This paper empirically investigates the impact of willingness to take risks on the likelihood of being an entrepreneur. We use a quarter century of data on second-generation Americans from Current Population Surveys in conjunction with country level measures of willingness to take risks from the Global Preference Survey. The average level of risk taking in the country of origin is found to have a positive and significant impact on the likelihood of being an entrepreneur. A one-standard deviation increase in risk taking increases the probability of being an entrepreneur by 15 percent. We also examine other preferences and cultural measures including trust, patience, and individualism. We find that these do not have an impact on entrepreneurship, while risk taking continues to be significant. JEL Classification: J20, J24, J61, L26, Z10

This dissertation is comprised of two studies on intergenerational cultural assimi- lation. The first chapter looks at the effect of preferences on assimilation in terms of residential outcomes. Parent’s desire to transmit their culture to their children can lead them to reside with neighbors of the same ethnicity. Ethnic segregation may be an outcome of such sorting. I develop a theoretical model of intergenerational cultural transmission that incorporates moving and neighbor choices. I prove how these choices can generate a dynamic equilibrium in which ethnic segregation will persist in the long run at the disaggregate neighborhood level with diversity in the aggregate. I examine whether model predictions regarding these segregation-inducing parental moves are supported by data. I use U.S Census Microdata (1990, 2000) and U.K Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities (1993-1994). The empirical strategy exploits variation in moves by the presence and age of children, ethnicity shares and cultural motivations. I find that a one standard deviation increase in share of own ethnicity in a location reduces the probability of leaving that location by .8 percentage points (7.6%) for parents compared to non-parents. Parents are also 1.76 percentage points (3.6%) more likely to go from a location with a lower share of own ethnicity to one with a higher share of own ethnicity. These effects are stronger for parents with young children. The findings suggest that young children may be disproportionately more exposed to ethnic enclaves. Cultural transmission appears to be an important causal determinant of the differential sorting patterns and a possible mechanism to help explain persistence in enclaves. The second chapter examines the effect of linguistic constraints on outcomes. In par- ticular, I study the causal impact of English proficiency among immigrant parents on language skills, educational outcomes and attitudes of second-generation immigrants in the U.K. To address the endogeneity in parent’s English proficiency, I take ad- vantage of the phenomenon that younger children learn languages more easily than older children. I employ a difference in difference strategy based on the instrument proposed by Bleakely and Chin (2004)- age at arrival of immigrant parents who came as children from English and non-English speaking countries to the U.K. I find that parent’s English proficiency has a significant and positive impact on the English pro- ficiency of their U.K born children. I also find a positive impact on their years of schooling, probability of pursuing higher education and job satisfaction. The impact of parental English proficiency on social attitudes related to risk taking, trustworthi- ness and political interest is negative. Additionally, individuals to English proficient parents are less likely to perceive religion to be of significance. They are also less likely to consider retention of own identity as crucial. I find parent’s educational qualification, labor force status and residential location to be important channels in explaining these language effects.

While recent decades have seen considerable research on cohabitation without marriage, the study of marriage without cohabitation has not fared as well. Prior work on the latter has emphasized the importance of occupational stratification, but ignored the social context around occupation, particularly regarding labour mobility and economic development. In this paper, we outline the significance of contemporary labour mobility and concomitant occupational stratification for the risk of non-cohabiting marriage, and use data from the IPUMS–International project to provide a cross-national accounting of non-cohabiting marriage. We focus on two issues: first, how does prevalence vary across countries, across time, and with respect to economic development? Second, how do the core dynamics of labour mobility —including migration, occupational status, and economic development—influence the probability of noncohabiting marriage? Results indicate broad cross-national differences in prevalence, increasing risk over time, and a pattern of accumulating risk associated with multifaceted social disadvantage.

