-child time, with key implications for family well-being and gender inequality.

Research shows that refugees in the United States experience faster economic growth than other immigrants, in part because they have limited incentive to return home. However, this pattern has primarily been documented in the late 20th century, making it unclear whether faster economic assimilation is an inherent characteristic of refugee flows, or whether it is unique to recent decades. This paper uses data between 1850 and 2017 to compare the economic assimilation of refugee cohorts to economic cohorts. I find that after 1900, refugee cohorts start off at a lower average occupational prestige than both their economic immigrant and native-born counterparts upon arrival, but refugees economically assimilate at a faster rate and, in some periods, overtake the occupational prestige of economic immigrants after two decades. Older arrival periods display more complex patterns of assimilation where refugees do not always start off below natives or assimilate more quickly with more years of stay.