Using IPUMS data on U.S. states from 1980 to 2010, we examine the effect of economic freedom on the gender income gap. We find that economic freedom is positively related to an increase in the gender income gap. When we break up the index into its components, we find different effects of various types of policy. For example, we find that decreases in government spending and a lower minimum wage have a statistically significant and positive effect on gender income disparities across states.

This report presents estimates of the undocumented population residing in the United States in 2018, highlighting demographic changes since 2010. The Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) compiled these estimates based primarily on information collected in the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). The annual CMS estimates of undocumented residents for 2010 to 2018 include all the detailed characteristics collected in the ACS.1 A summary of the CMS estimation procedures, as well as a discussion of the plausibility of the estimates, is provided in the Appendix. The total undocumented population in the United States continued to decline in 2018, primarily because large numbers of undocumented residents returned to Mexico. From 2010 to 2018, a total of 2.6 million Mexican nationals left the US undocumented population;2 about 1.1 million, or 45 percent of them, returned to Mexico voluntarily. The decline in the US undocumented population from Mexico since 2010 contributed to declines in the undocumented population in many states. Major findings include the following: The total US undocumented population was 10.6 million in 2018, a decline of about 80,000 from 2017, and a drop of 1.2 million, or 10 percent, since 2010. Since 2010, about two-thirds of new arrivals have overstayed temporary visas and one-third entered illegally across the border. The undocumented population from Mexico fell from 6.6 million in 2010 to 5.1 million in 2018, a decline of 1.5 million, or 23 percent. Total arrivals in the US undocumented population from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — despite high numbers of Border Patrol apprehensions of these populations in recent years — remained at about the same level in 2018 as in the previous four years.3 The total undocumented population in California was 2.3 million in 2018, a decline of about 600,000 compared to 2.9 million in 2010. The number from Mexico residing in the state dropped by 605,000 from 2010 to 2018. The undocumented population in New York State fell by 230,000, or 25 percent, from 2010 to 2018. Declines were largest for Jamaica (−51 percent), Trinidad and Tobago (−50 percent), Ecuador (−44 percent), and Mexico (−34 percent). The results shown here reinforce the view that improving social and economic conditions in sending countries would not only reduce pressure at the border but also likely cause a large decline in the undocumented population. Two countries had especially large population changes — in different directions — in the 2010 to 2018 period. The population from Poland dropped steadily, from 93,000 to 39,000, while the population from Venezuela increased from 65,000 to 172,000. Almost all the increase from Venezuela occurred after 2014.

Foreclosure sales permitted investors to purchase large volumes of low-cost residential properties after the last financial crisis, reshaping patterns of property ownership in low-income housing markets across the US. This study links post-foreclosure property acquisitions by investor landlords to subsequent lead poisoning cases among children under age six living in Detroit, Michigan. We find that the odds of exhibiting elevated blood lead levels (≥5 μg/dL) are higher for children living in investor-owned homes purchased through tax foreclosure sale. These findings highlight the potential for property speculation in post-foreclosure housing markets to exacerbate severe and racialized burdens of excess lead toxicity in low-income communities.

Displaced workers su er large and persistent earnings losses. These losses can be mitigated by returning to school, yet the extent to which such workers enroll in post-secondary education in response to displacement is poorly understood. Using employer-employee-student matched administrative data from Ohio, we provide the rst direct evidence of workers’ enrollment responses following mass layo s in the United States. Close to 10% of these displaced workers enroll in public two- or four-year colleges after displacement, with the typical enrollment persisting for ve semesters and 29% completing a degree. However, much of this enrollment may have occurred regardless of the displacement. To estimate a causal e ect, we compare displaced workers over time to similar non-displaced workers. We estimate that for every 100 displaced workers, only about 1 is ever induced to enroll in a public college as a result. This e ect is concentrated almost entirely among displaced manufacturing workers, who enroll at a rate of 2.5 per every 100. Such workers with lower within- rm earnings and from local labor markets with limited for-pro t college options are the most likely to enroll in public institutions.

