The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of marriage regulation on the migratory behavior of individuals using the history of the liberalization of same-sex marriage across the United States. Because the approval of same-sex marriage allows homosexuals access to legal rights and social benefits, marriage becomes more attractive relative to singlehood or other forms of partnership. The differences in the value of other forms of relationship status relative to marriage can affect the migration decisions of individuals, to the extent that those states approving same-sex marriage can be considered less discriminatory. Results show that that legal reform permanently increased the migration flow of homosexuals moving to tolerant states (i.e., those that have legalized same-sex marriage). The physical distance among states does not appear to be driving our estimates since the migration flow of homosexuals is not limited to border or close states. Supplemental analysis, developed to explore whether the migration flow is translated to a significant effect to the stock of homosexuals by state, suggests that that stock increased after the approval of same-sex marriage but that it was transitory, pointing to a ‘no effect’ on the spatial distribution of homosexuals as times went by. The liberalization of marriage for homosexuals also has an effect on the migration behavior of those individuals originating from countries in which same-sex sexual activity is illegal, for whom we observe an outflow migration from those states with same sex marriage, pointing to dissimilarities in cultural aspects related to homosexuality as important factors in migration decisions.

Canadá, los EE. UU. y la mayoría de los países occidentales recurren a inmigrantes titulados en CTIM (ciencia, tecnología, ingeniería y matemáticas) para fomentar la innovación y el crecimiento económico. Canadá, en concreto, ha acogido a muchos inmigrantes CTIM durante los últimos 25 años. En los EE. UU., existe un debate continuado sobre si el programa de visado H–1B se usa de manera eficaz para atraer a más inmigrantes CTIM. Resulta interesante que existan diferencias importantes entre los dos países en ingresos y probablemente la actividad innovadora de los inmigrantes con educación superior, lo que pone de manifiesto el posible papel de la política de inmigración a la hora de determinar dichos resultados.

In this dissertation, I estimate the structural parameters of the collective model of family time allocation decisions using the 2015 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data set. Traditional theories in labor economics explain that higher education leads to less housework. However, in the data set, we see that more educated husbands spend more housework time and take a higher share of the housework than less educated husbands. According to the PSID data set, on average, married-couple households in the United States reported spending 24 hours per week on housework in 2015. The average husband is responsible for approximately 32% of housework within the households in the U.S. Holding a wife's educational attainment level fixed, a husband with a college degree spends about 7.24 minutes more per day on housework compared to a husband with a high school degree. In terms of a husband's housework timeshare, there is a 4.2% point increase when a husband extends his education level from a high school degree to a college degree. This dissertation focuses on explaining this phenomenon that has never been explained by the existing literature. I develop a theoretical model to examine how a husband's education affects his time at home and analyze the impact of education on the husband's housework time. My structural estimation results reveal that husbands' education elasticity of home productivity is greater than that of market productivity and even wives' education elasticity of domestic productivity. This is the first empirical study specifically concentrating on the effect of education on counter-intuitive time allocation decisions of husbands. I find that the husband decreases his leisure time and increases time spent on housework and market labor as his educational attainment level increases.

Using the Consumption Activities Mail Survey (CAMS) module in the HRS we document how individual time allocations change when one or more members transitions from full time work to not working. We find that the ratio of home production to leisure time is approximately constant for both family members. Using a model of household labor supply to understand the implications of this finding, we conclude that the elasticity of substitu- tion between the leisure of the two members is quite large. This elasticity plays a key role in models of household labor supply and is important for understanding how changes in relative wages and taxes affect household labor supply.

Machine learning methods have become very popular in various scientific disciplines. Using Breimann’s random forests and data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and its mortality follow-up, we wanted to know 1) Could these methods be used to predict the occurrence of death? 2) Which variables are important for these predictions? We checked the accuracy of the forests by estimating the area under the ROC curve (AUC) for test data and showed that they perform relatively well, with an AUC from 0.83 to 0.87. To indicate the predictive power of every variable we estimated the mean decrease in accuracy (MDA). Not surprisingly ”age” is by far the most predictive, followed by ”mobility limitations” and ”self-rated health”. Typical sociodemographic mortality determinants like ”sex”, ”education”, and ”income” seem to be very weak in their predictive ability in each of the six selected intervals.

