Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Abstract We study the origins of labor productivity growth and its differences across sectors. In our model, sectors employ workers of different occupations and various forms of capital, none of which are perfect substitutes, and technology evolves at the sector-factor cell level. Using the model we infer technologies from US data over 1960-2017. We find sector-specific routine labor augmenting technological change to be crucial. It is the most important driver of sectoral differences, and has a large and increasing contribution to aggregate labor productivity growth. Neither capital accumulation nor the occupational employment structure within sectors explains much of the sectoral differences.

Population estimates are used for a variety of purposes. They serve as a basis for the calculation of a variety of population based rates, provide information on population trends that aid in the development of forecasts for infrastructure needs, and are indirectly used in formulas that distribute federal and state money to local communities. The purpose of this research is to understand how select characteristics of counties may result in under- or over-estimation of county population, either due to inherit biases in indicator data or due to other county related characteristics that make population estimation difficult (such as significant seasonal populations). The 2010 and 2000 Census Bureau county population estimates are evaluated relative to their respective decennial census counts.

Making inferences about aggregate business cycles from regional variation alone is difficult because of economic channels and shocks that differ between regional and aggregate economies. However, we argue that regional business cycles contain valuable information that can help discipline models of aggregate fluctuations. We begin by documenting a strong relationship across U.S. states between local employment and wage growth during the Great Recession. This relationship is much weaker in U.S. aggregates. Then, we present a methodology that combines such regional and aggregate data in order to estimate a medium‐scale New Keynesian DSGE model. We find that aggregate demand shocks were important drivers of aggregate employment during the Great Recession, but the wage stickiness necessary for them to account for the slow employment recovery and the modest fall in aggregate wages is inconsistent with the flexibility of wages we observe across U.S. states. Finally, we show that our methodology yields different conclusions about the causes of aggregate employment and wage dynamics between 2007 and 2014 than either estimating our model with aggregate data alone or performing back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations that directly extrapolate from well‐identified regional elasticities.

By reviewing our work in Bárány, Siegel (2018a, 2018b), this article emphasizes the link between job polarization and structural change. We summarize evidence that job polarization in the United States has started as early as the 1950s: middle-wage workers have been losing both in terms of employment and average wage growth compared to low-and high-wage workers. Furthermore, at least since the 1960s the same patterns for both employment and wages have been discernible in terms of three broad sectors: low-skilled services, manufacturing and high-skilled services, and these two phenomena are closely linked. Finally, we propose a model where technology evolves at the sector-occupation cell level that can capture the employment reallocation across sectors, occupations, and within sectors. We show that this framework can be used to assess what type of biased technological change is the driver of the observed reallocations. The data suggests that technological change has been biased not only across occupations or sectors, but also across sector-occupation cells.

This paper links between Beckerian literature that shows that marriage is a normal good with respect to male income and the literature that explores cultural changes as a result of exogenous events. I use the oil crisis of the 1970s as a positive shock on some males. The analyzed outcome is marital status at early twenties for women and at mid and late twenties for men. The probability to be never-married decreases in the American oilproducing areas immediately after the shock. This effect persists after the oil boom is over but longer for men than for women.

This paper studies the labor supply decisions of new mothers in cohabiting relationships in the United States. Using cross-sectional data from the 1997 Cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth as well as from the March Current Population Survey Annual Demographic Supplement, this paper analyzes how the birth of a child impacts a mother’s labor supply. Different subgroups of women based on relationship status are analyzed and compared. Both cross-sectional analyses show that new mothers in cohabiting households behave differently than their married counterparts when it comes to their labor supply after the birth of a child, taking significantly shorter leaves and working more hours in the year of birth. The results also suggest that their partner’s income is not a significant factor in determining their labor supply, which differs from married mothers. This research gives us important insights into the economic decision-making behavior of these nontraditional households.

The first-generation Korean immigrants in the U.S. have sustained higher levels of fertility than the home country whereas TFR in South Korea dropped at record-low in 2018. The estimated TFR of the first-generation Korean immigrants is higher by 0.4 on average. This study suggests that the extent of assimilation in the U.S. of the first-generation Korean immigrants correlate with the higher number of children, intertwined with socio-demographic and socio-economic determinants. The paper uses data on Korean immigrants in the American Community Survey (ACS) 2016 obtained through IPUMS-USA. Poisson regression model is used to examine the association between demographic and economic characteristics and the number of children at the household level. Contrary to the home country, results suggest that a new way of living among the first-generation Korean migrants correlates with higher fertility. Also, results support affordable housing in the U.S. correlate with higher fertility outcomes.

