This paper examines how college students in the United States altered their college major decisions during the energy boom and bust of the 1970s and 1980s. We focus on petroleum engineering and geology, two majors closely related to the energy industry. We find strong evidence that the energy boom increased the prevalence of these two energy-related majors and the energy bust lowered the prevalence of these majors. Effects are particularly strong for young people born in energy intensive states. Thus, college major decisions responded to industry fluctuations with important location-specific effects consistent with frictions to migration and information flows.

In this study I explore effects of adoption of the four-day school week policy, a permanent reduction in annual days of schooling, on parental labor supply and related outcomes. Using a difference-indifferences empirical model, I estimate causal effects of four-day school week adoption on parental employment, hours worked, weeks worked, earnings, and location choice across four states-CO, ID, OK, OR-with large increases in the use of the policy in the last decade. Estimates indicate that, among mothers with children all between ages 5 and 13, increasing four-day week enrollment from zero to 25 percent of an area's students causes an 11% decrease in employment (7.6 percentage points) and decreases of a similar magnitude in hours and weeks worked, and the probability of reporting any wage or salary income, relative to baseline levels. In contrast to these estimates, among single mothers I find no negative employment effects and also find that the policy led to an 18% increase in the incidence of working year-round relative to working fewer weeks per year. The labor supply of married fathers was not affected by adoption of the four-day school week in a statistically significant manner. Finally, I estimate small but precise increases in moving in response to the policy in subsequent years and show that there is significant heterogeneity in labor supply responses among married mothers according to educational level, with most of the negative effects accruing to mothers with a four-year college degree or greater.

Women’s increased labor force participation in the latter half of the 20th century resulted in a shift from male-sole-earner to dual-earner couples in the United States. There has been limited research since 2001 examining relative earning patterns within different-gender married and cohabiting couples. The first goal of this dissertation was to provide a contemporary portrait of couples’ relative earning patterns using the 2017 Current Population Survey (CPS). Prior research found that as of 2001, men were main contributors in more than half (55%) of dualearner couples. I found that by 2017 this number decreased to less than half (47%); and that higher levels of women’s education, women being more educated than their partners, having no or fewer children, cohabiting (versus married), and African American individuals were associated with a greater odds of couples being egalitarian (dual or equal providing) or nontraditional (women providing the majority or women sole) in their earning arrangements. Implications of the shift from the male-sole-earner to dual-earner partnerships for the well-being of partnerships have been studied; but little research has examined how individuals’ earnings relative to their partners relate to work-family conflict. The second goal of this dissertation was to examine the associations between relative earnings and both directions of work-family conflict—work-to-family conflict (WFC) and family-to-work conflict (FWC)—and whether these associations varied by gender. Using data from the 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce (NSCW), I found that main contributors worked longer work hours and had more perceived job strain, than secondary contributors. Main contributors experienced more WFC than secondary contributors, but when work hours and perceived job strain were controlled for, the higher WFC of main contributors than secondary contributors disappeared. Secondary contributors shoulder more FWC—housework and childcare—than main contributors; but relative earnings were not associated with FWC. I did not find gender differences in the association between relative earnings and WFC or FWC. These findings may suggest movement towards gender equality in terms of what makes work-family balance difficult. Overall, the findings from this dissertation provided a more nuanced understanding of gender equality within partnership in the United States.

Between 2008 and 2017, Mexican states introduced no-fault unilateral divorce, which allowed married individuals to seek a divorce without the consent of their spouse. In this paper, we exploit variation in the statelevel adoption of the reforms to investigate the consequences of the divorce law liberalization Using an event-study design, our results suggest that nofault divorce dramatically increased divorce rates in the three years following the reform. We next consider how the reform impacted divorce filings and divorce settlements. We find that no-fault divorce increased individual divorce filings, especially among women, and lowered the frequency of spousal alimony payments.

At the top of any Capitol Region constituent’s concerns is the high and increasing cost of housing. Over the past twenty years, increases in house prices have far exceeded residents’ increases in income, as Figure 1 shows. These concerns are just as elevated in the metro’s urban core — the District, Arlington and Alexandria — as they are in the suburbs and exurbs. Most analysts blame the run-up in prices on the limited increase in housing supply over the past few decades. Given the social and environmental consequences of suburban sprawl, policymakers are looking for solutions that can increase the density of housing units close to job centers and existing transportation infrastructure. In practice, this requires more apartment buildings in single-family neighborhoods with high land values: areas like northwest DC, north Arlington, and southern Montgomery County. But many homeowners in these neighborhoods -- who have built substantial wealth as housing prices have risen — have not yet been convinced that the benefits to increased density outweigh the costs, including traffic, scarcer parking and neighborhood change.

