Objective To evaluate whether calorie labeling of menus in large restaurant chains was associated with a change in mean calories purchased per transaction. Design Quasi-experimental longitudinal study. Setting Large franchise of a national fast food company with three different restaurant chains located in the southern United States (Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi) from April 2015 until April 2018. Participants 104 restaurants with calorie information added to in-store and drive-thru menus in April 2017 and with weekly aggregated sales data during the pre-labeling (April 2015 to April 2017) and post-labeling (April 2017 to April 2018) implementation period. Main outcome measures Primary outcome was the overall level and trend changes in mean purchased calories per transaction after implementation of calorie labeling compared with the counterfactual (ie, assumption that the pre-intervention trend would have persisted had the intervention not occurred) using interrupted time series analyses with linear mixed models. Secondary outcomes were by item category (entrees, sides, and sugar sweetened beverages). Subgroup analyses estimated the effect of calorie labeling in stratums defined by the sociodemographic characteristics of restaurant census tracts (defined region for taking census). Results The analytic sample comprised 14 352 restaurant weeks. Over three years and among 104 restaurants, 49 062 440 transactions took place and 242 726 953 items were purchased. After labeling implementation, a level decrease was observed of 60 calories/transaction (95% confidence interval 48 to 72; about 4%), followed by an increasing trend of 0.71 calories/transaction/week (95% confidence interval 0.51 to 0.92) independent of the baseline trend over the year after implementation. These results were generally robust to different analytic assumptions in sensitivity analyses. The level decrease and post-implementation trend change were stronger for sides than for entrees or sugar sweetened beverages. The level decrease was similar between census tracts with higher and lower median income, but the post-implementation trend in calories per transaction was higher in low income (change in calories/transaction/week 0.94, 95% confidence interval 0.67 to 1.21) than in high income census tracts (0.50, 0.19 to 0.81). Conclusions A small decrease in mean calories purchased per transaction was observed after implementation of calorie labeling in a large franchise of fast food restaurants. This reduction diminished over one year of follow-up.

This paper provides supportive evidence to the recent research on the task-based trends in the structural change of the US employment. Automation takes place either through neutral technical change at the task level, or deepening of computer capital subject to steep relative price declines. Quantifying these different sources of technological change with the task data, I show that the US labor market significantly becomes more interpersonal-service oriented, and to a lesser extent, less routine-intensive.

Previous studies often interpret the positive impact of high-skill human capital on the mean wages of low-skill workers as evidence of human capital externalities. We uncover a distributional wage effect that is difficult to reconcile with standard models of human capital externalities: city-level share of college graduates has a positive impact on wages of low-skill workers at the lower quantiles of the wage distribution, but not the upper quantiles. We then provide a comprehensive assessment and discussion of the effect of high-skill human capital on wages of low-skill workers in different occupations. We find a large and positive effect in the service sector but not in the manufacturing sector. These findings invite reinterpretation of previous studies on human capital externalities in low-skill labor markets, as the positive effect in the service sector is more likely to be explained by consumption spillovers generated by college-educated workers.

In this article, we provide the first comprehensive and pan-European empirical assessment of the relationships between four markers of household formation systems, as theorised by J. Hajnal in his 1982 seminal paper. Using an unprecedented family history database, the four markers of Hajnal’s household formation rules were operationalised for 256 regional rural populations from Catalonia to central Siberia between 1700 and 1926. In order to examine the meso-level relationships between these markers across these different areas, we employ an explicit, spatially sensitive descriptive analysis based on the Geographically Weighted Spearman’s rank order correlation. Our analysis demonstrates that mutual associations between nuclear household structure, service, headship, and marriage exhibit considerable spatial drifts (sign reversal) or important spatial gradients (magnitude change), and that the resulting number of their joint combinations far exceeds the scenarios that either Hajnal or his critics have been able to identify. By uncovering the spatially contingent associations between the different household formation traits, the innovative research presented in this paper provides support for the suggestion that Hajnal’s model is a gross simplification of historical reality that should be approached with caution.