We assess the welfare consequences of occupational licensing for workers and consumers. We estimate a model of labor market equilibrium in which licensing restricts labor supply but also affects labor demand via worker quality and selection. On the margin of occupations licensed differently between U.S. states, we find licensing raises wages and hours but reduces employment. We estimate an average welfare loss of 15 percent of occupational surplus. Consumers and workers each bear about half of the incidence. Higher willingness to pay offsets only 60 percent of higher prices for consumers, and higher wages compensate workers for only 70 percent of the cost of mandated investment in occupation-specific human capital.

We show that occupational licensing has significant negative effects on labor market fluidity. Using a balanced panel of workers constructed from public CPS and SIPP data, we investigate the causal effect of licensing on labor market outcomes. We apply a Propensity Score and Coarsened Exact Matching strategy and find that workers who have a government issued occupational license experience significantly lower churn rates than non-licensed workers. Specifically, licensed workers are 5% less likely to switch occupation, and 1% less likely to enter non-employment in the following month. Moreover, occupational licensing represents a barrier to entry for both non-employed workers and employed workers. Employed workers are 2% less likely to enter a licensed occupation next month than a non-licensed occupation, while non-employed workers are 0.1% less likely to enter a licensed occupation. This barrier effect is more prominent for employed workers relative to those entering from non-employment because the opportunity cost of acquiring a license is much higher for employed individuals. Lastly, we find that licensed workers have higher average wage growth rates than nonlicensed workers whether they stay in the same occupation in the next year or switch occupations (6.5% higher for both cases). We find significant heterogeneity in this licensing effect across different occupation groups. These results hold across various data . . .

It has become clear that while the future of America’s economy lies in its high-tech innovation sector, that same sector has widened the nation’s regional divides—a fact that became starkly apparent with the 2016 presidential election. Dependent on intense agglomerations of highly skilled workers and based on winner-take-most network economies, the innovation sector has generated significant technology gains and wealth but has also helped spawn a growing gap between the nation’s dynamic “superstar” metropolitan areas and most everywhere else. Neither market forces nor bottom-up economic development efforts have closed this gap, nor are they likely to. Instead, these deeply seated dynamics appear ready to exacerbate the current divides. This is why the nation needs a major push to counter these dynamics. Specifically, the nation needs—as one initiative among others—a massive federal effort to transform a short list of “heartland” metro areas with compelling strengths into self-sustaining “growth centers” that will benefit entire regions. The present paper, therefore, proposes that Congress assemble and award to a select set of metropolitan areas a major package of federal innovation inputs and supports that would help those areas accelerate transformative innovation sector scale-up. Along these lines, we envision Congress establishing a rigorous competitive process by which the most promising eight to 10 potential growth centers (all not geographically located near existing successful tech hubs) would receive substantial financial and regulatory support for 10 years to get “over the hump” and become self-sustaining new innovation centers. Such an initiative would not only bring significant economic opportunity to more parts of the nation, but also significantly boost U.S. and innovation-based competitiveness, including in the competition with China....

While bilingualism and biculturalism are common among the first generation of immigrants, it appears that the heritage language is partially lost by the second generation, and is lost completely by the third one (Polinsky, 2013; Bertsch, 2013; Gordon, 1964; Genesse, 2015). Parents struggle to preserve the traditional language with the former giving way to the dominant language (Mucherah, 2008; Isurin, 2011; Zhou, 1997; Polinsky, & Kagan, 2007). The situation is exacerbated by the fact that caregivers are not necessarily aware of the benefits of exposure to multiple languages during early years. While current research suggests the benefits of bilingualism over monolingualism (Okal, 2014; Klein, 2016; Leikin, Schwartz, & Share, 2009) and while the Russian-American community has been growing fast in recent years, (Isurin, 2010; Kagan, 2010; Mounton, 2011) not much is known about the beliefs that Russian-American parents hold concerning bilingualism. The goal of this research is to gain a deeper understanding of how members of the Russian-American community perceive heritage language bilingualism, language shift, and heritage language maintenance. Special attention will be given to the beliefs Russian Americans hold with regards to heritage language maintenance and the ways in which these beliefs are aligned with the L1 practices.

