My dissertation explores the demographics and composition of sexual minority populations in the United States, their labor market experiences, and public policy, respectively. Using a novel method of Cross-Survey Multiple Imputation (CSMI), I create a unique dataset which allows me to examine the demographic profile of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) populations at the national and state levels. I then measure the prevalence of discrimination experienced by these groups in the labor market through regression analyses and decompositions of wages. Finally, I examine the effectiveness of sexual orientation nondiscrimination policies at the state level. My analyses show that LGB people make up just over four percent of the national population, a sizeable minority though smaller than popular and historical estimates. I show that LGB people tend to be younger, more racially and ethnically diverse, and slightly more educated than the heterosexual majority. However, LGB people are also more likely to be unemployed, more likely to be living below the poverty line, and less likely to have health insurance than heterosexual people. I find that lesbian women and gay men earn a wage premium over similarly situated heterosexual women and men while bisexual men and women experience a significant wage penalty relative to heterosexual men and women. After cataloguing and analyzing all state-level sexual orientation nondiscrimination policies for textual themes, I test for policy effectiveness. My analyses suggest that while policies raise the wages of all workers, the specific effects of policies on LGB workers’ wages are inconsistent, suggesting other factors play a role in shaping wage differentials.

This research seeks to assess the factors affecting unskilled wages. This is a means to analyze the development of low paid wages, and whether it is sustainable. Chapter 1 seeks to measure relative income effects coming from outside of the individuals control as opposed to the the increase in wage inequality coming from an increase in relative level of skills. I find that skill levels attributed to high earners grew at a steady rate in the US from the 1940s. The income these skills earned stagnated after the 1970s, while unskilled wages actually decreased, after growing rapidly before the 1970s. As skilled workers can increase their earnings by growing their skill levels, not just by relying on the income growth for the pre-existing abilities, their wages continued to grow, resulting in rising wage inequality. The stagnation of income going to already obtained skills and unskilled wages is indicative of a structural shift in the economy and rising relative demand for skilled workers even as skill levels increased. This shift ensured the level of pay for Individuals’ skills grew faster than the unskilled wage. The second Chapter looks at the role of factor inputs and relative scarcity to explain an increase in demand for skilled labour. I conclude that the transition from unskilled to skilled biassed growth is a result of bottlenecks in certain inputs to production. Using US manufacturing data, I find that capital equipment predominantly complements better paid non-production workers, while energy predominantly complements worse paid production workers. As a result of the elasticity values and relative rise of inputs, there has been a large net increase in demand for non-production workers. The third chapter analyses the implications of factor inputs on technology growth and how this further impacts income distribution in a way that helps explain what type of shock or structural change has initiated the increasing inequality that has been observed. This finds that observed changes in prices and skill premium are consistent with being induced by a permanent shock in energy prices. The finding indicates potential benefits of technologies that reduce energy prices that in Chapter 2 were shown to complement lower paid workers.

Between 1890 and 1921, Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of 1,618 public libraries in cities and towns across the United States. I link these library construction grants to census data and measure the effect of childhood public library access on adult outcomes. Library construction grants increased children’s educational attainment by 0.10 years, did not affect wage income, and increased non-wage income by 4%. These income effects are driven by occupational choice. Access to a public library caused children to shift away from occupations like manual labor, factory work, and mining into safer and more prestigious occupations like farm-ownership, clerical, and technical jobs. I show that compulsory schooling laws had parallel effects on children, increasing educational attainment, non-wage income and occupational prestige without affecting wage income. Economists often rely solely on wage income to measure the returns to education. But public libraries and compulsory schooling laws in the early 1900s increased educational attainment and had positive effects on children’s adult labor market outcomes without affecting wage income.

Food insecurity in household with children in the US is about 13.6 percent. Food insecurity among households with children headed by a single woman is 28.7 percent and among households with incomes below 185 percent of the poverty threshold (the Federal poverty line was $25,926 for a family of four in 2019) is 27.6 percent (USDA, 2019). This research is about the effect of affordable housing on food security in the United States. The data include observations on 50 states and Washington, D.C., from 2004 to 2017 resulting in a total sample of 714 observations. The research used the 50th percentile FMR and housing vouchers as proxies for affordable housing. In researching the main objective, the research examined on how the presence of SNAP affects the relationship between food insecurity and housing affordability, the research also investigated on how the presence of WIC affects the relationship between food insecurity and housing affordability. To run the analysis, the study used the fixed effect model followed by the IV regression in efforts to overcome endogeneity. We found that an increase in the 50th percentile FMR causes food insecurity to increase, while an increase in housing vouchers increases food insecurity. The results of the fixed effect model show that there is positive relationship between WIC and food insecurity, while the effect of SNAP on food insecurity is absent. The results show that an increase in the median fair market rents causes food insecurity to increase, so a reduction in rent prices targeted to poor households would help low-income families improve their food security. That is, gaining access to affordable housing helps poor families become more food secure

