This paper evaluates the impact of eliminating affirmative action in California in postsecondary admission during 1995. Using methodology of difference-indifferences , I compare the university enrollment of minority in California with other states that did not eliminate affirmative action in 1990s. In contrast with the expectation, eliminating affirmative action does not reduce the enrollment of minority students. Research on outcomes by school types does not provide a clear support that fewer minorities enrolled in public schools. Result in labor market also fails to find evidence proving that minority are worse off in earnings after eliminating affirmative action. 2 In 1960, the term "affirmative action" firstly existed in a series orders in response to Civil Rights movement. Affirmative action (AA thereafter) is intended to promote the opportunity of minority group and compensate past discrimination by erase differences between races. In education and labor markets, race is broadly taken into account when the decision of admission, employment or payment is made. One extreme case is quota that sets a particular enrollment (or employment) number for each race. But quota is illegal in United States. There are two main area of adoption of AA-education and labor market. In this paper, I focus on the effect of AA on higher education, especially on school enrollment of minorities. In labor market, most people agree that employers have prejudice and discrimination on minorities. But in education, equity across races is always an important mission. Some even argue that affirmative action overprotects minorities so that produces environment of reverse discrimination. In 1990s, California firstly eliminated affirmative action in higher education admission. Some believe minorities were harmed by the change of law. Some support the policy and think it brings more fairness and better match for students. Nevertheless, most arguments concentrate on administrative data from specific schools. Some other research regards behaviors change in college selection. The purpose of my study is to explore the change of the well-beings of minorities after AA was ended. In this paper, I generalize the argument to the entire states and broaden the topic to two more general outcomes-college enrollment and earnings. By a study of the impact of eliminating AA on a macro-level to see what the effect on postsecondary school enrollment and future earnings of minorities, I conclude that negative effect of elimination of AA is not so serious as people worried. Conducting the methodology of "difference-in-differences", I compare the enrollment of blacks and Hispanics before and after the law was enacted, and detect 3 the difference between the earnings of the minorities who are and not affected by the policy change. The rest of paper is recognized as follows. Section I introduces background information and Section II reviews previous literature. Section III describes data sources and potential limitations. In section IV, I present the empirical strategy of my research and the result with sensitivity test. Labor market outcomes are provided in Section V. Section VI discusses and concludes.

Economic development agencies seek industries to benefit their local economies. This article investigates how manufacturing composition affects a region's income and educational attainment using data for individuals and Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) from 1970 through 2009. The results provide an understanding of the importance of changes in industry composition on the well-being of residents of an MSA. Using fixed-effects regressions, we model individual educational attainment and real income as a function of manufacturing composition, allowing for nonlinearities through squaring manufacturing composition. Across MSAs, high levels of manufacturing are associated with lower educational attainment and higher income; however, higher growth in manufacturing decreases both educational attainment and income.

Mexicans are among the top five immigrant groups in 43 states. In nine states, Mexicans make up more than 40 percent of the immigrant population, and up to nearly 60 percent in states such as Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. This population is made up predominantly of adults between 18 and 64 years old and contributes to the country economically through work and consumption and socially through culture and community life. Through work, they also pay taxes programs that benefit all Americans, including Social Security and Medicare. Despite these significant contributions, Mexican immigrants in the U.S. are poorly integrated and face high levels of social exclusion, with many not benefiting from existing health and social protection programs. Mexican immigrants' naturalization rates are far below those of other immigrant groups, and they are more likely to have low incomes, live in poverty, and many among their ranks are undocumented. These social characteristics contribute to their lack of health insurance and access to care, and have negative consequences for their health in terms of chronic disease and overall well-being. This report examines the health services implications of the social integration of Mexican immigrants in the United States, with special emphasis on the impact of the health system for nonelderly adults where access is heavily shaped by private insurance that is largely obtained through employment. This report is a result of binational collaboration between Secretariat of Government of Mexico, through National Population Council and Migration Policy Unit, and the University of California, through its Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses.