We study the impact of recessions on the real wages of undocumented immigrants in the US using data from the Mexican Migration Project. Empirical evidence shows that undocumented immigrants experience larger wage drops during recessions than legal immigrants, suggesting that the frequent renegotiation of contracts leads to greater wage flexibility. Because migration decisions also adjust to these wage changes, the observed equilibrium wages are capturing both lowered aggregate productivity and a smaller supply of migrant workers. To separate these effects, we analyze an equilibrium migration model where native wages are rigid while immigrant wages are flexible. In a counterfactual experiment with a fixed supply of immigrant workers, we see a stronger relationship between aggregate negative productivity shocks and immigrant wages. We also find that the flexibility of immigrant wages could reduce the volatility of high-skilled native employment over the business cycles, but magnifies the volatility of low-skilled native employment.

Evolutionary economic geography theory stresses the importance of time and history to explain the evolution of regional economies. Yet, consistent empirical treatment of longitudinal patterns of regional evolution has largely escaped the focus of this new approach. There is much work in progress, which suggests that a deepening of the historical perspective is the next natural step in a further development of evolutionary economic geography. However, there are also theoretical, empirical and methodological challenges to ‘taking evolutionary economic geography historical’. In this endeavour, much could be gained from insights from time–geography, economic history and the literature on longitudinal methodologies.

In 1956, the City of Detroit began plans for the Detroit Medical Center—the largest urban renewal project in the nation. This hospital campus, motivated by leadership at four inner-city hospitals, sought to use public funding to raze the surrounding “blighted” neighborhood to attract private patients, thus providing a new industry for a city in economic decline. This strategy was ultimately unsuccessful and instead further contributed to both the city’s economic decline and the continued poor health of Detroit’s residents. This dissertation argues that the development of the Detroit Medical Center, which largely used federal funding for its completion, was built for what the city planners and officials hoped for rather than for the city that existed. In doing so, planners and officials ignored pleas from activists and demographic trends, pouring money into a project that did not serve the community that utilized this institution. This, in turn, further taxed the city’s municipal hospital, Detroit Receiving, as the city continued to experience economic decline and the population of poor and indigent patients grew. Even as the violence of the Detroit Riots in 1967 highlighted both the extreme unease of Detroit’s black community and the central importance of adequate medical provision for Detroit’s most vulnerable populations, the city was ultimately unable, or unwilling, to prioritize the needs of its residents. This stigma associated with medical provision for Detroit’s indigent population even resulted in the continued failure of the individual hospitals of the Detroit Medical Center to merge into one integrated medical center, which external marketing consultants had deemed essential for the success of the Detroit Medical Center. xiii Ultimately, the development of the Detroit Medical Center contributed to the economic decline of the city of Detroit. Rather than investing in its immediate community, Detroit Medical Center planners continued to make choices and spend money in attempts to court suburbanites and private patients. This resulted in continued financial strain on the city when these investments were not recuperated because most of the center’s patients and clientele always remained near the hospitals of the Detroit Medical Center – an area of concentrated poverty. By not investing in its community through the largely publicly-funded Detroit Medical Center, the city of Detroit did not ensure adequate health provision for its neediest residents. This contribution to the creation of a perpetually unhealthy, and poor populace. A community must be healthy to work, to become educated, to be engaged consumers; the city of Detroit was not interested in making its residents healthier, and this is demonstrated by its actions during the development of the Detroit Medical Center. Because of this, the Detroit Medical Center never fulfilled its potential, and caused the city even further financial stress. In the end, this development is a symbol of what could have been but never was. As a study of the ways in which a struggling city attempted to use medical care as an engine of economic recovery, this dissertation provides a case study for historians interested in health and medicine in American urban cities and encourages planners and contemporary urbanists to consider the consequences of not providing adequate health provision to a city’s most vulnerable residents.

