We study a group of service industries that are skill-intensive, widely traded, and have recently seen explosive wage growth. Between 1980 and 2015, these "Skilled Tradable Services" accounted for a sharply increasing share of employment among the highest earning Americans. Unlike any other sector, their wage growth was strongly biased toward the densest local labor markets and the highest paying firms. These services alone explain 30% of the increase in inequality between the 50th and 90th percentiles of the wage distribution. We offer an explanation for these patterns that highlights the complementarity between the non-rivalry of knowledge and changes in communication costs.

Economic freedom facilitates the market selection mechanism that enables the Schumpeterian creative destruction process. I develop a framework depicting how economic freedom, which reduces entry barriers and transactions costs, acts as an external enabler that facilitates the creation of firms and jobs. It also facilitates the market correction device, potentially serving as a disabling force to allow firm and job destruction. Using a novel MSA-level dataset, I investigate empirically the role of local economic freedom on dynamism over the period 1972-2012. My results confirm that economic freedom is positively associated with firm and job creation, but it has no effect on firm and job destruction.

Objectives: Explore changes in abstinence rates in Mexican women (MW) residing in the United States based on nativity and time in the United States as an indicator risks for future alcohol-related disorders. Design: A secondary analysis of data from the National Health Interview Survey evaluated rates of abstinence between 2000 and 2017. A logistic regression was completed to address the impact of age, years in the United States, sample years. Sample: A total of 29,860 MW surveyed over an 18-year period that included those born in and outside the United States. Primary Research Variables: Dependent variable was abstinence status; independent variables included nativity, year of survey, age, years in the United States (if immigrant). Results: Immigrant MW showed higher rates of alcohol abstinence than U.S.-born MW across all years, but regardless of place of birth, fewer MW are abstaining over time. Among immigrant MW, those only in the United States greater than 15 years had a greater risk of becoming a drinker than those in the United States less than 5 years. Conclusion: There are declining rates of alcohol abstinence among MW regardless of immigration status. The lower rate of abstinent MW increases their risk for alcohol-related disorders. Assessing MW’s use of alcohol and providing targeted education is essential.

We explore how access to Head Start impacts maternal labor supply. Increased maternal employment and earnings could indirectly impact children and help explain Head Start’s short-lived cognitive impacts or long-run economic effects for children. Using the 1990s enrollment and funding expansions, the 1960s rollout, and the 2002 Head Start Impact Study randomized control trial we show that Head Start increases short-run employment among single mothers. We find little evidence Head Start leads to persistent increases in maternal employment. Viewing Head Start as a bundle of family-level treatments can shed new light on both short- and long-run impacts of the program

Objective: To examine the relationship between minoritized identity and mental health. Methods: Descriptive and logistic regression analyses were conducted on males and females separately using nationally representative data collected from the 2013-2017 NHIS. Individuals were placed in one of four categories: no minoritized identities; minoritized identities of race/ethnicity only (MIoRE); minoritized identities of sexuality only (MIoS); or minoritized identities of both race/ethnicity and sexuality (MIoRES). Four dichotomous measures of mental health were considered. Results: Individuals with MIoRE were less likely to report poor mental health and individuals with MIoS were more likely to report poor mental health compared to individuals with no minoritized identities. Among individuals with MIoRES, only males were more likely to report poor mental health compared to individuals with no minoritized identities. Conclusion: There remains a need to identify the pathways through which minoritization is detrimental or protective for mental health.

We study sectoral labor realloaction in the U.S. during the Great Depression by examining transitions between the farm and nonfarm sectors as well as movement within the farm sector. Towns and cities that are hit harder by the downturn see higher levels of out-migration to farms, suggesting that the widespread movement to farms serves as a source of migratory insurance. We also show that the more mechanized farming areas are far less able to provide this insurance function. In fact, while the subsistence agricultural sector gains large numbers of people during the crisis, the mechanized agricultural sector sheds workers. Instead of being released into more productive occupations, many of the workers leaving these mechanized areas are themselves moving into low-productivity or subsistence farming. This evidence suggests that economic downturns can interrupt the process of structural transformation and that the job losses associated with structural change may exacerbate the employment problem during economic downturns.