This study asks: 1. What are the relationships between types of living arrangements and psychological well-being for older adults? and 2. How do these relationships differ by gender? Data come from the 2010 wave of the Integrated Health Interview Series and include non-institutionalized adults age 65 and older (n=4,862). Dependent variables include self-rated quality of life and psychological distress. The study finds that older adults living alone or with others fare worse than those living with a spouse only. Yet, the outcomes of different types of living arrangements for older adults vary by gender. Women living with others are at greater risk of worse quality of life and serious psychological distress than men. Programs and policies must be responsive to the diverse needs of this population, rather than attempting a one-size-fits-all approach to housing and community-based services designed to promote older adults psychological well-being and independence.

The next mayor faces several challenges in the economic development arena: a climate of fiscal austerity; the imperative to leave a legacy that distinguishes the new administration from its predecessors; and an obligation to steward continued growth while working to repair the economic distress and dislocation that still affect one in five of the city’s residents. If the next administration commits to pursuing growth and equity goals simultaneously in economic development policy, it can consolidate the achievements of the Bloomberg administration while responding to the many advocates and stakeholders who believe there is much more to be done. In short, the new mayor should move policies aimed at reducing poverty and connecting a new generation of New Yorkers to the middle class to the center of the agenda, rather than separating the quest for new sources of wealth and growth from the quest to improve the economic well-being of unemployed and low-earning residents. There are many things to learn from the current administration, and many of its economic development initiatives should and will continue. Yet the next mayor needs to look for a new play book on reconciling growth and equity by explicitly setting more evenly spread job growth, more evenly spread income growth and greater economic mobility for low wage-earners as goals. Luckily, it is not necessary for a new administration to feel around in the dark for solutions. Several cities – including Los Angeles, as outlined in a companion essay by Cecilia Estolano -- have pursued pro-growth strategies that also focus on economic mobility. Estolano’s examples and others show how embedding policies that put community partnerships into the DNA of city government and promote basic workforce linkage policies in conjunction with economic development projects can achieve both equity and growth. This paper reviews the recent history of economic development policy and suggests three “growth with equity” strategies for New York City: ∙ Replace discretionary and as-of-right subsidies to firms with investment in public infrastructure and the adoption of labor demand strategies ∙ Use available public levers to increase training, earning, and economic mobility opportunities for unemployed and low-wage workers ∙ Strengthen the City's core blue-collar employment base by bringing a deliberate equity vision to the management of the city’s physical assets, especially industrial land.

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the Lanham Act of 1940, a heavily-subsidized and universal child care program that was administered throughout the U.S. during World War II. I begin by estimating the impact of the Lanham Act on maternal employment using 1940 and 1950 Census data in a difference-in-difference-in-differences framework. The evidence suggests that mothers paid work increased substantially following the introduction of the child care program. I then study the implications of the Lanham Act for childrens long-run outcomes related to educational attainment, family formation, and labor market participation. Using Census data from 1970 to 1990, I assess well-being in a lifecycle framework by tracking cohorts of treated individuals throughout their prime working years. Results from difference-in-differences models suggest that the Lanham Act had strong and persistent positive effects on well-being, equivalent to a 0.36 standard deviation increase in a summary index of adult outcomes. In addition, a supplementary analysis of distributional effects shows that the benefits of the Lanham Act accrued largely to the most economically disadvantaged adults. Together, these findings shed light on the design of contemporary child care systems that balance the twin goals of increasing parental employment and enhancing child well-being.