In this thesis, I argue that the newspapers that owned and/or operated radio stations in Los Angeles and San Diego sought to create new print and broadcast multimedia corporations but ultimately failed because they faced several obstacles that they could not overcome. Newspapers wanted to use radio to promote their stations and to attract advertising revenue. However, as radio grew into an entertainment business rather than an information business, the newspaper-owned or controlled stations found that they needed to create live entertainment programming in addition to the news. The cost of broadcasting equipment and programming ultimately led the Los Angeles and San Diego newspapers to sell or discontinue their stations. By the time that network broadcasting reached the west coast in 1930, none of the newspapers in Los Angeles or San Diego county-owned radio stations. This thesis covers the period of early broadcast radio that occurred from 1920 through 1930.

This paper examines the long-term effect of a historical public crime, namely lynching, against Black offenders in the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries on the current local rates of intergenerational mobility of Black people. I find that higher historical lynching activity exerts a negative effect on the current economic opportunities of Blacks, potentially through racism and hatred. I corroborate this by instrumenting lynching with the local historical railway and population expansion. The results do not hold for Whites, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans, and are valid to a large set of robustness checks.

During the 1990s, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded over $6 billion in competitive grants (HOPE VI) to spur neighborhood redevelopment. We add to HOPE VI research by examining the impacts of a large set of public–private real estate investments, including HOPE VI, made over a 16-year period in a distressed neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Hill District). We estimate the effects of $468 million additional public–private investments that Hill District received compared with a demographically similar neighborhood on sales prices, rental prices, and crime. We find large, statistically significant impacts of these investments on residential sales prices, commercial sales prices, and on rental prices, and a marginally significant yet meaningful decline in nonviolent arrests. For each $10 million of public–private investment, we find a 0.95%, 2.7%, and 0.55% increase in residential sales prices, commercial sales prices, and rental prices, respectively. Given the accumulated difference over 16 years of $468 million in these investments across the two neighborhoods, the percentage increases amount to large changes in prices over that time. Cities should anticipate the potential impacts of major neighborhood investment on low-income households, especially unsubsidized renters who most directly experience the brunt of rising rents.

In this paper we consider the problem of minimizing composite objective functions consisting of a convex differentiable loss function plus a non-smooth regularization term, such as $L_1$ norm or nuclear norm, under Rényi differential privacy (RDP). To solve the problem, we propose two stochastic alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithms: ssADMM based on gradient perturbation and mpADMM based on output perturbation. Both algorithms decompose the original problem into sub-problems that have closed-form solutions. The first algorithm, ssADMM, applies the recent privacy amplification result for RDP to reduce the amount of noise to add. The second algorithm, mpADMM, numerically computes the sensitivity of ADMM variable updates and releases the updated parameter vector at the end of each epoch. We compare the performance of our algorithms with several baseline algorithms on both real and simulated datasets. Experimental results show that, in high privacy regimes (small ε), ssADMM and mpADMM outperform baseline algorithms in terms of classification and feature selection performance, respectively.

We investigate the earnings effects of marriage among same-sex couples in the United States. Gays and lesbians in the United States have only recently been allowed to enter into legally recognized marriages. As such, we know little about the impact of same-sex marriage on the economic lives of gays and lesbians. We use data from the 2013 to 2017 American Community Survey to show that married gay men experience a 3% marriage earnings premium and lesbian women experience a 6% marriage earnings premium relative to their unmarried cohabiting counterparts. The marriage premium for gay men is smaller than that of heterosexual married men, but the lesbian marriage premium is similar in size to the premium for heterosexual women. In both cases, we show that the marriage premium is larger relative to single gay men and lesbian women in the 2013 to 2017 National Health Interview Surveys. We also find that the marriage premium is more than two times larger among individuals who earn more than their partners, and marriage increases intrahousehold differences in labor market outcomes. This pattern is consistent with a common explanation of the earnings premium experienced by heterosexual men and women: marriage increases investments in relationships that affect patterns of household specialization. Therefore, our results suggest that the effect of marriage on how households organize their time is general and not unique to different-sex households.