A first glance at US data suggests that college-given its mean returns and sharply subsidized cost for all enrollees-could be of great value to most. Using an empirically-disciplined human capital model that allows for variation in college-readiness, we show otherwise. While the top-decile of valuations is indeed large (40 percent of consumption), nearly half of high school completers place zero value on access to college. Subsidies to college currently flow to those already best positioned to succeed and least sensitive to them. Even modestly targeted alternatives may therefore improve welfare. As proof of principle, we show that redirecting subsidies away from those who would nonetheless enroll-towards a stock index retirement fund for those who do not even when college is subsidized-increases ex-ante welfare by 1 percent of mean consumption, while preserving aggregate enrollment and being budget neutral .

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), based at the University of Washington, Bothell, recently released a series of three policy briefs on the financial impact of charter schools on nearby school districts in California. The briefs arrive at a time when a Task Force convened by California Gov. Gavin Newsom is deliberating on these exact matters. CRPE’s founder, Paul Hill, was a key source of testimony to the task force, serving as an expert viewed as “sympathetic to charter schools.”1 The three briefs make note of the task force in their introduction and are seemingly intended to inform these ongoing debates over charter school financing and expansion in the state of California. The briefs are as . . .

Privacy has received increasing concerns in publication of datasets that contain sensitive information. Preventing privacy disclosure and providing useful information to legitimate users for data mining are conflicting goals. Generalization and randomized response methods were proposed in database community to tackle this problem. However, both of them have postulated the same prior belief for all transactions, which might be wrong modeling and lead to privacy breach. Besides, generalization and randomized response methods usually require a privacy controlling parameter to control the tradeoff between privacy and data quality, which may put the data publishers in a dilemma. In this paper, a novel privacy preserving method for data publication is proposed based on conditional probability distribution and machine learning techniques, which can achieve different prior beliefs for different transactions. A basic cross sampling algorithm and a complete cross sampling algorithm are designed respectively for the settings of single sensitive attribute and multiple sensitive attributes, and an improved complete algorithm is developed by using Gibbs sampling, in order to enhance data utility when data are not sufficient. Our method can offer stronger privacy guarantee, while, as shown in the extensive experiments, retaining better data utility.

Aging is inevitable-it happens to all of us-but it is not a homogeneous experience. Aging people are among the most vulnerable populations in the world, and thus deserve our care and compassion. This is particularly true of aging American Indian and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs), who face unique barriers to accessing health care due to geographic constraints, language and cultural barriers, and a lack of infrastructure and resource support. This Article examines the availability, accessibility, and acceptability of health care services for aging AI/ANs, with a focus on culturally appropriate care and the role of community health representatives in communities with traditions that support resiliency.

This paper links between Beckerian literature that shows that marriage is a normal good with respect to male income and the literature that explores cultural changes as a result of exogenous events. I use the oil crisis of the 1970s as a positive shock on some males. The analyzed outcome is marital status at early twenties for women and at mid and late twenties for men. The probability to be never-married is significantly lower in the oil-producing than in other American areas immediately after the shock. This effect persists after the oil boom is over but longer for men than for women.

I provide new evidence on the house price elasticity of consumption by exploiting micro-level consumption data from the Nielsen consumer panel for 2004 through 2016. I estimate elasticity as a non-parametric function of household characteristics, locations and time using Generalized Random Forest (GRF), a causal machine learning model. At the county-level, the average elasticity ranges from 0.04 to 0.16 with some neighboring counties being up to eight standard deviations apart, while household elasticities range from 0.01 to 0.2. Among all characteristics, having a child, household size, and the age of a household head create substantial disparities. I find that locations with volatile housing markets are less elastic. This means that failing to account for local heterogeneities overestimates the magnitude of total consumption responses in booms and busts. Moreover, local heterogeneities in elasticity camouflage the existing asymmetry in responses. Looking within a county reveals that households, especially more financially-constrained households, are more elastic in busts than in booms. Policymakers should account for this individual and geographic heterogeneity in consumption responses to house price changes when formulating policy.