Today, we are witnessing high, but not unprecedented, rates of migration across national borders and around the globe. It is widely known that this movement holds the potential to influence social and economic conditions in migrant-sending and -receiving countries. What is less commonly recognized is that contemporary flows of migration seem to be generating transnational family arrangements that may influence children’s development and well-being. Families are scattered among countries, with spouses separated and children living apart from one or both parents and their siblings for years at a time. Statistics describing the prevalence and structures of transnational families, however, are hard to come by. One study based on interviews with 385 adolescents born in China, Central America, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Mexico living in the United States found that 85 percent had been separated from one or both parents for an extended period.1 A larger survey of 8,573 US-based immigrants who had just received legal permanent residence (LPR, known as a “green card”) and their children found that 15 percent of these immigrants’ children had been separated from at least one parent for two years or more. Separation was more common for those children who were born outside the United States: 31 percent had beenseparated from a parent.2 These statistics make it clear that separation is quite common among the children of immigrants in the United States and elsewhere. Ethnographic research suggests that parent-child separation may be more common among Black immigrants than other immigrants because of parenting traditions that distribute child care through practices known as child fostering, child circulation, or child shifting. These practices have developed in areas of West Africa and the Caribbean that have long traditions of regional migration. This chapter explores the practice of child fostering and its implications for parent-child separation among immigrants from Ghana. Like many Caribbean immigrants and some West Africans who come from politically stable countries, many Ghanaian immigrants do not raise their young children in the United States. Instead, these children are raised in their country of origin by other family members.3 Some of these children are “left behind” when a parent migrates; others are born in the United States and later sent to Ghana as infants or adolescents. Ethnographic research shows that the ages of their return to the United States vary: many do so as young adults, others when they are ready for elementary school. This chapter analyzes the reasons why many Ghanaian immigrants decide to raise their young children in Ghana. It also assesses the informal and formal social resources available to support the well-being of young children of a select group of Black immigrants in the United States.

Due to rapid expansion in size of the Hispanic American population, Latinos are exerting an ever growing influence on the economy and culture of the United States. At the same time, their own views and lifestyles are being reshaped by exposure to the rest of American society. Hispanics’ patterns of adjustment to and interaction with the surrounding environment are sure to have important implications for the group’s long-term socioeconomic attainment as well as for general societal well-being. In light of the salience of the issues involved, this dissertation explores in- depth a few specific facets of the process of Hispanic incorporation into American society. Chapter 1 focuses on how compositional factors (e.g. women’s economic resources, mate availability) affect the marriage rates of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans relative to those of non-Hispanic whites and blacks. Chapter 2 examines whether the migration of Latino workers to rural areas with burgeoning Hispanic populations impinges on the economic outcomes of established residents. Chapter 3 investigates patterns of occupational segregation by ethnicity in the rural South to gauge labor market competition between Latino migrants and the region’s longer-settled groups. The three studies yield several noteworthy findings. Chapter 1 documents that Mexican American and white women marry at rates well above those of Puerto Rican and, especially, African American women. In addition, the results suggest that Latinas’ limited economic resources reduce their likelihood of marrying vis-à-vis whites and blacks, while their larger supply of stably employed men and higher probability of being foreign-born raise their comparative marriage odds. Chapter 2 provides evidence that growth in the Latino share of the workforce in new rural destinations leads to somewhat less desirable income and poverty trajectories for non-Hispanics. Chapter 3 shows that Hispanics in the rural South experience a large degree of occupational segregation from whites and African Americans and rank below both of these groups in occupational status on average. Furthermore, low levels of English proficiency, US citizenship, and educational attainment largely account for the disadvantaged labor market position of Hispanic workers.

Some loss in memory is considered a part of normal aging; however, there is a considerable heterogeneity in cognitive aging among older adults. Studies show that living arrangements, social interaction, social relationships and size of social network are among the predictors of memory decline for older adults. Moreover, marriage has been associated with physiological health as well as psychological and social well-being. This study has examined the relationship between the marital status and memory performance in older adults. It was hypothesized that (1) being married will be positively related to memory of older adults; (2) participants with larger supportive social network will perform better on memory tests; and (3) that quality of married life will be positively related to memory for married older adults. Results from this study did not support the hypotheses when age was controlled suggesting no relationship between marital status and memory performance.