Federal administrative tax data are invaluable for research, but because of privacy concerns, access to these data is typically limited to select agencies and a few individuals. An alternative to sharing microlevel data are validation servers, which allow individuals to query statistics without accessing the confidential data. This paper studies the feasibility of using differentially private (DP) methods to implement such a server. We provide an extensive study on existing DP methods for releasing tabular statistics, means, quantiles, and regression estimates. We also include new methodological adaptations to existing DP regression algorithms for using new data types and returning standard error estimates. We evaluate the selected methods based on the accuracy of the output for statistical analyses, using real administrative tax data obtained from the Internal Revenue Service Statistics of Income (SOI) Division. Our findings show that a validation server would be feasible for simple statistics but would struggle to produce accurate regression estimates and confidence intervals. We outline challenges and offer recommendations for future work on validation servers. This is the first comprehensive statistical study of DP methodology on a real, complex dataset, that has significant implications for the direction of a growing research field.

This paper estimates the medium- to long-run effects of slavery in the United States in a spatial regression discontinuity design. Using the boundary between free and slave states immediately antebellum, we find that legal slavery decreased per capita manufacturing output by as much as 30% in the decades following the Civil War. Perhaps surprisingly, agricultural output and farm values were only briefly depressed in former slave states after the war. Although emancipation ended slavery, political forces kept the institution from being completely disintegrated, and we explore channels through which this was possible. We show that slavery affected the structure of the economy in a given region—specifically through agricultural production decisions—and that these structures persisted long after passage of the 13th Amendment. However, sharecropping played a relatively small role in this region. Our results support mounting evidence in recent literature of the significant and lasting effects of institutions on economic development.

Transload facilities are a type of transportation infrastructure specific to the freight industry where freight goods are transferred from truck to rail car, and vice versa. These facilities are thought to be a source of economic benefit because of their ability to provide nearby shippers with greater accessibility to an increased variety of, and potentially less costly, modes of transportation. However, the economic benefits realized after the construction of transload facilities have not yet been numerically quantified. This thesis examines the economic impact and spatial influence of transload facilities through quantitative analysis. The following examination is made up of two parts: first, an economic analysis focused on recently constructed transload facilities, and second, a spatial analysis focused on the relationship between the urbanness or ruralness of transload facilities and their range of influence. In the economic analysis, facilities having been constructed in the year 2001 or later are defined as ‘newly constructed.’ 14 facilities were determined to be newly constructed, and the counties in which the newly constructed facilities are located were identified. For each county containing a newly constructed facility, a minimum of five counties within the same state having similar median household income, population density, and degree of freeway access were identified. Sums of employment and sales volume between 2003 and 2019 were compared between counties containing newly constructed facilities and corresponding similar counties. Percent differences in employment and sales volume with reference to values measured during the facility’s year of construction were calculated for years between 2003 and 2019. The percent differences associated with counties containing newly constructed transload facilities were compared to the average percent differences associated with the corresponding similar counties. Growth in employment and sales volume was generally greater in counties containing newly constructed transload facilities compared to similar counties not containing transload facilities. Analysis of business records associated with the transportation and warehousing industries yielded similar results. In the spatial analysis, 33 facilities in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina were studied. The urbanness or ruralness of each facility was determined by evaluating the 2016 edition of the National Land Cover Database (NLCD). A twenty-mile radius was drawn around each facility, and the amount of land classified as ‘developed’ was used to calculate a ‘Percent Developed’ value. Estimates of trips originating and ending within the one-mile radius surrounding each facility were gathered through Streetlight analysis. Traffic information was used to calculate the average trip distance and average trip duration weighted by trip frequency for each facility. Percent Developed values and corresponding average trip distance and average trip duration were compared. This comparison suggested a negative relationship between the intensity of development and trip distance and trip duration. Facilities in more rural areas tend to generate trips that are longer in distance and duration, while facilities in more urban areas tend to generate trips that are shorter in distance in duration.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the labor market entry of real estate agents in the USA and the potential effect of occupational licensing on entry. Design/methodology/approach Data from the 2012 to 2017 American Community Survey are linked to local housing price fluctuations from the Federal Housing Finance Agency for 100 large metro areas. The cost of entry associated with occupational licensing for new real estate agents is carefully measured for each market and interacted with housing fluctuations to investigate the role for barriers to entry. Findings A 10 percent increase in housing prices is associated with a 4 percent increase in the number of agents. However, increased license stringency reduces the labor market response by 30 percent. The impact of licensing is stronger for women and younger workers. Originality/value This work contributes to the growing literature investigating the impact of occupational licensing on labor supply and entry in the USA, as well as potential impacts of regulation on dynamism and entrepreneurship. To the authors’ knowledge, this study is also the first to quantify the cost of occupational licensing in the real estate industry.