Women continue to face discrimination in the workplace and unequal burdens in non-market work and reproductive health access. This dissertation studies how women make decisions about work and family life in the current policy environment. Chapter 1: Does the introduction of paid family leave in the United States increase fertility? Fertility in California increased by 2.5 percent relative to the rest of the country following the 2004 implementation of a statewide paid family leave. This increase is primarily among higher order (2nd or higher birth parity) births to mothers in their 30s. Chapter 2: Do gender norms influence housework distribution? Immigrants from source countries with more progressive gender norms share housework and childcare more equally between men and women once they immigrate to the U.S., though men primarily spend more time in childcare rather than housework. Immigrants from source countries with less gender equality allocate housework and childcare more traditionally, with women doing a significantly larger share of the housework and childcare. These effects persist into the second generation for men, particularly fathers, but not for women. Chapter 3: Does the type of parent involvement in abortion law differentially impact sexual behavior among minors? Notification laws require abortion providers to notify, via phone or email, a minor’s guardians prior to providing the procedure. Consent laws require a notified signature from a guardian to obtain an abortion. I find a statistically significant 4–7 percent increase in pill use at last intercourse for sexually active females in response to a notification law, and a 5 percent decrease in intercourse in the last 3 months following the implementation of a consent law. Neither effect is statistically distinguishable from the effect of the alternate law, suggesting that using one indicator for either type of law is not obscuring individual effects.

“No taxation without representation.” This mantra represents one of the key sources of tension within the British colonies in America in the late eighteenth century that ultimately led to the American revolution. The decisions by the British Parliament to enact the Stamp Act, among several other tax acts, on the American colonies led to severe backlash among the colonists primarily for two reasons: the issue of representation, and the issue of taxation. The issue of representation is plastered all over the Declaration of Independence, in which the Founding Fathers of the United States detailed the many grievances that led to their decision to separate from the rule of the British government. In essence, the Founding Fathers and many other American colonists felt that they had very little say in what went on in their own colonies, especially compared to the legislative body of the British Parliament that resides thousands of miles away. Such feelings were conveyed quite prominently throughout the Declaration of Independence, which included grievances on representation relating not just to taxation, but also to standing armies, defense, trade, and more generally the legislative process.

We study the effect of business cycles on admissions to specialty substance abuse treatment using administrative data between 1992 and 2015. We proxy business cycles with the state unemployment rate and apply a panel fixed-effects model. While previous economic research has shown that substance abuse is counter-cyclical, we observe no change in the total number of admissions across the business cycle. However, focusing on average effects misses important heterogeneity. In substance-specific regressions we find statistically significant evidence that heroin-related admissions are counter-cyclical while stimulant-related admissions are procyclical. Our findings add to the literature on business cycles and health. (JEL I1, J2)

Background: Alcohol use is an established risk factor for several malignancies and is associated with adverse oncologic outcomes among individuals diagnosed with cancer. The prevalence and patterns of alcohol use among cancer survivors are poorly described. Methods: We used the National Health Interview Survey from 2000 to 2017 to examine alcohol drinking prevalence and patterns among adults reporting a cancer diagnosis. Multivariable logistic regression was used to define the association between demographic and socioeconomic variables and odds of self-reporting as a current drinker, exceeding moderate drinking limits, and engaging in binge drinking. The association between specific cancer type and odds of drinking were assessed. Results: Among 34,080 survey participants with a known cancer diagnosis, 56.5% self-reported as current drinkers, including 34.9% who exceeded moderate drinking limits and 21.0% who engaged in binge drinking. Younger age, smoking history, and more recent survey period were associated with higher odds of current, exceeding moderate, and binge drinking ( P <.001 for all, except P =.008 for excess drinking). Similar associations persisted when the cohort was limited to 20,828 cancer survivors diagnosed ≥5 years before survey administration. Diagnoses of melanoma and cervical, head and neck, and testicular cancers were associated with higher odds of binge drinking ( P <.05 for all) compared with other cancer diagnoses. Conclusions: Most cancer survivors self-report as current alcohol drinkers, including a subset who seem to engage in excessive drinking behaviors. Given that alcohol intake has implications for cancer prevention and is a potentially modifiable risk factor for cancer-specific outcomes, the high prevalence of alcohol use among cancer survivors highlights the need for public health strategies aimed at the reduction of alcohol consumption.