As national government agencies continue to mandate specific data management requirements and the need for research data management (RDM) grows, many libraries are developing RDM services to help with the research mission of their institution. Research libraries' mission and expertise have always included a variety of research services. What can the library's role be in RDM services? This paper describes the possible roles that libraries and librarians can play throughout the data lifecycle. The Princeton University Library is presented as a case study to demonstrate these roles and the development of RDM services including advocacy, awareness, education, advisory services, data management plan development, and data repository development and promotion. In addition, this paper also discusses the challenges and opportunities associated with RDM services development in libraries and the future plans at Princeton, including the development of a RDM mini course for graduate students and a robust RDM program.

Racial economic divides seem a fixed feature of American society. Yet the past 75 years have witnessed important shifts in this dimension of inequality. This dissertation studies two key episodes in American economic history that have shaped current patterns of racial disparities. The first chapter examines the role of the Great Migration in the changing geography of upward mobility for black families. I show that northern cities responded endogenously to black population increases during the Great Migration, lowering the gains from growing up in destination cities and widening the racial gap in upward mobility in the region. The second chapter explores mechanisms of the Migration’s effect on upward mobility. Starting in the 1960s, destination commuting zones exhibited higher white private school enrollment rates, greater investment in police services, higher urban murder rates, and increased incarceration, suggesting rising segregation and urban decline as plausible channels. The third chapter of the dissertation uncovers the role of federal minimum wage policy in the sharp decline of racial earnings gaps during the Civil Rights Era. The 1966 Fair Labor Standards Act extended federal minimum wage coverage to retail, services, agriculture, and other sectors where black workers were overrepresented. The reform increased wages for workers in newly covered industries, with twice as large an effect on black workers as on white, and with no detectable effects on employment. The 1966 extension can explain 20% of the reduction in the racial earnings gap in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Discussion of growing inequity in U.S. life expectancy increasingly focuses on the popularized narrative that it is driven by a surge of “deaths of despair.” Does this narrative fit the empirical evidence? Using census and Vital Statistics data, we apply life-table methods to calculate cause-specific years of life lost between ages 25 and 84 by sex and educational rank for non-Hispanic blacks and whites in 1990 and 2015. Drug overdoses do contribute importantly to widening inequity for whites, especially men, but trivially for blacks. The contribution of suicide to growing inequity is unremarkable. Cardiovascular disease, non-lung cancers, and other internal causes are key to explaining growing life expectancy inequity. Results underline the speculative nature of attempts to attribute trends in life-expectancy inequity to an epidemic of despair. They call for continued investigation of the possible weathering effects of tenacious high-effort coping with chronic stressors on the health of marginalized populations.

We combine the Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure (HSDI) concept developed within spatial history with elements of archaeological predictive modeling to demonstrate a novel GIS-based landscape model for identifying the persistence of historically-generated industrial hazards in postindustrial cities. This historical big data approach draws on over a century of both historical and modern spatial big data to project the presence of specific persistent historical hazards across a city. This research improves on previous attempts to understand the origins and persistence of historical pollution hazards, and our final model augments traditional archaeological approaches to site prospection and analysis. This study also demonstrates how models based on the historical record, such as the HSDI, complement existing approaches to identifying postindustrial sites that require remediation. Our approach links the work of archaeologists more closely to other researchers and to municipal decision makers, permitting closer cooperation between those involved in archaeology, heritage, urban redevelopment, and environmental sustainability activities in postindustrial cities.