In this article, we study the labour supply effects and the redistributional consequences of the US social security system. We focus particularly on auxiliary benefits, where eligibility is linked to marital status. To this end, we develop a dynamic, structural life cycle model of singles and couples, featuring uncertain marital status and survival. We account for the socio-economic gradients to both marriage stability and life expectancy. We find that auxiliary benefits have a large depressing effect on married women’s employment. Moreover, we show that a revenue neutral minimum benefit scheme would moderately reduce inequality relative to the current US system.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted access to medical care for millions of Americans, yet information on the individual characteristics associated with these disruptions is lacking. We used recently released data from the Current Population Survey’s supplemental COVID-19 questions to provide the first evidence on associations between individual characteristics, including age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, health status, work-limiting disabilities, health insurance coverage, and employment, and the propensity to experience an involuntary care disruption resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Involuntary care disruption is defined as delayed or cancelled care that was not initiated by the patient. Results indicate that older age, being in fair or poor health, greater education, and having health insurance coverage were associated with greater likelihood of experiencing an involuntary delay in accessing medical care. In addition, White, non-Hispanic respondents had higher rates of involuntary care delays than respondents of other races/ethnicities. Our findings provide useful guidance for researchers examining the health consequences of COVID-19-related care disruptions and for policy makers developing tools to offset the potential harms of such disruptions.

In big data mining, the K-prototypes has become a popular clustering method for mixed data owing to its simplicity and efficiency. However, the data clustering process of the K-prototypes method will cause the risk of user privacy leakage because user data usually contain sensitive information. To address this issue, general solutions introduce a trusted third-party model for privacy protection in clustering analysis, but it is difficult to find a fully trusted entity in reality. In this article, we propose a local differential privacy K-prototypes (LDPK) mechanism, which does not require any trusted third party to perform privacy preprocessing on user data. Our mechanism first uses local differential privacy to disturb user data, then completes the clustering through the interaction between server and user. Furthermore, we propose a privacy protection enhancement mechanism (ELDPK) by extending the LDPK mechanism, which disturbs the user's clustering information in each iteration to protect user privacy further. Theoretical analysis proves the privacy and feasibility of our proposed scheme, and the experimental results prove that our proposed scheme can guarantee the quality of the clustering results under the premise of satisfying the local differential privacy.

We question the growing consensus in the literature that European Americans behave as a homogenous pan-ethnic coalition of voters. Seemingly below the radar of scholarship on voting groups in American politics, we identify a group of white voters that behaves differently from others: German Americans, the largest ethnic group, regionally concentrated in the ‘Swinging Midwest’. Using county level voting returns, ancestry group information from the American Community Survey (ACS), current survey data and historical census data going back as early as 1910, we provide evidence for a partisan and a non-partisan pathway that motivated German Americans to vote for Trump in 2016: a historically grown association with the Republican Party and an acquired taste for isolationist attitudes that mobilizes non-partisan German Americans to support isolationist candidates. Our findings indicate that European American experiences of migration and integration still echo into the political arena of today.

We study the contribution of economic conditions to the success of the first avowedly nativist political party in the United States. The Know-Nothing Party gained control of a number of state governments in the 1854-1856 elections running on a staunchly anti-Catholic and anti-Irish platform. Our analysis focuses on the case of Massachusetts, which had experienced a wave of Irish Famine immigration and was at the forefront of industrialization in the United States. Voters in towns with more exposure to Irish labor market crowdout and deskilling in manufacturing were more likely to vote for Know-Nothing candidates in state elections. These economic shocks have both explanatory and outcome significance. These two forces played a decisive role in the 1855, and accounted for 19-30% of Know-Nothing votes in the 1854-56 elections. We find evidence of reduced wealth accumulation for native workers most exposed to labor market crowd-out and deskilling, though this was tempered by occupational upgrading. The Know-Nothings lost power in 1857 to the abolitionist Republicans as the crisis over slavery came to a head, culminating in the Civil War.

Women are less likely than men to be in “risky” occupations, that is, those that exhibit large within-occupation wage dispersion. We first demonstrate that a new theoretical channel—the competitive structure of the marriage market—may incentivize both men and women to choose riskier careers with lower wage returns. We then show that a unifying factor—women’s relative inability to reap the benefits of a risky career due to their shorter reproductive span—can help rationalize a set of gender differences in labor-market and marriagemarket outcomes. We provide evidence that supports the importance of the marriage market in risky career choices and their gender differences.