The increasing importance of empirical analysis in economics highlights the need for efficient ways to bring these skills to the classroom. R Markdown is a new technology that provides a solution by integrating writing, statistical work and computation into a single document. R Markdown benefits students and instructors by streamlining teaching, research, and collaboration. The authors report on their use of R Markdown in undergraduate teaching, including core courses, electives, and senior theses. They discuss the costs and benefits of adoption, and explain the advantages of R Markdown in teaching reproducibility of empirical work, avoiding time-consuming and error-prone “cut and paste,” and facilitating a one-stop solution for importing, cleaning, manipulating, visualizing, and communicating with data.

This dissertation contains three essays on how value-added trade affect the U.S. labor market outcomes. In the most recent presidential competition, we observed how voter angst against economic globalization had a considerable impact on the election results. This dissertation seeks to shed light on how the changes in exposure to value-added trade affect individual wages, the probability of being unemployed as well as the likelihood of being married with consideration of each worker’s occupation, the level of skill, and gender. In the first essay, we link U.S. industry-level value-added trade data with U.S. worker-level data from the Current Population Surveys from 1995 to 2009. We find that U.S. occupational exposure to value-added imports has a negative effect on the wages earned by intermediate-routine workers, which leads to wage polarization among American workers. In particular, the polarization of wages is driven by occupational exposure to value-added imports of final goods from middle- income countries, while exposure to final goods imported from high-income countries has a negative, albeit more fairly distributed, effect across U.S. workers’ wages. On the other hand, occupational exposure to value-added imports of intermediate goods from middle-income countries is associated with a positive wage effect for least-routine workers, signaling to the presence of strong complementarities between the group of least-routine workers and imports of intermediate goods from this group of countries In the second essay, we investigate the contribution of the degree of occupation routineness and the level of a worker’s skill in determining the effects of U.S. exposure to value-added trade on U.S. labor market outcomes. We apply three main approaches to examine how the interplay between routineness and skills is essential in explaining the effects of U.S. exposure to value- added trade flows. First, we find that the increase in occupational exposure to value-added imports of final goods from middle-income countries is the primary driver of polarization of wages in the U.S. labor market within each skill group, where the effect on workers in the occupations with moderate levels of routineness is most adversely affected. Comparing the wage effects for workers within each routineness group, we find that skilled workers tend to face smaller pressure on their wages from import competition than the unskilled. Second, we examine the impact of exposure to value-added trade on the probability of being unemployed at the worker level. We show that an increase in exposure to value-added imports will raise the employment-related uncertainty for unskilled workers relative to skilled workers. Third, we estimate the transition costs across workers who have trade-induced occupation switches between two consecutive periods. Results suggest that occupation switch is very costly for all unskilled workers as well as for the skilled workers who are involved with the least-routine occupations. Notice that the effect of trade might not be gender-neutral. In the third paper, we complement the existing literature by providing evidence that increasing import exposure has differential effects on individual outcomes depending on the workers’ gender and on the degree of routineness of their occupations. We explore the effects of gender-specific exposure to value- added trade on individual outcomes such as wages, the probability of being unemployed, and the likelihood of being married. Despite that the male-specific exposures to value-added trade are highly comparable to those female-specific measures, we find it is powerful enough to distinguish their differential effects across gender. We find that the effect of trade is symmetric across genders when it comes to wage effects but asymmetric in terms of the probability of being unemployed and in the likelihood of being married. Our findings on wages suggest that an increase in exposure to value-added imports has the most negative effect on intermediate-routine workers for both gender groups, which results in wage polarization for both groups. As for the probability of being unemployed, we find that the greater the male-specific exposure to value-added imports, the greater the chances of being unemployed for male workers in the intermediate-routine occupations, while the effects for other men are insignificant. In the case of female workers, rising import exposure is associated with an increase in the uncertainty related to unemployment for those in least-routine occupations. Finally, for the likelihood of getting married, the effect for female workers is insignificant regardless of the degree of routineness. In the case of men, the likelihood of getting married decreases for males in intermediate-routine occupations when exposure to imported final goods increases, while, on the other hand, males in least-routine occupations are more likely to get married with an increase in exposure to intermediate inputs.