We investigate whether preschool-age children exposed to Sesame Street when it aired in 1969 experienced improved educational and labor market outcomes. We exploit geographic variation in broadcast reception derived from technological factors, namely UHF versus VHF transmission. This variation is then related to Census data on grade-for-age status, educational attainment, and labor market outcomes. The results indicate that Sesame Street improved school performance, particularly for boys. The point estimates for long-term educational and labor market outcomes are generally imprecise.

The northern United States long served as a land of opportunity for black Amer-icans, but today the region's racial gap in intergenerational mobility rivals that of the South. I show that racial composition changes during the peak of the Great Migration (1940-1970) reduced upward mobility in northern cities in the long run, with the largest effects on black men. I identify urban black population increases during the Migration at the commuting zone level using a shift-share instrument, interacting pre-1940 black southern migrant location choices with predicted out-migration from southern counties. The Migration's negative effects on children's adult outcomes appear driven by neighborhood factors, not changes in the characteristics of the average child. As early as the 1960s, the Migration led to greater white enrollment in private schools, increased spending on policing, and higher crime and incarceration rates. I estimate that the overall change in childhood environment induced by the Great Migration explains 43% of the upward mobility gap between black and white men in the region today.

Along the US border with Mexico there are thousands of communities designated by the federal government as colonias, a name that highlights the large numbers of low-income, Hispanic immigrants that live in these communities. These subdivisions have been studied extensively in recent years, often using insights from the concept of urban informality. This research has highlighted the challenges posed by exploitative land sales practices, poor-quality or non-existent infrastructure and poor-quality housing in these communities. However, similar informal subdivisions exist along the urban fringe elsewhere across the US, though they are not designated as colonias by the federal government and scholars rarely consider their similarities to colonias in the border region. This study uses data on Census Designated Places from the American Community Survey, satellite imagery and county property records to examine the extent and nature of these subdivisions. The results illustrate that informal land development of the sort described here is not restricted only to the border region, to immigrant enclaves or to Hispanic communities. Instead, it is demonstrated that informal subdivisions exist in large numbers across Southern and Western states and, though their numbers are smaller, they are present even in the Midwest and Northeast. Moreover, these subdivisions are home to diverse populations and they provide important benefits such as expanded opportunities of homeownership for minorities and the poor.

Using nineteen panels of the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-79), we construct life-lines characterizing women’s childless expectations and fertility behavior. One-quarter of women in the NLSY-79 cohort ever reported an expectation for childlessness but only 14.8 percent of women remain childless. Childless women follow two predominant life course paths: (1) repeated postponement of childbearing and the subsequent adoption of a childless expectation at older ages or (2) indecision about parenthood signaled through vacillating reports of childless expectations across various ages. We also find that more than one in ten women became a mother after considering childlessness: an understudied group in research on childlessness and childbearing preferences. These findings reaffirm that it is problematic to assign expected and unexpected childlessness labels to the reproductive experience of childless women. In addition, despite their variability over time, childless expectations strongly predict permanent childlessness, regardless of the age when respondents offer them. Longitudinal logistic regression analysis of these childless expectations indicates a strong effect of childbearing postponement among the increasingly selective group of childless women. However, net of this postponement, few variables commonly associated with childlessness are associated with reports of a childless expectation. We thus conclude that the effects of socio-demographic and situational factors on childless expectations are channeled predominantly through repeated childbearing postponement.

Diversity is a central concept in many fields. Despite its importance, there is no unified methodological framework to measure diversity and its three components of variety, balance and disparity. Current approaches take into account disparity of the types by considering their pairwise similarities. Pair-wise similarities between types do not adequately capture total disparity, since they fail to take into account in which way pairs are similar. Hence, pairwise similarities do not discriminate between similarity of types in terms of the same feature and similarity of types in terms of different features. This paper presents an alternative approach which is based similarities of features between types over the whole set. The proposed measure of diversity properly takes into account the aspects of variety, balance and disparity, and without having to set an arbitrary weight for each aspect of diversity. Based on this measure, the 'ABC decomposition' is introduced, which provides separate measures for the variety, balance and disparity, allowing them to enter analysis separately. The method is illustrated by analyzing the industrial diversity from 1850 to present while taking into account the overlap in occupations they employ. Finally, the framework is extended to take into account disparity considering multiple features, providing a helpful tool in analysis of high-dimensional data.

