Most states saw growth in the middle class between 2016 and 2017, but the number of households in that group still had not recovered to the levels of 2000. Only Nebraska and the District of Columbia had a middle class bigger than in 2000, according to a Stateline analysis of American Community Survey microdata at IPUMS USA. The plight of the middle class, which has yet to regain financial ground lost during the Great Recession, is of increasing concern to economists. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago held a conference this month to discuss policy solutions to problems Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell called “crucial” for the nation to tackle in coming . . .

This paper explores the formation of gender norms in preferences for academic fields, and shows how these norms constrain women’s allocative ability to pursue computer science degrees. I hypothesize that historical development in women’s education contributed to the gendered preferences in college major choices. As an example, I document that the curriculum of home economics, a female-targeted college major created in the late nineteenth century, correlates with women’s contemporary tendency to major in psychology, chemistry, biology, and public health. To show that theses norms still influences women’s major choices today, I study the gender assortment in computer science (CS). I take advantage of CS’s multiple departmental affiliations, some farther away from the gender norm than others. Using a novel panel dataset on the university department hierarchy from 1980 to 2010, I found that the percentage of women earning CS bachelor’s degrees decreases when the CS department moves from colleges of liberal arts and sciences to the traditionally masculine domain of schools of engineering.

The five million Jews who lived in the Pale of Settlement at the turn of the century were overwhelmingly over-represented in towns and in cities. They specialized in seemingly urban occupations, were relatively literate, and were almost absent in agriculture. This pattern persisted overseas where one third of them would eventually immigrate. Hence, Jews were typically characterized as an urban minority. I argue that the opposite was true. The economic ecology of the Jews, the patterns of choices of occupation and location, are described in a model in which Jews were countryside workers with a comparative advantage in rural commerce, complementing agricultural workers, and without comparative advantage in denser urban settings. Using data from the 1897 census, I show that the cross-sectional patterns across districts and localities were consistent with all the predictions of this model. When the share of Jews in the population grew, Jews spilled across two margins-occupational, as manufacturing workers, and geographic, as rural frontier men. Non-Jews were imperfect substitute for Jews, rendering the latter indispensable to the countryside economy. No evidence of urban advantage is evident in the data. Turn of the century Pale of Settlement Jews ought to be understood as rural workers, in and of the countryside. In this light, the patterns exhibited in the US after immigration appear as a sharp break from, rather than a continuation of, old country economic tradition. * I thank my committee members Joel Mokyr (chair), Igal Hendel, and Joseph Ferrie for their endless support and advice. and the Balzan Foundation. I am grateful for comments from seminar participants at Bar-Ilan University,

We investigate how business changes affect tax policy choices in 34 OECD countries over the last two decades. While we observe a general trend of decreasing tax rates, stable capital investment incentives, and stricter anti-tax avoidance rules over time, our results suggest that country-specific business change exposure can explain countries’ deviation from this trend. We provide evidence suggesting that, after the occurrence of a business change, smaller countries strategically use less stringent anti-tax avoidance rules to attract mobile capital. Smaller countries thus appear to opt for policy tools that are less salient and create indirect investment incentives (i.e., via less stringent anti-tax avoidance rules).

We characterise the rental subsidy use in units developed with construction subsidies and explore whether such concurrent subsidy use responds to needs unmet by a tenant-based programme alone. We develop a typology of households to guide our analysis focusing on voucher use in Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) units. Findings for Ohio in 2011 suggest that the use of additional rental assistance in LIHTC can be complementary in serving certain high-need populations, particularly when targeted housing services are provided. Very poor households with special housing needs constitute over 60% of the population with additional rental assistance in LIHTC, yet the extent to which additional housing services are provided to them is unclear. However, our analysis identifies a significant portion of households in LIHTC units that could seemingly be housed in the private rental market, signalling some degree of inefficiency in the current subsidy mix. While we find that very low income voucher holders are more likely to use their voucher in an LIHTC unit when facing a tighter market or a potential gain in neighbourhood quality, the effects are small.