The effectiveness of local spatial dependence in shaping the population density distribution is investigated. Individual location preferences are modelled by considering the status-related features of a given spatial unit and its neighbours as well as local random spatial dependence. The novelty is framing such a dependence through conditionally autoregressive (CAR) census random effects that are added to a spatially lagged explanatory variable X (SLX) setting. The results not only confirm that controlling for the spatial dimension is relevant but also indicate that local spatial dependence warrants consideration when determining the population distribution of recent decades. In this respect, the framework turns out to be useful for the analysis of microdata in which individual relationships (in a same spatial unit) enforce local spatial dependence.

Sleep disturbances among pregnant women are increasingly linked to suboptimal maternal/birth outcomes. Few studies in the USA investigating sleep by pregnancy status have included racially/ethnically diverse populations, despite worsening disparities in adverse birth outcomes. Using a nationally representative sample of 71,644 (2,349 pregnant) women from the National Health Interview Survey (2004–2017), we investigated relationships between self‐reported pregnancy and six sleep characteristics stratified by race/ethnicity. We also examined associations between race/ethnicity and sleep stratified by pregnancy status. We used average marginal predictions from fitted logistic regression models to estimate prevalence ratios (PRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for each sleep dimension, adjusting for sociodemographic and health characteristics. Pregnant women were less likely than non‐pregnant women to report short sleep (PROverall = 0.75; 95% CI, 0.68–0.82) and more likely to report long sleep (PROverall = 2.06; 95% CI, 1.74–2.43) and trouble staying asleep (PROverall = 1.34; 95% CI, 1.25–1.44). The association between pregnancy and sleep duration was less pronounced among women aged 35–49 years compared to those <35 years. Among white women, sleep medication use was less prevalent among pregnant compared to non‐pregnant women (PRWhite = 0.45; 95% CI, 0.31–0.64), but this association was not observed among black women (PRBlack = 0.98; 95% CI, 0.46–2.09) and was less pronounced among Hispanic/Latina women (PRHispanic/Latina = 0.82; 95% CI, 0.38–1.77). Compared to pregnant white women, pregnant black women had a higher short sleep prevalence (PRBlack = 1.35; 95% CI, 1.08–1.67). Given disparities in maternal/birth outcomes and sleep, expectant mothers (particularly racial/ethnic minorities) may need screening followed by treatment for sleep disturbances. Our findings should be interpreted in the historical and sociocultural context of the USA.

Since 1980, college-educated workers have been steadily moving into affluent cities while non-college workers have been moving out. One likely reason is that employment and earnings opportunities in urban labor markets for non-college workers (defined as workers without a bachelor's degree) have substantially deteriorated over the past three decades. As U.S. employment has "polarized" into high-education, high-wage occupations and low-education, low-wage occupations, non-college urban workers have been increasingly shunted out of blue-collar production jobs and white-collar office and administrative jobs into low-paid services, such as food service, cleaning, security, transportation, maintenance, and health aide positions. Simultaneously, the formerly robust urban wage premium paid to non-college workers has eroded. Urban occupational polarization and wage declines are far more pronounced among Hispanic and Black workers than among Whites, and most severe among Black males. Thus, for the majority of non-college workers-but especially for minorities-U.S. cities no longer appear to offer the escalator of skills acquisition and high earnings that they provided in earlier decades.