Whether immigrants advance in labor markets relative to natives as they gain experience is a fundamental question in the economics of immigration. For the US, it has been difficult to answer this question for the period when the immigration rate was at its historical peak, between the 1840s and 1920s. We develop new datasets of linked census records for foreign- and native-born men in 1850-80 and 1900-30. We find that for the nineteenth century cohort, there is evidence of substantial “catching up” by immigrants in terms of occupational status, but for the twentieth century cohort there is not. These changes do not reflect the shift in source countries from Northern and Western Europe to Southern and Eastern Europe. Instead, we find that natives had advantages in upgrading relative to immigrants conditional on initial occupation in both periods, but that by 1900, natives were less concentrated than previously in jobs with low upward mobility (farming) and more concentrated in jobs with lower initial status but higher upward mobility. The difference in assimilation over time is thus rooted in a sizable change in native men’s occupational distribution between 1850 and 1900. These results revise the oversimplified but influential view that historical immigrants “worked their way up” in the American labor market.

This paper provides new evidence on the acquisition and persistence of child gender preference among immigrant populations in the United States using Census and ACS data. We first confirm existing evidence of son preference among immigrant populations from South East Asia documented across multiple studies and samples. We then demonstrate several new empirical findings. First, Japanese immigrants exhibit daughter preference. Second, assortative matching between immigrant parents is associated with stronger gender preferences. Third, comparing male and female migrants who marry natives provides suggestive evidence that paternal preferences could be more to blame for son preference than maternal. Fourth, child gender preferences are strongest for migrants who arrive after childhood but do not appear to diminish with duration of residence in the U.S. Finally, while higher order generations exhibit weaker son preference, there is a high degree of heterogeneity across groups most second and higher order generation immigrants assimilate more rapidly to U.S. norms except Indian immigrant populations which exhibit strong son preference among higher-order generations.

In the 1920s, the United States substantially reduced immigrant entry by imposing country- specific quotas. We compare local labor markets with more or less exposure to the national quotas due to differences in initial immigrant settlement. A puzzle emerges: the earnings of existing US-born workers declined after the border closure, despite the loss of immigrant labor supply. We find that more skilled US-born workers – along with unrestricted immigrants from Mexico and Canada – moved into affected urban areas, completely replacing European immigrants. By contrast, the loss of immigrant workers encouraged farmers to shift toward capital-intensive agriculture and discouraged entry from unrestricted workers.

Bankruptcy spillovers are said to occur when a household’s decision to file for bankruptcy is influenced by the filings of neighbours. This paper argues that spillovers are best captured by measuring the extent to which spatial and temporal lags of filings affect current filings in small geographical regions. It uses the geocoded exact addresses of all debtors who filed in the state of Maryland between 1949 and 1973. An additional bankruptcy last year increases bankruptcies this year by as much as 7%. The effect is largest for small distances and short lags. Moreover, close neighbours are more likely to share an attorney. These results suggest that interpersonal exchange of information is the dominant mechanism of transmission.

Migration flows have been growing over the last decades and, given the global economic and demographic imbalances, they are unlikely to fall in the nearer future. In 2017, more than 250 million people lived outside their country of birth, and the share of foreign-born population in OECD countries grew from 9.5 percent in 2000 to 13 percent (OECD, 2018a). In many industrialized countries, the foreign-born population has not only increased, it has also become more diverse (Adserà and Ferrer, 2015). For 2015, Figure I illustrates how the number of source countries of immigrants varies across host countries. In African and South Asian countries, the immigrant population typically comprises of less than 40 different countries of origin, while traditional receiving countries, like the United Kingdom and Australia, host immigrants from more than 200 countries. For host countries, this source country heterogeneity creates . . .