The popularity of e-business and preference learning techniques have contributed a huge amount of product and user preference data. Analyzing the influence of an existing or new product among the users is critical to unlock the great scientific and social–economic value of these data. In this paper, we advocate the problem of influence-based cost optimization for the user preference and product data, which is fundamental in many real applications such as marketing and advertising. Generally, we aim to find a cost optimal position for a new product such that it can attract at least k or a particular percentage of users for the given user preference functions and competitors’ products. Although we show the solution space of our problem can be reduced to a finite number of possible positions (points) by utilizing the classical k-level computation techniques, the computation cost is still very expensive due to the nature of the high combinatorial complexity of the k-level problem. To alleviate this issue, we develop efficient pruning and query processing techniques to significantly improve the performance. In particular, our traverse-based 2-dimensional algorithm is very efficient with time complexity O(n) where n is the number of user preference functions. For general multi-dimensional spaces, we develop space partition-based algorithm to significantly improve the performance by utilizing cost-based, influence-based and local dominance-based pruning techniques. Then, we show that the performance of the partition-based algorithm can be further enhanced by utilizing sampling approach, where the problem can be reduced to the classical half-space intersection problem. Based on the problem of influence-based cost optimization, two naturally extended problems are proposed, which are Batch-Query and the most cost-effective influence query. We demonstrate the efficiency of our techniques with extensive experiments over real and synthetic datasets.

Research on state-level immigration policies and health in the United States is limited. In this article Stephanie Potochnick, Sarah May, and Lisa Flores address the gap in research on state-level immigration policies and health in the US by examining the health implications of in-state resident tuition (IRT) policies and their effects. As one of the largest inclusive state efforts, IRT policies reduce educational barriers for Latina/o undocumented immigrant youth, alleviate familial resource constraints, and promote social inclusion. Consequently, IRT and IRT-related policies are likely to have strong impacts on the health of Latina/o undocumented immigrant youth, their families, and their community. Analyzing nationally representative household data and using Mexican noncitizens to proxy undocumented status, the authors adopted a difference-in-difference strategy to identify the influence of IRT-related policies on general self-rated health. Their findings show that IRT policies are associated with bett...

This study analyzed the interdependent relationships among marital status, fertility rate and other socioeconomic factors in Japan in the 2000s by using fixed-effect 2SLS. In addition to higher fertility due to an increase in the number of married females, we demonstrated that economic conditions of males and the male co-residence rate have positive and negative co-relation on the married rate, respectively. We also found a downward convex co-relation between co-residence and parental economic condition, indicating that greater parental assets promote co-residence because of independence of children; however, poor independent parents also promote co-residence in case of less parental assets.

This paper examines how specific human capital affects labour turnover and real wage cyclicality in a frictional labour market. I develop an equilibrium search model with long-term contracts and imperfect monitoring of worker ef- fort. Imperfect monitoring creates a moral hazard problem that requires firms to pay efficiency wages. The optimal contract implies that more specific cap- ital reduces job separation, thereby alleviating the moral hazard and increas- ing wage stability over the business cycle. I apply this model to explain novel stylised facts about the cyclicality of the postgraduate-undergraduate wage pre- mium. Postgraduate degree holders experience lower cyclical variation in real wages than those with undergraduate degrees. This effect is significant for workers with a long tenure, but not for new hires. Moreover, postgraduates have more specific human capital than undergraduates. Estimates reveal that specific capital can explain the educational gaps both in labour turnover and in real wage cyclicality.

We study the political effects of mass emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century using data from Sweden. To instrument for total emigration over several decades, we exploit severe local frost shocks that sparked an initial wave of emigration, interacted with within-country travel costs. Our estimates show that emigration substantially increased the local demand for political change, as measured by labor movement membership, strike participation, and voting. Emigration also led to de facto political change, increasing welfare expenditures as well as the likelihood of adopting more inclusive political institutions.