On April 2, 2020, due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued Executive Order No. 2020-35, which suspended all in-person K-12 instruction for the remainder of the school year.1 Even as school buildings across the state remained closed, educators continued to provide instruction, learning opportunities, and other supports to their students from a distance. These unprecedented changes raised questions about how students would learn when removed from their school buildings and sparked serious concerns about inequitable access to technology, broadband, distance learning resources, and other supports that might exacerbate existing achievement gaps among Michigan students. As states across the country similarly transitioned to distance learning, surveys of educators have contributed to the national discourse on the adequacy and equity of educational responses. Teacher surveys highlighted student-specific concerns including low engagement,2 limited access to technology (e.g., electronic devices, internet),3 and access to crucial services (e.g., meals, counseling).4 Principal surveys and national research similarly emphasized concerns about students’ limited access to technology, especially given the prominent role of technology as a key educational resource for families learning from a distance. They also raised questions about the connection between access to technology and concerns over equity given the substantial differences in student access by race, socioeconomic status, and geographic location.5 If students lack access to the internet or an appropriate device, this can restrict the type of distance learning provided (i.e., instructional packets versus synchronous learning);6 affect student engagement;7 contribute to students’ feelings of disconnectedness from their peers, teachers, and school communities;8 and add financial strain to schools and districts that provide devices and/or internet access for students.9 In addition to a shared concern about technology, surveys of teachers and principals across the country have surfaced a need for greater guidance and supports.10 In particular, principals indicate a need for strategies to handle the loss of “hands-on learning,” technology for students, training for teachers, and materials to support instruction.11 Teachers report that they need assistance with strategies to improve student engagement, and teachers of students with disabilities, homeless students, and English Learners express the desire for more or better guidance about how to support these populations.12 To begin to understand how Michigan educators responded during the transition to distance learning, the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative (EPIC) conducted a survey of K-8 teachers and principals in traditional public schools (TPSs) and charter schools (in Michigan, called Public School Academies or PSAs) across the state.13 The survey asked educators about how they were engaging with students, the challenges they were facing, the resources and supports they were using, and their concerns about the impacts of COVID-19

The use of historical data has become a standard tool in economics, serving three main purposes: to examine the influence of the past on current economic outcomes; to use unique natural experiments to test modern economic theories; and to use modern economic theories to refine our understanding of important historical events. In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the types of historical data most commonly used in economic research and discuss a variety of issues that they raise, such as the constant change in national and administrative borders; the reshuffling of ethnic groups due to migration, colonialism, natural disasters, and many other forces. We also point out which methodological advances allow economists to overcome or minimize these problems.

"What the evidence of the decade after 1916 tells us is inconclusive but not insignifcant. It shows with alarming clarity that blacks from the outset suffered from a prejudice that relegated them to the lowest rank in the colony's society, and there are strong hints that bondage for blacks did not follow the same terms as for whites" (Vaughan, 1972). What Vaughn's statement doesn't reveal is that African women were most likely on the lowest rung of society.

Women entered the paid workforce in unprecedented numbers during the 20th century. Yet recent years have been witness to a creeping reversal in women’s labor force participation. Why did the revolution stall? In response to debates over a “natural” limit to women’s employment, or a cultural backlash against the dual-breadwinner household, we consider an alternative explanation, namely whether immigration has slowed the growth in female labor force participation. Using CPS data from 1998 to 2018, we show that the increase in the share of immigrants and children of immigrants in the population has reduced overall female labor force participation. However, immigration accounts for relatively little of the retreat from the labor force. Instead, the compositional effect of population change is overshadowed by behavioral shifts that affect both natives and immigrants. Lower participation rates among native-born women accounts for most of the overall decline. Despite persistent differences, we also find substantial convergence in the labor force behavior of native-born and foreign-born women, which bodes well for the long-term economic incorporation of immigrants and their children.