This dissertation uses big data constructed from census record linkage to study the long-run effects of different circumstances and shocks in the United States. The first chapter considers how the place one resides in, both as a child and as an adult, affects intergenerational mobility. I show that during the early 20th Century, intergenerational mobility was higher for those growing up in the coastal and industrial regions of the country. Exploiting differences in when children moved across neighborhoods, I demonstrate that the historical spatial patterns were not due to differences in childhood environment. Rather, they were driven by differences in the local labor market structure. Over time, human capital became more important for success in the labor market, shifting the landscape of intergenerational mobility in favor of places that were more conducive to a child's development. The second chapter focuses on the demographic transition in the United States and asks how family size when young affects the education outcomes of individuals. Using twin births to isolate exogenous variation in family size, I find that each additional sibling reduces the likelihood that a child attends school and lowers the level of human capital accumulated by adulthood. However, these effects are quantitatively small. The third chapter seeks to determine whether military service during World War I affected the economic outcomes of American veterans who survived the war. Making use of differences in the likelihood of military service by cohort and a difference-in-discontinuities strategy, I conclude that serving in the army during World War I did not have any meaningful effects on the labor market outcomes of veterans.

Americans come from all over the world. Using individual-level Census survey data, we found the most common self-identified ancestry in each US state and DC. Many states had a plurality of residents identifying as German, Mexican, or African-American. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

What life events have you delayed because of money concerns? A new survey by Insider and Morning Consult asked just that to more than 2,000 Americans for its series, “The State of Our Money.” Of these respondents, 49.2% identified as male and 50.8% identified as female. They were given eight options to choose from. Around the same percentage of men and women have each delayed getting married, having children, and ending a relationship due to money (all ranging from 13% to 17%). A similar percentage of men and women have also delayed starting a business because of money (just over 20% for each gender).

The relationship between school resources and students’ labor market outcomes has been a topic of debate among economists for the last half-century. The release of the 1940 United States census, the first to ask questions regarding income, allows for a closer examination of this relationship for those born in the early twentieth century. I link children residing in Georgia in 1910 to their responses as adults to the 1940 census and to district-level measures of school revenues. Georgia is attractive as a case study since State School Fund allocation rules provide a plausibly exogenous source of variation in school district revenues. The results suggest that a 10 percentage point increase in school revenues for the first three years of an individual's schooling increases educational attainment by more than a third of a year and weekly wage earnings in adulthood by 7.14% (e 0.0069×10 −1) on average for whites.

This paper examines the effects of globalization on the distribution of worker-specific labor taxes using a unique set of tax calculators. We find a differential effect of higher trade and factor mobility on relative tax burdens in 1980–1993 versus 1994–2007 in the OECD. Prior to 1994, greater openness meant that higher income earners were taxed progressively more. However, after 1994, we document a globalization-induced rise in the labor income tax burden of the middle class, while the top 1 percent of workers and employees faced a reduction in their tax burden of 0.59–1.45 percentage points.

Between 1980 and 2010, the college wage premium in U.S. labor markets with larger initial shares of high-skill service employment grew substantially faster than the nationwide average. I show how this trend can be explained within the context of a Ricardian model of interregional trade, where a reduction in communication costs magnifies regional specialization in high-skill services, raising the skill premium in service-exporting regions and reducing it in service-importing regions. Quantitatively , I show that the decline in communication costs I infer from sectoral trade imbalances can explain a substantial part of the differential skill premium growth across U.S. labor markets in the data. These regional changes aggregate to account for 30 percent of the rise in the overall U.S. college wage premium between 1980 and 2010.

Historically, the family planning practices and needs of married women have been monitored and reported uniformly. However, the same uniformity does not hold for unmarried women. Because key data and information platforms employ different measurement approaches-namely, different definitions of sexual recency-reports of contraceptive prevalence and unmet need among unmarried women are inconsistent. We examine how the measurement approaches employed by 3 large organizations yield such divergent estimates. We find that contraceptive prevalence and unmet need estimates among married women do not vary much by sexual recency. For unmarried women, contraceptive prevalence is systematically lower and unmet need is systematically higher as the sexual recency window widens. In the short term, we recommend using the 1-month cutoff as analyses reveal it yields the most precise estimates for better recognizing the needs of this important demographic group.