Much of the research on the economic integration of immigrants centers on educational and occupational mobility from the first through third generation. Although intermarriage is a key component of both old (Gordon 1964) and new (Alba and Nee 2003) perspectives on immigrant assimilation, the role of intermarriage in the economic integration of immigrants remains poorly understood. As the population of immigrants and children of immigrants has increased in the past few decades, the increasing availability of marital partners with the same national origin has led to an increase in endogamous marriages in the second generation. What are the implications of the decline in intermarriage for the economic outcomes of the second generation of post-1960s immigrants? We use pooled cross-sectional data from the IPUMS-CPS 1996-2010 to investigate the relationship between assortative mating by national origins and the economic well-being of adult children of immigrants. We find that (1) children of immigrants who partner with members of the same national-origin group have lower income and living standards relative to those who intermarry; (2) children of immigrants who partner with a native-born spouse or cohabiting partner are not economically advantaged as compared to those who partner exogamously with first and second generation immigrants; and (3) the economic gains from intermarriage depend on the race and ethnicity of both partners, with Asian immigrants the only group to show no effect of assortative mating.

This study uses data from the 2002 Rwandan census to situate the discourse on migration and orphan well-being within the context of the household. According to its findings, migrant orphans are less likely than non-migrant orphans to live in households with less favorable structural characteristics such as single-parent households. Significant differences are also found in the implied gains to living standards and schooling associated with migration among paternal, maternal, and double-orphans. However, the higher living standards and schooling attainment of orphan migrants relative to their non-migrant counterparts disappear within child-headed household contexts. More generally, the results indicate that the higher living standards of migrant orphans are in part driven by the fact that they mostly live in households with migrant householdheads or migrant spouses. Yet the analysis also suggests that orphans living within these contexts experience higher levels of intra-household discrimination in investments in their schooling, relative to their orphan counterparts who live in non-migrant households.

This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of the causal effects of in-hospital voluntary paternity establishment (IHVPE) programs on paternity establishment rates and consequent family structure, behavior, and well-being. The empirical analysis is compatible with a conceptual framework in which fathers, who are heterogeneousin quality, must make transfers to mothers in exchange for rights to their children. However, because maternal utility is more sensitive to father quality in marriage thanoutside marriage, mothers trade off the benefits of paternal transfers with the costs of interacting with lower-than-desired quality partners in marriage. Following a decrease in the cost of paternity establishment, more mothers expect partial transfers outside marriage and thus choose to remain unmarried, thereby raising the marriage threshold in father quality. Using variation in the timing of IHVPE initiation across states and years, I show that IHVPE programs increase paternity establishment rates by 38percent, and reduce the likelihood of parental marriage post-childbirth. The decrease in marriage leads to positive selection into the samples of both married and unmarriedfathers, providing evidence for an increase in the marriage threshold in father quality. Accounting for selection out of marriage, there is some indication of a net reductionin paternal transfers: private health insurance provision for children declines, while maternal labor supply increases. On the whole, measures of child welfare such as total family income and child mental and physical health are unaffected, although childrens access to preventative care declines. I perform numerous robustness checks to support the validity of my findings.