Previous work has established that U.S. immigrants earn more if they are fluent in English, but a portion of that return likely reflects biases because fluency is correlated with unobserved factors such as self-selection and ability to job shop. This article investigates those factors by looking at the variation in the crude fluency returns earned by resettled refugees and other immigrants in the United States. Results show that nonrefugees initially earn a much larger wage return for fluency, and this gap persists in the first years after immigration. However, refugees’ return does eventually increase and catches up with that of the nonrefugees.

The geography of immigrant settlement has shifted dramatically over the last 30 years, with immigrants increasingly migrating to a number of “new destinations”. Latino immigrants are the largest immigrant group in the United States and their economic outcomes in these new dLake, F. M. L. (2019). A Multi-Measure Approach: Latino Immigrant Economic Well-Being by Destination Type. University of California, Los Angeles, California. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/content/qt7cs626wc/qt7cs626wc.pdfestinations have been a topic of particular scholarly concern. Past studies at the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) level have largely focused on measures of poverty and employment to find that Latino immigrants generally fare worse in new destinations relative to “traditional destinations” like Los Angeles, New York, and Miami. Unexplored in the current literature is whether the use of different outcome variables like homeownership, rent-burden, and nominal income would yield a different story of the economic well-being of Latino immigrants in new destinations. In this study, I explore Latino immigrant economic well-being across five dimensions. While my results support previous findings regarding poverty, I find that Latino immigrants have better employment outcomes, higher nominal income, less rent-burden, and higher rates of homeownership. The results point to the need to consider a variety of outcomes in assessing Latino immigrant economic well-being.

In times of hardship, moving in with family is one strategy for alleviating economic deprivation and uncertainty. The ability of the family to buffer against poverty may vary by the resources available to and the economic needs of individuals. I assess how the formation of extended-family households is associated with a move into or out of poverty and how this association varies by race and ethnicity, since economic resources and norms around extended-family households differ. Using longitudinal data that span four years, I estimate linear fixed effects regression models to assess how changes in living arrangements are related to changes in poverty. I find that moving into an extended-family household reduces poverty, especially for the joining family unit. Most of this poverty reduction occurs through a family safety net, with a non-poor family taking in poor family units.

We analyze the association between spouses' incomes using a rank-rank specification that takes non­linearities along both spouses' income distribution into account. We also document that the relationships between income and labor force participation and income and couple formation are non-linear. Using simulations, we then analyze how changes in spouses' rank-dependence structure, labor force participation and couple formation contribute to the upsurge of income inequality in the U.S between 1973 and 2013. We find that an increased tendency towards positive sorting contributed substantially to the rise in inequality among dual-earner couples, but contributed little to overall inequality across households. When considering all households, the factor accounting most for the increased inequality during this period is an increased tendency for individual men and women 10 remain single.

This article describes kmr, a Stata command to estimate a micro compliance function using group’s nonresponse rates (2007, Journal of Econometrics 136: 213-235), which can be used to correct survey weights for unit nonresponse. We illustrate the use of kmr with an empirical example using the Current Population Survey and state-level nonresponse rates.

BACKGROUND: Transportation research suggests that persons who travel further to work earn higher hourly wages. OBJECTIVE: To explore whether workers with disabilities who have longer commute times earn higher wages. METHODS: Data from the 2016 American Community Survey is used to examine commuting time and wages for workers with and without disabilities, controlling for individual characteristics. RESULTS: Travel time to work is quite similar between workers with and without disabilities, but workers with disabilities who travel similar amounts of time as workers without disabilities earn substantially less per hour, even when controlling for individual characteristics. CONCLUSIONS Commuting time does not contribute to the wage gap between workers with and without disabilities.

This paper examines the effects of offered and required coursework covering financial and economic topics in U.S. high schools over the past 20 years. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I look at the effects of economic and financial curricula on several post high school outcomes such as education attainment of potentially exposed groups, tax credit filing behaviour, and differences in poverty status. Analysis is done with 3 levels of geographic fixed effects; at the state level, county level, and contiguous county pairs that straddle state borders where discontinuities in coursework offerings or requirements are present. The results of this study do not suggest that potential exposure to economic or financial courses, whether they be offered or required, has any significant economic or statistical impact on education attainment for the affected population at the high school or post-secondary level. Exposure to coursework does not have a large economic impact on poverty reduction in potentially affected populations, but does result in some increase in both the likelihood of claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit, as well as the amount claimed.