We examine whether and why managers strengthen antitakeover provisions when facing an increased threat of being acquired. Our tests exploit the staggered recognition of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) by U.S. state courts, a doctrine that exogenously decreases knowledge worker mobility, thereby increasing firms’ likelihood of being acquired. We find that managers respond by increasing takeover defenses to deter hostile bids, especially when its employees had greater ex-ante employment mobility. Our cross-sectional tests examine two potential mechanisms driving managers’ decisions to increase takeover defenses: protection of firm value via innovation versus self-serving protection of manager’ jobs. Our results support the former mechanism. We find that increases in antitakeover provisions are significantly greater for firms with more knowledge workers, and higher research and development and intangible asset intensity, but not for firms with higher proxies of managerial entrenchment. Consistent with protection of innovation output, firms increasing antitakeover provisions following IDD enjoy higher ex-post patent quantity and quality. Firms with increased takeover defense provisions also experience a near term reduction or delay in takeover likelihood. Our results provide evidence of a setting where managers upward adjust their level of antitakeover provisions to protect innovation rather than for self-serving reasons.

The distribution of the burdens of energy development, relative to the benefits, is a primary concern of sustainable energy development. Thus, energy justice has become a key framework for understanding these concerns. In this paper, we evaluate the current landscape of wind energy development in the continental United States as it relates to energy justice. Through the use of logistic regression and fixed effects we evaluate the social factors currently associated with existing wind energy infrastructure at three spatial scales: the nation, the state, and the county. We find little evidence of distributional injustice related to wind energy at the national or state level. However, when considering census tracts within counties, three variables suggest localized distributional injustice. We find that wind energy is more likely to be sited in areas with lower education, fewer people in the labor force, and lower population density.

The US Census Bureau tracks patterns in marital status by age among Americans, including divorce statistics. In recent years, older Americans are more likely to have been divorced, separated, or in a second or later marriage than in previous decades. Younger Americans are more likely to be never married or in a first marriage. RECOMMENDED VIDEO A lot of people get married. And if things work out, they'll stay happily married. But things don't always work out. Using individual-level Census data from the Minnesota Population Center's Integrated Public Microdata Sample project, we took a closer look at different marital outcomes by each year of age in 2017, the latest year for which data is available.

This paper studies how productivity-enhancing agricultural technology affects urbanization by provoking structural change. We investigate these issues using a natural experiment in the United States. The results show that technologies which improve crop productivity lead to a less urbanized economy as economic activity relocates from manufacturing and services towards agriculture. The effects are highly persistent and are driven by the technology increasing agricultural labor demand. Our findings highlight the potentially unintended, disruptive force of innovative technologies.

Bodenhorn, Guinnane, and Mroz (2017) are critical about the results of anthropometric research using data that are not based on random samples. Accordingly, they argue that declining height trends are artifacts of negative selection into the military during favorable labor market conditions. We study height trends in the United States in the antebellum decades, that coincided with the onset of modern economic growth. We find that neither the historical evidence nor their own statistical analysis support their views. The decline in physical stature in the decades before the Civil War was real as Zimran (2019) also found.

We study the effect of physician workforce diversity on the demand for preventive care among African American men. In an experiment in Oakland, California, we randomize black men to black or non-black male medical doctors. We use a two-stage design, measuring decisions before (pre-consultation) and after (post-consultation) meeting their assigned doctor. Subjects select a similar number of preventives in the pre-consultation stage, but are much more likely to select every preventive service, particularly invasive services, once meeting with a racially concordant doctor. Our findings suggest black doctors could reduce the black-white male gap in cardiovascular mortality by 19 percent.

Theories of household saving posit that households add to or draw down wealth to equalize the discounted present value of consumption over time. This article examines the extent to which 19th century urban American industrial workers saved and dissaved to smooth consumption in response to unanticipated, plausibly exogenous, shocks to income. Information on the expected and unexpected number of days unemployed is used to construct estimates of transitory income. The data are then used to estimate the marginal propensity to save from transitory income. The results are broadly consistent with Friedman's () permanent income hypothesis in that the marginal propensity to consume from transitory income is about twice that of nontransitory income.

The diversity of family types has increased in the United States, with a decreasing share of children living with two married biological parents (Brown, Manning, & Stykes, 2015; FP-17-15). In 2017, one-quarter of children under age 18 lived with a single parent, with 15 million children living with a single mother, and 3 million children living with a single father (FP-17-17; Pew 2018). In this Family Profile, we focus on parents who are raising children alone, with no spouse or partner living in their home. We use the 2018 Current Population Survey to identify the prevalence of single parenthood among resident parents and examine their demographic characteristics including gender, educational attainment, and race/ethnicity. We define single parents as men and women aged 18 and older who live with at least one child (under age 18) of their own and who do not live with a spouse or cohabiting partner. This Family Profile joins previously published profiles that explore and document family structure in the United States