This dissertation encompasses three essays that examine the extent to which parental loss and social programs affect the health, education and time allocation of children in developing countries. The first chapter asks the question of whether early life public health interventions have lasting or long term impact on children’s human capital development. In order to answer this question, this chapter investigates the long term impact of the safe motherhood program in Indonesia on later cognition and schooling outcomes of children when they are age 11 to 17 years. The paper further investigates this question by examining the impact of the program based on exposure that began during a particular year. The findings suggest that the safe motherhood program had an impact on adolescent cognition and schooling. In particular, the program impact is relatively large and significant for those children who began exposure to the program at age 2 or younger, or not yet conceived. These estimates are robust to a series of robustness and specification checks. The results are also in general consistent with the findings in biological literature that suggest the importance of the first two years of life in shaping outcomes later in life. The second chapter examines the question of how parental loss or absence affects child well-being. While the strategy of many papers in the literature is to use parental death due to HIV/Aids to examine this question, this chapter uses the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as a plausibly exogenous source of variation in parental death. In addition, the paper uses a unique longitudinal dataset that has baseline information on the same sample of individuals interviewed after the tsunami. Also, given rich data, the paper is able to look at various dimensions of child well-being which include school attendance, post-secondary aspirations, time allocation as well as educational attainment and marriage decisions for older children. The paper provides an in-depth analysis by examining the impact of parental death by age and gender of the child as well as looking at the impact in the short term and longer term. The results suggest that death of both parents, which has been little explored in the literature, has a large, negative impact on the human capital accumulation of both males and females. The loss of father alone led older males (aged 15 to 17 at the time of tsunami) to acquire less education compared to same age males whose both parents survived, while no effect is found on younger males aged 9 to 14. Furthermore, the results suggest that maternal death has little impact on schooling outcomes but does affect time allocation of children. Finally, the third chapter examines the impact of a unique bilateral grant-aid program which provided typhoon-resistant schools and instructional equipment to the Philippines. The results suggest that the presence of both the typhoon-resistant schools and instructional equipment programs had a positive impact on the educational attainment of both men and women. The availability of instructional equipment program alone also increased the educational attainment of men but it does not seem to have had substantive effect on women. On the other hand, the availability of typhoon- resistant schools without the instructional equipment package did not have any impact on schooling outcomes of either the males or females. Except for the falsification exercise which suggests that there could be other underlying trends which may not be fully captured by the specifications, the estimates are in general robust to the inclusion of individual level characteristics, accounting of other concurrent national government’s programs, restricting to municipalities in the typhoon belt region and accounting for municipality-specific trends. The findings suggest the importance of not only expanding access to schooling through increased availability of schools or classrooms (particularly, those that are resistant to natural disasters) but also the importance of improving the quality of learning through the availability of school resources that aide in students’ learning in developing countries.

From 1980 to 2000, the substantial rise in the U.S. college-high school graduate wage gap coincided with an increase in geographic sorting as college graduates increasingly concentrated in high wage, high rent metropolitan areas, relative to lower skill workers. The increase in wage inequality may not reflect a similar increase in well-being inequality because high and low skill workers increasingly paid different housing costs and consumed different local amenities. This paper examines the determinants and welfare implications of the increased geographic skill sorting. I estimate a structural spatial equilibrium model of local labor demand, housing supply, labor supply, and amenity levels. The model allows local amenity and productivity levels to endogenously respond to a citys skill-mix. I identify the model parameters using local labor demand changes driven by variation in cities industry mixes and interactions of these labor demand shocks with determinants of housing supply (land use regulations and land availability). The GMM estimates indicate that cross-city changes in firms' demands for high and low skill labor were the underlying forces of the increase in geographic skill sorting. An increase in labor demand for college relative to non-college workers increases a citys college employment share, which then endogenously raises the local productivity of all workers and improves local amenities. Local wage and amenity growth generates in-migration, driving up rents. My estimates show that low skill workers are less willing to pay high housing costs to live in high-amenity cities, leading them to elect more affordable, low-amenity cities. I find that the combined effects of changes in citieswages, rents, and endogenous amenities increased well-being inequality between high school and college graduates by a significantly larger amount than would be suggested by the increase in the college wage gap alone.

Research on coresidence between parents and their adult children in the United States has challenged the myth that elders are the primary beneficiaries, and instead has shownthat inter-generationally extended households generally benefit the younger generation more than their parents. Nevertheless, the economic fortunes of those at the older and younger ends of the adult life course have shifted in the second half of the twentieth century, with increasing financial well-being among older adults and greater financial strain among younger adults. This paper uses U.S. Census data to examine the extent to which changes in generational financial well-being over the late 20th century have been reflected in the likelihood of coresidence and financial dependency in parent-adult childhouseholds between 1960 and 2000. We find that younger adults have become more financially dependent on their parents and older adults have become more independentof their adult children. We also find that the effect of economic considerations in decisions about coresidence became increasingly salient for younger adults, butdecreasingly so for older adults.