Importance Understanding if the association of social programs with health care access and utilization, especially among older adults with costly chronic medical conditions, can help in improving strategies for self-management of disease. Objective To examine whether participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is associated with a reduced likelihood of low-income older adults with diabetes (aged ≥65 years) needing to forgo medications because of cost. Design, Setting, and Participants This repeated cross-sectional, population-based study included 1302 seniors who participated in the National Health Interview Survey from 2013 through 2016. Individuals in the study were diagnosed with diabetes or borderline diabetes, were eligible to receive SNAP benefits, were prescribed medications, and incurred more than zero US dollars in out-of-pocket medical expenses in the past year. The data analysis was performed from October 2017 to April 2018.

This study uses worker‐level data on industry, occupation, and place of work to explore differences in the spatial properties of production, administrative, and R&D occupation groups within industries. To measure differences, we calculate location quotients at the local labor market level and the Duranton and Overman (2005) agglomeration index for each group. We find appreciable differences in the spatial distribution of occupation groups within most manufacturing industries, with R&D occupations consistently exhibiting the highest degree of spatial concentration. Our results are consistent with the core theoretical and empirical results in the agglomeration literature.

The federal earned income tax credit (EITC) is a refundable tax credit that provides substantial benefits to low-income working families with children at home but little to those without resident children. But families without resident children also struggle, including noncustodial parents, who are often considered "childless" for tax purposes. We model a plan that would increase the maximum childless EITC to almost half the size of the maximum EITC for one-child families and that would begin to phase the childless EITC out at the same income level used for families with children. This would improve parity between people with and without children at home, filling a gap in existing credit benefits. It could also improve noncustodial parents' economic well-being and increase their capacity to support their children. The federal EITC delivered about $66 billion in benefits to 27 million families in the 2016 tax year (the latest year for which data are available). Workers with children at home received 97 percent of the aggregate benefits. Childless workers receive few benefits from the credit because the maximum credit they can qualify for is relatively small and their credit phases out at much lower income levels than the credit for workers with children. On average, childless workers in 2016 received less than $300 from the EITC, compared with $2,400 for workers with one child at home, $3,800 for workers with two children at home, and $4,100 for workers with at least three children at home. 1 In some cases, "childless" workers have children, but their children live primarily with another parent or are too old to be considered qualifying children for tax purposes.

Equating a job with an individual rather than an occupation, we re-examine whether U.S. workers are increasingly concentrated in low and high-wage jobs relative to middle-wage jobs, a phenomenon known as employment polarization. By assigning workers in the CPS to real hourly wage bins with time-invariant thresholds and tracking over time the shares of workers in each, we do find a decline since 1973 in the share of workers earning middle wages. However, we find that a strong increase in the share of workers in the top bin is accompanied by a slight decline in the share in the bottom bin, inconsistent with employment polarization. Turning to occupation-based analysis, we show that the share of employment in low-wage occupations is trending up only from 2002-2012, and that the apparent earlier growth and therefore polarization found in the literature is an artifact of occupation code redefinitions. This new timing rules out the hypothesis that computerization and automation lie behind both rising wage inequality and occupation-based employment polarization in the United States.

Between 1940 and 1970, during the second Great Migration, more than 4 million African Americans moved from the South to the North of the United States. In this period, blacks were often excluded from the political process in the South, but were eligible to vote in the North. We study how, by changing the composition and the preferences of the northern electorate, the Great Migration affected both voters’ demand for racial equality and legislators’ support for civil rights legislation. We predict black inflows by interacting historical settlements of southern born blacks across northern counties with the differential rate of black emigration from different southern states after 1940. We find that black in-migration increased the Democratic vote share and encouraged grassroots activism, not only among black but also, and crucially, among white voters. In turn, Congress members representing areas more exposed to black inflows became increasingly supportive of civil rights. They were not only more likely to vote in favor of pro-civil rights bills, but also more willing to take direct actions, such as signing discharge petitions, to promote racial equality. Investigating the mechanisms, we document that both “between” and “within” party changes contributed to the shift in the position of northern legislators on civil rights. Taken together, our findings suggest that the Great Migration played an important role in the development and success of the civil rights movement.