Analyzing the factors that determine any labor market’s outcomes is important. That is because the results of these analyses can help policy makers to adopt effective labor market policies, and thus achieve the best outcomes of that labor market. In this study, I analyze three important factors: unemployment, education-occupation mismatch, and immigrants’ participation in the US labor market. First, I analyze the problem of slow decline in the rate of U.S. unemployment after the last recessions. In this chapter, I examine whether the slow movement in U.S. unemployment is due to cyclical or structural factors. I contribute to the literature by using a FAVAR approach to investigate the relative contribution of cyclical and structural factors in U.S. unemployment. The results show that the cyclical factors (GDP growth and vacancy) can explain about 60% of the forecast error variance of unemployment. The structural factors can explain about 16%. About 20% of unemployment is not explained through these results; this percentage of unemployment could be due to the increase in frictional unemployment. These results, in general, indicate that cyclical factors have more contribution than structural factors in the movement of the U.S. unemployment, which is in line with the literature. However, the results indicate that the FAVAR approach can provide better results by reducing the estimation bias...

Research on immigrant homeownership does not differentiate that which is encumbered by mortgage debt and that which is “free and clear.” This is an important distinction since wealth held in the form of encumbered home equity can be fleeting. I use US Census and American Community Survey data to chart progress toward unencumbered homeownership among immigrants born in the 1950’s who immigrated to the US in the 1970’s. Observing this cohort across a 25 year period (1990-2015), I uncover a robust pattern of unencumbered home equity accumulation as they approach the retirement ages. By the end of the period, some immigrant groups exhibited higher rates of “free and clear” homeownership than their US-born white counterparts while others lagged in ways that cannot be explained by compositional differences between groups. Theoretical and policy implications of these findings are discussed.

The modernization hypothesis, classically formulated by Goode ([1963] 1970), predicted that urbanization, industrialization, and educational expansion would cause a worldwide convergence to the Western model of small and nuclear households. Although rejected as a global theory of household change (Bongaarts 2001; Bongaarts and Zimmer 2002; Therborn 2004; Thornton 2005; Ruggles and Heggeness 2008; Ruggles 2009, 2010; Cherlin 2012), this hypothesis remains central to household research in several regions and countries. This is notably the case in India, where the decline or nucleation of the traditional joint household system (Hajnal 1982)1, a paradigmatic case of the modernization hypothesis, has puzzled social scientists for more than a century (Gait 1913; Allendorf 2013). Living arrangements in India have since emerged at a crucial intersection in the study of demography, gender inequality, and intergenerational relationships (Dyson and Moore 1983; Das Gupta 1995; Agarwal 1997; Mookerjee 2019). A growing literature shows that household composition (e.g., whether a young woman resides with her mother‐in‐law, or whether aging parents are cared for by coresiding children) is a key determinant of everyday processes that have far‐reaching sociodemographic consequences—whether in terms of women's autonomy and reproductive health (Jejeebhoy and Sathar 2001; Bloom, Wypij, and Das Gupta 2001; Mistry, Galal, and Lu 2009; Allendorf 2012; Coffey, Khera, and Spears 2016), son preference (Miller 1981; Das Gupta et al. 2003), investments in children (Myroniuk, Vanneman, and Desai 2017), domestic violence (Fernandez 1997; Bhattacharya 2004), and so on. In this research context, understanding how modernization has transformed Indian households becomes even more essential.

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

The gender wage gap continues to prove a contentious topic with some going as far as to question its existence. However, scholarly works continue to prove it is real and impactful. More fruitful debates have arisen about the source of this disparity in wages. This paper seeks to analyze one possible explanation for the pay gap: gender-based occupational segregation. I used OLS regressions based on women working full-time between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five to measure this. I find a negative effect of segregated occupations on women’s earnings across countries and years. On a similar note, the percentage of females in an occupation correlates with lower earnings across the years in Canada and the United States.