Emotional distress and poor sleep both place considerable public health burdens on the United States. Around 4 to 5 percent of the U.S. population has a significant degree of emotional distress (ED) at any given time (Kottke et al., 2016). Emotional distress has been defined in research as anxious and depressed mood and as symptoms of nonspecific negative affect, meaning “the negative affect surrounding serious or nonserious mental illness” (Bruch, Rivet, & Laurenti, 2000, p. 37). Studies examining emotional distress have frequently used the six-item questionnaire developed by Kessler et al. (2003) for assessing nonspecific distress, also known as the “Kessler-6.” Research has established that ED is detrimental to physical health and that efforts to prevent or reduce ED would reduce the frequency or severity of many chronic illnesses. For example, Homer and colleagues (Homer et al., 2014) found that ED (as measured by the Kessler-6) was a significant risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD). Similarly, Schutte and colleagues (Schutte et al., 2015) found that ED predicted the development of hypertension over 5 years in black South Africans, independent of other risk factors such as alcohol intake. In addition, ED has been linked to other illnesses such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease, and diabetes (Salleh, 2008, Stewart-Brown, 2011).

This paper examines patterns and trends in racial inequality in poverty and affluence over the 1959–2015 period. Analyzing data from decennial censuses and the American Community Survey, I find that that disparities have generally narrowed over the period. Nevertheless, considerable disparities remain, with whites least likely to be poor and Asians most likely to be affluent on the one hand, and blacks and American Indians much more likely to be poor and less likely to be affluent on the other—and Hispanics somewhat in between. Sociodemographic characteristics, such as education, family structure, and nativity explain some of the disparities—and an increasing proportion over the 1959–2015 period, indicative of the growing importance of disparities in human capital, the immigrant incorporation process, and the interaction between economic conditions and cultural shifts in attitudes toward marriage in explaining racial inequality in poverty and affluence. There also are still significant portions of the gaps that remain unexplained, especially for blacks and American Indians. The presence of this unexplained gap indicates that other factors are still at work in producing these disparities, although their effects have declined over time.

The signs that the climate crisis is already happening are clear. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report detailed the evidence from more than 6,000 studies that found that over the past decade, a series of record-breaking storms, forest fires, droughts, coral bleaching, heat waves, and floods have taken place around the world in response to the 1.0 °C of global warming that has taken place since the pre-industrial era.1 These events, and the losses associated with them, are expected to become substantially worse with 1.5 °C of warming currently targeted by global climate agreements, and far worse if these agreements are not effective. Without major cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, this warming threshold could be reached in as little as 11 years, and almost certainly within 20 years. Even if such cuts were to begin immediately, reaching this threshold would not be prevented, only delayed. Any chance of staving off even worst impacts from climate change depends on significant reductions in GHG emissions . . .

vFor the past decade IPUMS and the Census Bureau have been collaborating to recover, preserve, document, harmonize, and disseminate all surviving machine-readable population census microdata from 1960 to the present. The fruits of this collaboration are now available in Federal Statistical Research Data Centers (FSRDCs). With 1.3 billion person records and 530 million household records, IPUMS-FSRDC is the largest structured individual-level data collection describing the demographic characteristics of a population. This paper will describe the challenges of creating IPUMS-FSRDC and highlight the important research opportunities made possible by this new data resource. We will also provide details about the data, including differences between the public use data and these restricted files; description of constructed IPUMS variables, such as family interrelationships; an overview and explanation of consistent geography variables. Finally, we will discuss our plans to create harmonized versions of American Community Survey (ACS) microdata in the FSRDC.

Inequality in the United States has increased dramatically during the past several decades. Multiple policies aimed at reducing racial inequality have been enacted many times since the emancipation of slavery in the United States. While some have had limited success, many failed to achieve their desired outcomes. When policy fails, the consequences for affected recipients may not be the same as if no policy at all had been enacted. Unsuccessful or inadequately considered policy interventions may have small positive effects. However, they also may serve to harm the very group they were designed to help. Reconstruction provides fertile ground for examining the impact of failed policies on their intended recipients. The Southern Homestead Act (SHA) of 1866 provided a route to land ownership for former slaves and is largely regarded as a failure. The Freedmen’s Bank provided banking services to former slaves before its collapse in 1874.

The Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program, which provides income support to individuals who become unable to work because of a disability, has not been substantially reformed since the 1980s, despite sweeping changes in health, medical technology, and the functional requirements of jobs. I review how the SSDI program works, its history in terms of caseloads and reforms, and findings from the research evidence that offer lessons for the future. I then propose two interlocking reforms that would modernize the core functions of the program. The first is to improve SSDI’s process for determining whether an applicant has remaining capacity to work by replacing the outdated medical-vocational “grid” with a new system of individual work capacity measurement. Second, I propose the introduction of partial disability benefits, which would make use of the new system for measuring work capacity and allow beneficiaries to combine benefit receipt with work. Partial benefits could be paired with a generalized benefit offset to further encourage work by beneficiaries, and the Social Security Administration’s complex array of work-related rules could be eliminated.

My dissertation applies different empirical methodologies with a variety of administrative datasets to investigate the interrelationship between firms and labor market outcomes. Chapter 1 examines how and why market power affect wages differently in financial industries. Increasing industry concentration has raised concerns that declining competition among firms for labor has led to slow wage growth. However, I find that finance wages have increased by almost three times the increase in non-finance wages, despite similar trends in market concentration. Using data from the U.S. Census, I construct measures of firm-specific market power and show that higher market power is associated with significantly higher wages in finance than in non-finance. I provide evidence that rent-sharing plays an essential role in driving the more pronounced effect of market power on finance wages for two reasons. First, financial firms with higher market power can extract relatively higher rents to share. Second, financial firms give a relatively higher share of rents to workers, especially high-skill workers, due to relatively higher worker bargaining power. As rents are disproportionally distributed to high-skill workers, financial firms with higher market power are associated with relatively higher within-firm inequality...

This dissertation revolves around the study of worker productivity and earnings. Chapters 1 and 3 revolve around the study of incentives for employee performance. Specifically, I look to understand how two contract elements impact employee effort. Using the context of the Major League Baseball (MLB) player market, the first chapter looks at how multi-year contracts impact player performance. Because salary is guaranteed, players with multiple years remaining on their contracts may not have sufficient incentive to perform at a high level because the next contracts the players will sign are far off into the future. The third chapter focuses on a related contract component, contract options. If a contract has an option, that option lays out terms for an additional year of contract that may become guaranteed at the discretion of one or both parties to the agreement. When a player’s contract has a club option, this may disincentivize player effort because the player cannot fully reap the benefits of high performance during the guaranteed years of the contract and receives a buyout if the option is not exercised. The second chapter looks to understand how a specific choice made within college, the choice to double major, subsequently impacts earnings. Human capital theory would suggest that completing a second major would improve worker productivity, which should subsequently increase earnings. Signaling or sorting models would suggest that if completing a double major conveys information to an employer about a student, possibly that he or she is of high ability or exerts high effort, the double major should increase earnings.