The subprime mortgage crisis was a devastating financial shock for many homeowners. This research uses a probabilistic matching strategy to link foreclosure records with birth certificate records from 2006 to 2010 in California to identify birth parents who experienced a foreclosure. Among mothers who did, those issued a loan during the peak of subprime lending from 2005 to 2007 were more Hispanic and socioeconomically disadvantaged than mothers with loans originating before 2005. We use a mother fixed-effects analyses of ever-foreclosed mothers issued a loan during 2006 and 2007 and find that infants in gestation during or after the foreclosure had a lower birth weight for gestational age than those born earlier, suggesting that the foreclosure crisis was a plausible contributor to disparities in initial health endowments.

There are substantial and increasing educational differences in US adult life expectancy. To reduce social inequalities in mortality, it is important to understand how specific causes of death have contributed to increasing educational differences in adult life expectancy in recent years. To estimate the relationship of specific causes of death with increasing educational differences in adult life expectancy from 2010 to 2017. In this serial cross-sectional study, estimated life expectancy at age 25 years declined overall between 2010 and 2017; however, it declined among persons without a 4-year college degree and increased among college-educated persons. Much of the increasing educational differences in years of life lost may be related to deaths attributed to drug use.

"Superstar effects" generate large compensation differentials among similarly talented individuals. Are superstar effects amplified by technological innovations that extend the scale over which talent is deployed? I test this idea in the market for entertainers, using the roll-out of television as a natural experiment which provides clean variation in a scale-related technological change. The launch of a local TV station increases top entertainers' incomes, resulting in a twofold increase in top-percentile income share, while reducing employment and incomes of lower-level talents. These results show clear evidence of superstar effects and are inconsistent with canonical models of skill-biased technological change.

How did personal wealth and slaveownership affect the likelihood Southerners fought for the Confederate Army in the American Civil War? On the one hand, wealthy Southerners had incentives to free-ride on poorer Southerners and avoid fighting; on the other hand, wealthy Southerners were disproportionately slaveowners, and thus had more at stake in the outcome of the war. We assemble a dataset on roughly 3.9 million free citizens in the Confederacy and show that slaveowners were more likely to fight than non-slaveowners. We then exploit a randomized land lottery held in 1832 in Georgia. Households of lottery winners owned more slaves in 1850 and were more likely to have sons who fought in the Confederate Army. We conclude that slaveownership, in contrast to some other kinds of wealth, compelled Southerners to fight despite free-rider incentives because it raised their stakes in the war's outcome.

This dissertation examines search and matching models with multidimensional offers and agents. The first chapter presents a search model with multidimensional offers. In addition to generalizing standard comparative static results for unidimensional search models, I also obtain new multidimensional comparative static results with no unidimensional analog. The second chapter analyzes dynamic changes in the U.S. marriage market between 1970 and 2015. I document how the landscape in the U.S. marriage market changed over time. Furthermore, I also estimate changes in racial and educational attraction between individuals. Finally, I report a racial and educational decomposition of individuals’ expected utilities of being married and how they changed over time. The last chapter presents a general framework of matching markets with multidimensional agents. I introduce new concepts for multidimensional sorting and complementarities. By establishing the link between multidimensional complementarities and sorting patt erns, I generalize Becker’s celebrated sorting results to the matching model with multidimensional agents. Furthermore, I also examine associations between individuals’ and their spouses’ health status and education levels in the U.S. By using an empirical multidimensional matching model; I decompose the well-documented positive association between individuals’ health status and their spouses’ education levels. I show that the association is a product of positive association between individuals’ health status and their education levels, and the attraction between better-educated individuals. This decomposition also suggests that the risk associated with a two-person family plan is higher than the combined risk associated with two individual plans.

We replicate eight influential papers to provide empirical evidence that, in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects, OLS with fixed effects (FE) is generally not a consistent estimator of the average treatment effect (ATE). We propose two alternative estimators that recover the ATE in the presence of group-specific heterogeneity. We document that heterogeneous treatment effects are common and the ATE is often statistically and economically different from the FE estimate. In all but one of our replications, there is statistically significant treatment effect heterogeneity and, in six, the ATEs are either economically or statistically different from the FE estimates.