This report analyzes disaster-driven internal migration, its effects on residence layout by social vulnerability, and demonstrates a modeling procedure for this task. Since the processes underlying disaster-driven migration may unfold at scales below those in the data, especially in vulnerable areas where these models are especially useful, this report focuses on South Africa, which had key flooding events at urban centers over 15 years before the 2011 census. Since only low spatial resolution census data are obtainable for research, we use universal kriging (UK) with a pre-fit model from the Philippines (which used more detailed data) to estimate social vulnerability in South Africa at a higher spatial resolution. With the UK model, we estimate and reaggregate a social vulnerability index (SVI) from South African provincial to municipal boundaries, then fit a model testing the relationship between internal migration, SVI, and flooding risk within each municipality. Results show that, when controlling for flood risk, within-province migration is inversely related to SVI, while neither SVI nor flooding affect migration between provinces. This is consistent with our hypothesis that the socially vulnerable are less likely to leave flood-prone areas, and over time, a positive spatial correlation emerges between SVI and flood risk.

Paid family leave policies are intended to help working parents fulfill their work and child care responsibilities by providing them with paid time off from work after the birth of a child. While other research has shown that paid leave policies increase leave-taking among parents, little is known about how parents of infants spend their time while they are on leave and shortly after returning to work. Using the American Heritage Time Use Study and taking a difference-in-differences approach, this paper shows that the California Paid Family Leave policy led to an additional six hours per week mothers spend on child care activities, four additional hours in basic care and two in educational or recreational care. Notably, the availability of paid leave resulted in increases in time mothers spend with children even after they return to work. The increases in maternal time investments also appear to persist beyond infancy, until children reach age three. While fathers are also eligible for paid leave under the California policy, the policy did not induce a change in the total amount of time fathers spend on child care but did result in slightly more time spent playing with children and less time on basic care activities. Given the large literature showing that parental time investments, especially those made early in a child’s life, play a strong role in child cognitive skill development, the findings in this paper are important for policymakers considering enacting paid leave policies.

Student-parents (i.e., students with dependent children) are an increasingly large share of the college population, but little is known about how they balance the demands of college with those of parenthood and household responsibilities. In this article, we use data from the American Time Use Survey to explore the time-allocation decisions of student-parents, and compare them with those of their more traditional college peers, student-nonparents. We begin with exploratory descriptive statistics, which show that student-parents spend significantly less time in educational activities, but more time in paid work, than their student-nonparent peers. Our regression analysis shows that being a student-parent reduces the likelihood of paid work by 5 percentage points and is associated with 24 fewer minutes of homework and 15 fewer minutes of sleep per day, relative to student-nonparents.

The unemployment rate dominates economic and political discussions concerning the state of the labor market; however, the measure overlooks individuals who are underutilized in their current form of employment or who, due to technical definitions, are not considered to be part of the labor force. This paper uses a multinomial logit to investigate how living in a more rural area affects the returns to educational attainment on employment opportunities, taking a more comprehensive view of underemployment by considering six employment outcomes: 1) full-time, 2) part-time for non-economic reasons, 3) part-time for economic reasons, 4) unemployed, 5) marginal attachment, and 6) not in the labor force. The results suggest that regional rurality and educational attainment have distinctly different effects on each of the six employment categories. Further, after controlling for educational attainment, employment outcomes in more rural areas have better employment prospects. As rural areas continue to face economic disparity and challenges in attracting high skill employers, this paper emphasizes the need for education reform in rural America.

Income disparities have increased in recent decades, producing an “age of extremes” in which resources are concentrated among a selective segment of the population. This issue is well-studied at the national level, but there has been less attention to inequality sub-nationally, including among rural places. We address this gap, with the goal of understanding recent income inequality dynamics in non-metropolitan U.S. counties. We analyze data from the U.S. Census Bureau to describe and map levels of within-county income inequality in 2016, comparing non-metropolitan and metropolitan counties and analyzing differences among rural counties. We then describe and compare the demographic profile of high- and low-inequality non-metropolitan counties to determine whether and how the populations exposed to such places vary. Finally, we analyze changes in these patterns since 1970. Preliminary analyses indicate that within-county inequality is higher in non-metropolitan than metropolitan counties. However, these analyses also reveal evidence of convergence over time.