This thesis is a collection of essays focused on developmental economics. The first portion is dedicated to the analysis of transaction fees on remitting be- havior and how the existence of transaction costs impact the canonical test of the altruistic remittance motive. The second portion is dedicated to the empirical analysis and estimation of the effect of family migration in Indonesia on the investment in their children’s human capital. Our work contributes to the ongoing discussion in developmental economics on how migration and capital flows impact both those who stay behind and the future generations who might reap the fruits of the investments made by their progenitors. The economic literature on remittances has not settled on what is the driving motive for the large flows of capital transferred by migrants to their home countries. In the first chapter we investigate the role of transfer fees and the cost incurred by migrant remitters on the altruistic remitting motive. We explore a theoretical treatment of the problem of transaction costs induced by the existence of a fee to send capital between two households, and how the distortion affects remitting behavior indirectly through inter-temporal effects on savings decisions. While we have not yet generalized our results to the class of convex functions for a transfer cost, we show in a simple two period model that remittances decrease as a function of increasing remittance fees due to the theoretical increase in savings that the existence of higher fees induce. We then ask how the existence of a transaction cost induced by a transfer fee affects the canonical test of the altruistic motive for inter-household transfers, first elucidated by Becker (1974). Here we find that the distortions from transfer costs negatively impact the inference of altruism from the theoretical limit based on Becker’s test. Finally, we calibrate the model in the context of the Cuban migrant community in the U.S. We find, in a no cost model, that the aggregate time series of remittance flows observed is mostly explained by altruism; and that the calibrated transaction fee assuming migrants are altruistic comes fairly close to the average fees reported in the literature for remittances to Cuba. We argue that this evidences the need to consider the scope of the remittance landscape when inferring the motive of this behavior, especially the altruistic one. In the second chapter we shift focus to migration of households and the associated outcome on children’s schooling attainment. This work is relevant given the increasing migration flows both within and between countries that can have disruptive effects on the family. As such the effects of migration on the household’s children has been a consistent topic within the development lit- erature because of the various dimensions through which migration can impact them. To explore this topic, we turn to the Indonesian Family Life Survey, a longitudinal panel data maintained by the RAND Corporation. We first analyze how internal migration in general affects wage premiums, given that the migration literature finds evidence that expected wage premiums between labor markets is the principal motivation for migration. Then we look at how family migration specifically affects schooling attainment in migrant children. Our analysis is descriptive in nature but points to positive associations in both cases, with family migration reducing the hazard of exiting higher schooling levels in a country where the government is still actively combating child labor, despite its illegality. We take these two qualitative findings from the second chapter to develop in chapter three a simple intergenerational model of family migration and invest- ment in a child’s human capital. Investigating a plausible selection mechanism that plagued the endogeneity in the descriptive work allows us to not only comment on whether a causal effect exists but also on the magnitude and di- rection of effects. In conducting policy experiments we show that inducing family migration via full (or nearly full) subsidy, especially among low-skilled households, leads to higher average wages in the next generation than in the base case where families are tied to their home location. Finally, while relax- ing the migration cost in our estimated model does lead to improvements, we also show that the cheapest policy outcome might be to relax the opportunity costs to educate that still exist in Indonesia, whose effects are greater and the costs arguably lower than a migration policy would accomplish. We also argue that this last result doesn’t diminish the effects of migration, but enhances it as the apparent disparities between labor markets is empirically favoring migration and warrants a further look at regional investments in human cap- ital. And while a full migration subsidy may seem extreme, we note that the Indonesian government has provided impoverished Jawanese the opportunity to move themselves and their families to other islands within Indonesia at no cost through transmigration programs, a topic only lightly touched upon in the literature.

Geographical mobility is known to be crucial to the adjustment of local labor markets. But there is severe inequity in the incidence of mobility: better educated Americans make many more long-distance moves. I argue this is a consequence of larger wage offer dispersion, independent of geography. In a thin labor market, this generates larger wage rents (in excess of workers' reservations) in new job matches, particularly for younger workers who are just beginning their careers. If an offer happens to arrive from a distant location, these larger rents are more likely to justify the cost of moving-even if the offer distribution is invariant geographically. Also, local job creation will elicit a larger migratory response. I motivate my claims with new evidence on mobility patterns and subjective moving costs. And I test my hypothesis by estimating wage returns to local and long-distance job matching over the jobs ladder. Though I focus on education differentials, this paper offers new insights for understanding geographical immobility more generally

Declining kin propinquity in the United States between 1790 and 1940 has recently been established. Historically, urban kin propinquity rates were far lower than rural rates. While some evidence supports lower kin propinquity in urban areas compared to rural areas, previous estimates included some methodological shortcomings. Geocoded Census data corrects for some of the previous methodological issues. Using geocoded data for 39 cities in the 1880 Census, I attempt to provide an updated measure for urban kin propinquity. Numerous checks to insure accurate kin propinquity links include controlling for common surnames, identifying ideal household distance thresholds to identify kin propinquity, and consistent life course results for those with propinquitous kin. I hypothesize that results will be slightly higher than previous estimates and validate that previous sequential isonymic linking methods provided an accurate description of kin propinquity in urban areas historically.