I study the relationship between undocumented status and homeownership among immigrants in the U.S. Finding that undocumented immigrants are less likely to own their homes (even conditional on observable characteristics), I assess whether policy has affected the relationship between legal status and homeownership and explore potential mechanisms behind differences in housing tenure outcomes of otherwise similar immigrant groups. I use the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy to provide quasi-experimental evidence of the homeownership gap and estimate the impact of the recent immigration policy on housing market outcomes. I supplement the analysis with an evaluation of the legal clarification made in the 2003 changes to Treasury Department rules, explicitly allowing the use of individual taxpayer identification numbers in lieu of social security numbers to establish bank accounts. Comparing the effects of these changes in policy allows for further discussion of the factors that drive the homeownership gap between undocumented immigrants and those with legal status.

This dissertation is a collection of three essays in applied microeconomics. In the first essay, I study the enrollment effects of Tennessee Promise, a state-funded financial aid program in the two-year college sector. I document a substantial response in full-time first-time enrollment and some degree of substitutability between the unsubsidized and subsidized college sectors following the inception of the Tennessee Promise program. The second essay takes initial steps to examine the broader implications of free college. I first use institution-level data to construct three metrics of diversity, namely the share of underrepresented minorities in the student body, Simpson’s index, and Shannon’s index. I then leverage the staggered timing of statewide “free college” programs across the United States to document these programs’ impacts on college diversity. Overall, free-college programs have not catalyzed an economically significant effect on the demographic composition of public two-year colleges, although initial results do offer grounds for optimism. This essay places the first essay in perspective. In relation to the literature, the findings complement recent work, which has documented the early success of promise programs in encouraging community college enrollment. To this end, I provide several policy implications to improve practice. The third essay is a joint work in which my coauthor and I seek to understand US immigrants’ health-related behaviors and outcomes. We simultaneously examine risky consumption choices (smoking and drinking) and physical health conditions (asthma, diabetes, vision problems, and coronary heart diseases) using data from the National Health Interview Surveys (1989-2018). We incorporate cohort fixed-effects and the interactions between cohort effects and years since immigration into our empirical framework to capture the dynamics of immigrant health over time. For all health indicators, we find that there are important differences between arriving immigrants and natives. Despite some heterogeneity in the dynamics of unhealthy behaviors, this heterogeneity seems to dissipate as we explore longer-term health outcomes. Overall, our findings provide an interesting outlook on how the integration into the host society affects American immigrants’ health. We contribute new results to the immigrant assimilation literature, which has primarily focused on obesity and wages.

How new jobs requiring high skill can be notably benecial for the overall employment of a local economy has been a long discussed topic in economic literature. Nevertheless, given the post-pandemic break-out trend for increasing remote work, especially in the case of high-skilled workers, the benecial eects may not be the same. This paper presents a two-sector spatial equilibrium search model that explains skill premium dierences together with the pre-and post-pandemic unemployment rate patterns for high and low population density locations. This is accomplished through an idea exchange environment that draws highly paid workers, who, as their wage increases, consume more of the local goods and services, together. Post-pandemic, this situation changes to a degree, explaining the pattern reversal in unemployment rate, namely that unemployment was greater during 2020 in high population density locations.

Introduction: Discussion of cancer genetic testing with health-care providers (HCPs) is necessary to undergo testing to inform cancer risk assessment and prevention. Given the rapid evolution in genetic testing practice in oncology, we describe the current landscape of population-level cancer genetic testing behaviors. Methods: A questionnaire including items regarding discussion of cancer genetic testing with HCPs was administered to a nonprobability sample (N = 2,029) of the Texas population. Results: Overall, 11% of respondents discussed cancer genetic testing with HCPs. In multivariable analysis, discussion was significantly related to having a personal history of breast/ovarian/colon cancer (OR = 11.57, 95% CI = 5.34-25.03), personal history of other cancer (OR = 3.18, 95% CI = 1.69-5.97), and health information seeking behaviors (OR = 1.73, 95% CI = 1.12-2.66). Surprisingly , respondents who believed that inherited predispositions in addition to other modifiable risk factors cause cancer were less likely to discuss genetic testing compared to those who did not believe that inherited cancer predispositions cause cancer (OR = 0.54, 95% CI = 0.36-0.79). Discussion: The high discussion rate may be attributed to increased public awareness of genetic testing and adoption of more inclusive clinical genetic testing guidelines. The findings suggest that efforts to increase public awareness of the utility of genetic testing on personalized cancer risk assessment and cancer prevention are needed.

Combining a variety of survey and administrative data, this paper measures the progressivity of taxes and transfers for each of the US states and contrasts it to progressivity at the federal level. Our findings are fourfold: (i) the tax and transfer system is progressive at the federal level; (ii) state and local tax and transfer systems are close to proportional, on average: the regressivity of state consumption and property taxes neutralizes the progressivity of state income taxes and transfers; (iii) there is substantial heterogeneity across states, and its key determinant is the choice of the tax base (sales and property vs income); (iv) Democrat-leaning states tend to have more progressive systems, but richer and more unequal states tend to me more regressive.