We analyse the effect of credit supply on households’ homeownership status and mortgage debt, as well as other variables relating to housing costs and home equity. We demonstrate that banking deregulation as enacted by the Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act (IBBEA) together with states’ autonomy to set the degree and timing of deregulation provides an exogenous shift in credit supply which shows variation across states and time. We use this variation to isolate the effect of credit supply from confounding factors which could simultaneously affect credit supply and demand. Using a rich individual-level panel covering the period 1996 to 2008, and controlling for individual and region-year fixed effects, we find that a shift from full regulation to full deregulation increases the probability of owning a home by one, and of having a mortgage by two percentage points. The deregulation observed between 1990 and 2005 can explain at least one fifth, and up to 45% of the increase in homeowneship and the share of households with mortgages. For observations residing in non-metropolitan areas, we also find significant effects of deregulation on the amount of mortgage debt, reported home values, monthly mortgage payments, and debt to value as well as debt to income ratios. Most of these effects are driven by young households, and by individuals with higher incomes. Our results inform on the causes of the rise in homeownership and mortgage debt in the 1990s and 2000s which have led up to the housing crisis in the late 2000s.

This paper considers how the effect of job displacement varies across different individuals. In particular, our interest centers on features of the distribution of the individual-level effect of job displacement. Identifying features of this distribution is particularly challenging-e.g., even if we could randomly assign workers to be displaced or not, many of the parameters that we consider would not be point identified. We exploit our access to panel data, and our approach relies on comparing outcomes of displaced workers to outcomes the same workers would have experienced if they had not been displaced and if they maintained the same rank in the distribution of earnings as they had before they were displaced. Using data from the Displaced Workers Survey, we find that displaced workers earn about $157 per week less than they would have earned if they had not been displaced. We also find that there is substantial heterogeneity. We estimate that 42% of workers have higher earnings than they would have had if they had not been displaced and that a large fraction of workers have substantially lower earnings than the average effect of displacement. Finally, we also document major differences in the distribution of the effect of job displacement across education levels, sex, age, and counterfactual earnings levels. Throughout the paper, we rely heavily on quantile regression. First, we use quantile regression as a flexible (yet feasible) first step estimator of conditional distributions and quantile functions that our main results build on. We also use quantile regression to study how covariates affect the distribution of the individual-level effect of job displacement. JEL Codes: J63, C21

The use of Internet connectivity for remote patient monitoring is often unsuitable for rural communities where Internet infrastructure is lacking, and power outages are frequent. This paper explores the rural connectivity problem in the context of remote patient monitoring and analyzes the feasibility of utilizing a delay tolerant network (DTN) architecture that leverages the social behaviors of rural community members to enable out-of-range monitoring of patients in rural communities without local transportation systems. The feasibility is characterized using delivery latency and delivery rate with the number of participants and the number of sources as variables. The architecture is evaluated for Owingsville, KY using U.S. Census Bureau, the National Cancer Institute's, and IPUMS ATUS sample data. The findings show that within a 24 hour window, there is an exponential relationship between the number of participants in the network and the delivery rate with a minimal delivery of 38.7%, a maximal delivery rate of a 100% and an overall average delivery rate of 89.8%.

This study examines the joint impact of parental origins and partner choice on the employment behavior of second-generation women in the United States. We find that endogamy (choosing a first- or second-generation partner from the same national-origin group) is associated with lower labor supply among second-generation women, net of the effects of parental origin culture as proxied using the epidemiological approach to cultural transmission. Parental origin effects are mediated by education, but endogamy curtails economic activity regardless of educational attainment. The findings are robust for married women. Findings for women in cohabiting unions are more heterogeneous, however: cohabitation appears to mute some of the relationship between parental origin culture and women’s economic behavior. In particular, the negative relationship between endogamy and women’s labor supply does not hold for women in cohabiting unions.