In the past few years, there have been numerous high-profile shootings by police, with wide-spread speculation many may have been either racially motivated or the result of an abuse of power by police. While past researchers have used community-level data to test theories of “racial or economic threat”—that police target violence at minorities or the poor to prevent redistributive criminal activity and maintain the existing order—or “reactive hypotheses” of policing focused on the use of force to prevent violence against officers and other citizens, the majority of these studies are dated, rely on incomplete government data on justifiable police killings, and fail to consider predictors of police killings such as non-murder violent offense rates, property crime rates, or violence against police. However, recently, many internet archives have collected more complete data on police killings, and this study utilizes one such source to create a county-level longitudinal dataset of police-related fatalities from 2000 to 2014 to estimate the causal relationship between changes in county characteristics and police-related fatalities. In addition to finding police-related fatalities are strongly correlated with murder rates, findings show substantial evidence that police-related fatalities are also strongly correlated with rates of property crime and assaults on officers, factors not previously considered. Contrary to previous research, this study finds little to no evidence in favor of the “racial or economic threat hypotheses” when examining police-related fatalities within county over time.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is suffering from spatially divergent development. The uprisings of the Arab Spring in part reflected grievances of citizens who were or perceived to have been left behind, particularly by accidents of where they were born. This memo introduces a report that one may find useful and interesting. Focusing on actions that can put countries in the MENA on a path to territorial convergence, it concludes that governments can take the lead by tackling the economic and institutional causes of spatial exclusion. Rising spatial disparities are threatening economic growth and social inclusion in the country and across the region. This report shows that opportunities for the citizens are shaped more by accidents of where they were born - much more than in any other part of the world. One can reduce territorial disparities more immediately and effectively by taking five steps: strengthen coordination and complementarities across sectoral interventions; redistribute roles and responsibilities across tiers of government; enable greater mobility of the people between lagging and leading areas; build dense and connected cities; and enhance market access for lagging areas, nationally, and regionally.

BACKGROUND: Medication nonadherence is associated with worse outcomes in patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), a group who requires long-term therapy for secondary prevention. It is important to understand to what extent drug costs, which are potentially actionable factors, contribute to medication nonadherence. METHODS: In a nationally representative survey of US adults in the National Health Interview Survey (2013–2017), we identified individuals =18 years with a reported history of ASCVD. Participants were considered to have experienced cost-related nonadherence (CRN) if in the preceding 12 months they reported skipping doses to save money, taking less medication to save money, or delaying filling a prescription to save money. We used survey analysis to obtain national estimates. RESULTS: Of the 14279 surveyed individuals with ASCVD, a weighted 12.6% (or 2.2 million [95% CI, 2.1–2.4]) experienced CRN, including 8.6% or 1.5 million missing doses, 8.8% or 1.6 million taking lower than prescribed doses, and 10.5% or 1.9 million intentionally delaying a medication fill to save costs. Age <65 years, female sex, low family income, lack of health insurance, and high comorbidity burden were independently associated with CRN, with >1 in 5 reporting CRN in these subgroups. Survey respondents with CRN compared with those without CRN had 10.8-fold higher odds of requesting low-cost medications and 8.9-fold higher odds of using alternative, nonprescription, therapies. CONCLUSIONS: One in 8 patients with ASCVD reports nonadherence to medications because of cost. The removal of financial barriers to accessing medications, particularly among vulnerable patient groups, may help improve adherence to essential therapy to reduce ASCVD morbidity and mortality.

Non-pecuniary factors are believed to play a crucial role in the decisions of entrepreneurs. We estimate how the non-pecuniary benefits related to the quality-of-life (e.g., clement weather) of a target firm’s location affect its acquisition price. Using new data on private firm acquisitions, we find that firms in cities with a higher quality-of-life sell for an average premium of 15.8% over comparable firms in cities with a lower quality-of-life, and this premium is likely driven by entrepreneurs who buy target firms to relocate. Notably, the premium disappears when the firm is acquired by investors who value the firm as a purely financial asset. Using historical wage-to-housing cost differentials to instrument for the quality-of-life, we show that the premium for non-pecuniary amenities of a city is in addition to any premium for city characteristics (e.g., agglomeration economies) that affect firm fundamentals