Recent military engagements in Iraq (OIF) and Afghanistan (OEF) raise questions about the effects on service members of overseas deployment, which can include service in a combat or war zone, exposure to casualties, or both. The 2010 National Survey of Veterans, which asked a broad cross section of living veteran cohorts about deployment to OEF/OIF and combat exposure, provides some new insights into short and long-term relationships between characteristics of military service and outcomes. Analysis of these data suggests that the impacts of deployment and combat on the current socioeconomic well-being of returning OEF/OIF veterans may be relatively small, but the effects of combat exposure on self-reported health and other nonpecuniary indicators of their well-being appear to be negative. Among older veteran cohorts, where there is clearer sorting into treatment and control groups because of strong variation in combat exposure by year of birth, patterns are broadly similar. These results are consistent with a veterans compensation system that replaces lost earnings but does not necessarily compensate for other harms associated with combat exposure such as mental health trauma.

This dissertation consists of three essays in the areas of labor economics and economic demography. The first essay builds on previous research, which has analyzed the economic impacts of divorce using various methods and outcomes, and from this research it is clear that divorce has economic consequences for women. One consequence of divorce that has not been explored is changes time allocation. Time allocation, specifically time spent in leisure, is directly related to the well-being of individuals, and it is expected to change with divorce when time-use gains from joint household production are no longer realized. The results show that divorced women spend more time in market work, and less time in housework than their married counterparts. Divorced women with children are found to have less leisure time than married women, and divorced women are found to spend the same amount of time in primary childcare yet significantly less time with children while doing other activities. The second essay is on the decision to enter the labor force for women with children. This decision is based on a variety of factors that includes characteristics of spouses. Husbands work schedules, work hours, and flexibility of work time will play an important role in this decision to enter the labor force, and additionally, in the decision to work part-time or a set number of hours. This paper uses detailed time-dairy and work schedules data to investigate the relationship between husbands work schedules and maternal employment. The results show married women with children are less likely to participate in the labor force when their husbands finish work after 6:00pm when compared to husbands that finish work before 6:00pm, even while controlling for simultaneous relationship between husbands work stopping time and wifes labor force participation. Finally, the third essay of this dissertation analyzes the effect of state-level changes in divorce law on the time allocation of married men and women. The results show that married mens time allocation is not impacted by the change in divorce law, yet women are found to be spending more time in leisure and less time in household production in states with unilateral divorce law.

The well-being of immigrant youth - of the first or second generation - is intimately tied to their socioeconomic status and success, and these are important for social cohesion in society. Institutional settings and policies vary greatly from one country to the next, so studying key outcomes for immigrant youth in a comparative perspective illuminates which are most effective in promoting their well-being. In this chapter, a framework is presented for that exercise, highlighting recent literature on multidimensional well-being, social inclusion/exclusion, and child well-being. Then key findings from research on immigration and youth are examined within that framework in order to delineate the potential and the challeneges associated with this approah to teasing out what works for immigrant youth.

This study examined the relationship betweenexperiences of day-to-day discrimination and two measuresof health among Gujaratis, one of the largest ethnic groupsof Asian Indians in the U.S. Data were collected viacomputer-assisted telephone interviews with a randomsample of Gujarati men and women aged 1864 in Metropolitan Detroit (N = 423). Using structural equation modeling, we tested two gender-moderated models of the relationship between day-to-day discrimination and health, one using the single-item general health status and the other using the 4-item emotional well-being measure. For both women and men, controlling for socio-demographic and other relevant characteristics, the experience of day-today discrimination was associated with worse emotional well-being. However, day-to-day discrimination was associated with the single-item self-rated general health status only for men. This study identified not only gender differences in discrimination-health associations but also the importance of using multiple questions in assessing perceived health status.

Interactions between culturally diverse individuals can spur economic benefits by stimulating new ideas that raise urban residents productivity. But diversity can also diminish economic well-being by making communication difficult, and by stimulating conflict. This paper investigates whether urban institutionsin particular residents sense of generalized trustdetermine when diversity is an economic asset and when it is a liability. To do so, data on trust, birthplace diversity, wages, and demographics in US metropolitan areas are combined. The evidence suggests that workers are much better able to harness the productivity-enhancing spillovers that arise from cultural diversity when they live in cities endowed with strong informal institutions.