Because of migration. In a spatial equilibrium framework, we show that three-quarters of the CPI rent increase in the United States from 2000 to 2018 is due to increased demand to live in ex ante housing-supply-inelastic cities. Moving one person to a less elastic city raises the average rent because the positive effect on rents in the inelastic city outweighs the negative effect in the elastic one. In these years, the quantitative importance of this migration channel is greater if people are mobile in response to rent changes. Empirically, we show that people have high long-run mobility by estimating that income changes have similar effects on rents across cities regardless of housing supply elasticity. Supporting this migration channel, the cross-sectional pattern of migration demand implied by our model matches patterns of labor-market and amenity changes. JEL Codes: R31, R23, E31

This dissertation investigates the scope and historical origins of the institutional contexts behind the income divergence of the Bay Area and Southern California between 1980 and 2010. It is widely recognized in the literature that the `secret' to the Bay Area's extraordinary economic performance in recent decades lies in the region's institutional structure. This dissertation begins by substantiating this claim by showing that theoretically-derived major income growth-related characteristics cannot explain the extent of the divergence. The research proceeds to explore the scope of the region's transposition-enabling socio-relational context and its historical origins. Findings reveal that such an institutional context is evident at the scope of the Bay Area's high-end corporate social structure, characterized by cross-realm relations and widely-shared perceptions; and at the scope of society at large evident by the degree of generalized trust and the size of the civic sphere. By exploring the history of the civic and political/cross-jurisdictional spheres over the course of the 20th Century evidence is presented in support of an institutional `regional effect' upon the industrial . . .

While there are well-documented health disparities across states in the U.S., we know little about the degree to which immigrants’ health also varies by their state of residence. We seek to fill this gap using data from the American Community Survey, supplemented with state-level variables merged from various sources. We first document that there is large geographic variation in the prevalence of disability among immigrants, and that the patterns are different from those of the overall U.S. population. We then explain the state variation in immigrants’ disability, highlighting that selection into states only accounts for half of the variation, and that the rest can be partially explained by differences in states’ healthcare contexts. Our research contributes to the literature on spatial patterns of health by adding the case of the U.S. foreign-born population, and adds a new geographic dimension to analyses of the immigrant health differential across the life course.

Tomorrow’s jobs demand a highly trained workforce. Job seekers across North Carolina are entering a dynamic economy that requires new sets of technical skills and the ability to navigate increasing uncertainty. Once powered by industries like farming and manufacturing, North Carolina’s economy continues to shift toward a knowledge- and service-based economy comprised of higher-skilled jobs. Existing lower-skilled, lower-wage jobs are at increasing risk of being replaced by a machine or a computer algorithm. A highly trained workforce is a key driver of economic growth. Employers are drawn to regions where they can easily hire and retain skilled employees, and communities benefit substantially when new industries move to town or existing companies grow. More-educated workers are less likely to be unemployed and more likely to earn higher family-supporting wages.1 In addition, increased educational attainment is a powerful predictor of adult well-being, including better physical and mental health outcomes, more stable relationships, and greater civic knowledge and engagement. Adults’ educational attainment is also a key predictor of their children’s own level of education and wages.2 These trends are having a profound impact on the value we place on postsecondary schooling. The fastest-growing sectors of North Carolina’s economy demand employees with increasingly higher levels of educational attainment. By 2020, an estimated 67% of all jobs in North Carolina will require some education and training beyond high school.3 Today, 47% of North Carolina’s 5.3 million working-age adults (25-64 years old) have a postsecondary degree or nondegree credential.4 To meet the projected demands for an educated workforce, at least 60% of NC workers will need a postsecondary degree or nondegree credential by 2030. To reach 60% attainment today, an additional 672,000 NC adults would need to obtain a postsecondary degree or nondegree credential...

Background: Multiple sclerosis (MS) burden of disease has been described by reporting the disability-adjusted life years (DALY) index. So far, no study has assessed the trend of MS DALY rates over time. Method: Age-standardized MS DALY rates for both sexes were reported every 5 years from 1990 to 2015 in 195 countries in the Global Burden of Disease Database (GBD) database. To assess the MS DALY rates' trends in each super region and throughout the world, we applied the Latent Growth Models. We also utilized the linear mixed model to evaluate the effect of development factor on MS DALY rates. Results: Our results showed that 5 out of 7 GBD super regions had negative trends in MS DALY rates during these years and the remaining 2 - Latin America and the Caribbean (slope = 0.196, p < 0.05) and South Asia - slope = 0.057, p > 0.05 - had upward trends. Using a linear mixed model, we found that the mean difference of MS DALY rates was about 25 DALYs higher in developed countries compared to developing ones (p < 0.0001). Conclusion: In general, our findings revealed a global downward trend in the MS DALY rate. We also conclude that MS DALY rates are decreasing both in developed and developing countries, with a steeper slope in the developed world.

Public education policies that aim to improve educational outcomes can have the effect of increasing the distance that many students must travel to attend school. In this article, we use American Time Use Survey data to examine whether longer school commutes influence time spent on important health-promoting activities. We find school commute time to be strongly inversely related to time spent sleeping, and negatively related to time spent exercising for those with long commutes. Thus, increasing journey to school distances may have troubling public health implications for teens.

We classified the respondents according to their marital and parenthood status. The gap is dramatically higher between married couples versus singles without children. For married parents, the gap is even greater. Married fathers work even more than other men, while married mothers work less than married women without kids. The different behavior of women and men has an impact on the gender wage gap. It modifies the nominal income, but it also influences how much women and men earn per each hour worked. The average hourly pay increases as the number of hours worked per week increases. Because men tend to work more hours than women, especially if they are married, and even more if they are married parents, this explains a large portion of the pay gap. Also, as years pass, men accumulate more practice and training than women. The job market pays more if the worker has more experience: the gap widens as men acquire more experience than women.

he objective of this study was to characterize the demographics and population health of four slum communities in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, including population density and the burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases. Four urban slums were surveyed using a population-representative design between July and October 2016. A multistage cluster area random sampling process was used to identify households and individuals for the survey. Household surveys included rosters of residents, household characteristics, adult and child deaths in the past year, child health, and healthcare access and utilization. Individual surveys of two randomly sampled adults from each household included sociodemographic data, maternal health, and adult health. Additionally, blood pressure, height, weight, and psychological distress were measured by study staff. Data were weighted for complex survey design and non-response. A total of 525 households and 894 individuals completed the survey (96% household and 90% individual response rate, respectively). The estimated population density was 58,000 persons/km2. Across slums, 55% of all residents were female, and 38% were adolescents and youth 10–24 years. Among adults, 58% were female with median age 29 years (22–38). The most common adult illnesses were severe psychological distress (24%), hypertension (20%), history of physical injury/trauma (10%), asthma (7%), history of cholera (4%), and history of tuberculosis (3%). Ten percent of adults had obesity (BMI > 30 kg/m2), and 7% currently smoked. The most common under-5 diseases during the last 3 months were respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses (50% and 28%, respectively). One-third of households reported needing medical care for a child in the past year but not being able to access it, largely due to financial constraints. Unique features of these slums are a population structure dominated by adolescents and youth, a high proportion of females, and a high burden of non-communicable diseases including hypertension and psychological distress. Screening, diagnostic, and disease management interventions are urgently needed to protect and promote improved population health outcomes in these slum communities.

Though sociological research on immigrant enclaves and co-ethnic spatial homogeneity is rife with analyses on how associated conditions affect entrepreneurship, research on these phenomena from the consumer’s perspective is lacking. This paper purports to bridge the gap between research on immigrant entrepreneurs, which often relies heavily on variations of the enclave thesis and theories of concentrated wealth and poverty, with research on consumers, particularly with regards to established theories on consumer ethnocentrism and consumer acculturation. Using the 1995-2015 Current Population Survey, we test the effect of co-ethnic immigrant density on degrees of consumer spending per week on food. Focusing specifically on Mexican immigrants and East Asian immigrants, who each make up a significant portion of the foreign-born population, our results indicate that increases in co-ethnic density significantly corresponded decreases in weekly spending for Mexicans, but increases in spending for East Asians. The implications of these findings are discussed.