Public policy decisions designed to address a public need frequently have secondary effects, especially on hard-to-predict employment outcomes. In this dissertation, I study three laws or groups of laws and the effects they have on labor-related outcomes. Economic theory proposes that laws increasing the minimum wage should increase employment discrimination. Employers theoretically have longer queues of job applicants, allowing them to exercise their biases in hiring decisions. In Chapter 1, I exploit the wide variation in state minimum wage rates since 2005 to estimate the effect on discrimination, using 4.8 million allegations from publicly unavailable administrative data provided by the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission. I find overall discrimination allegations do increase with minimum wage changes. Higher rates of discrimination filings are driven by private sector firms; by allegations of firings and promotions; by alleged violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act; and in states where discrimination reporting is already common. Consistent with human capital theory, age discrimination allegations do not statistically significantly increase following minimum wage changes.... In Chapter 1, I exploit the wide variation in state minimum wage rates since 2005 to estimate the effect on discrimination, using 4.8 million allegations from publicly unavailable administrative data provided by the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission... In Chapter 2, I study the effects of wage floors on labor force participation, providing a new method of estimating labor supply elasticity... Using BLS’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages and a triple-differences approach, in Chapter 3 I examine the employment effects of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, a policy that led to millions of newly-insured Americans. Exploiting differences among states’ participation and variation in federal aid they received, I find that the wide expansion of Medicaid insurance led to only small increases in employment rates across the health care and health insurance industries and a moderate 8.5% increase in jobs among home care providers. This small result was robust to a number of adjustments to my analysis and consistent with existing stimulus research.

To study rural poverty in the U.S., researchers commonly use metropolitan/non-metropolitan (i.e., metro/nonmetro) classifications rather than the Census Bureau’s urban/rural classifications, often mixing the “metro/nonmetro” and “urban/rural” terminology interchangeably. This practice is flawed and misleading. Under the metro/nonmetro classification, nonmetro areas have higher poverty rates than metro areas. However, under the urban-rural classification, the relationship is completely reversed; rural areas have the lowest poverty rates overall. In order to overcome this limitation, we compute a continuous measure of urban/rural status—population-weighted density—which can be used as a complement to the metro/nonmetro classification in the analysis of public-use census microdata, thereby capturing two dimensions of rurality. In general, we provide a theoretical basis and methodology for distinguishing rural areas in microdata beyond the metro/nonmetro classification and then use this framework to analyze urban/rural disparities in poverty.

To estimate the local effect of establishing land grant colleges, I compare locations that receive a land grant college to “runner-up” counties that were in contention to receive the land grant but did not for as-good-as-random reasons. I find that establishing a land grant college causes an increase in local invention, including in particular agricultural inventions, in college counties relative to the runner-up counties. But land grant college counties see only small and imprecisely estimated improvements in agricultural performance, measured by yield and output, relative to runner-up counties. I discuss several alternative interpretations of these findings. By comparing the establishment of land grant colleges to non-land grant colleges, I show that land grants appear to cause smaller increases in local invention, population, and agricultural output, but larger increases in agricultural yields and new crop varieties. The effect of land grant colleges on local innovations is largest, even relative to non-land grant colleges, following the passage of legislation that increases funding to agricultural research.

Gross Domestic Product recovered much more quickly than labor markets did during the 1930s. We provide new analysis of this issue by estimating a cross-sectional model for individuals in 1939–1940 as a function of the measures of the Great Contraction of 1929–1933, the recovery, and the Second Dip Recession and average information for three types of New Deal spending. The results show that the Great Contraction of 1929–1933 and the Second-Dip Recession still had powerful negative effects on county labor markets in 1939/1940 and these were only partially offset by public works grants. Relief grants had somewhat negative effects although this might have arisen because of a large layoff of workers by the WPA in 1939. The AAA payments to farmers to take land out of production were associated with lower earnings and private employment, but had mixed effects on skill mobility.

Using numbers of industrial robots shipped to primarily manufacturing industries as a supply shock to an industry labor market, we estimate that an additional robot reduces employment by roughly two to three workers overall and by three to four workers when robots are likely to be good substitutes for humans. The supply shock also reduces wages. The estimates far exceed those of an additional immigrant on employment and wages. While growth of robots in the 2000s was too modest to be a major determinant of wages and employment, the estimated effects suggest that continued exponential growth of industrial robots could disrupt job markets in the foreseeable future and thus merit attention from analysts and policymakers concerned about the economic well-being of workers.

This Online Appendix accompanies the paper "The Side Effects of Immunity: Malaria and African Slavery in the United States". Section A presents additional material complementing the Background section in the main text. Section B presents data sources, additional figures , additional results and robustness results for the cross-county analysis, Section C for the difference-indifference exercise, and Section D for the analysis of slave prices.

In the face of continued low employment, stagnant wages, persistent poverty, and rising inequality, minimum wage increases will likely continue to hold appeal as a policy response. In this paper, I propose a Higher Wages Tax Credit (HWTC) to partially offset the costs imposed by minimum wage increases on firms that employ low-skilled labor. Following a minimum wage increase, the HWTC would provide a tax credit of 50% of the difference between the prior minimum wage and the new minimum wage, for each hour of labor employed; the credit would phase out at wages higher than the minimum wage, and as wage inflation erodes the real cost of higher nominal minimum wages. The HWTC would reduce the incentive for employers to substitute away from low-skilled workers in the face of minimum wage increases, thus mitigating the potential adverse effects of minimum wage increases while simultaneously preserving and possibly enhancing some of the benefits of minimum wage hikes. The credit is also intended to infuse the debate around increasing the minimum wage with a more realistic accounting of the costs and benefits of such a policy by partially transforming minimum wage increases into a more conventional redistributive policy.

Hello, good morning. It is such a pleasure to be here. Such a pleasure, because I am a native St. Louisan and this is the most beautiful campus in the world. I always have thought that Washington University is just a fairy tale of what a campus should look like. But I did grow up in St. Louis, and I have come to understand that my experience is really the stuff of legend. When I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, things were really different than they are now. I grew up on the 4900 block of Terry, between Kingshighway and Euclid. I understand that it’s referred to as North St. Louis now. We referred to it as our neighborhood. We didn’t have . . .

This paper analyzes the odds of divorce from 2008 to 2016 (soon 2017), using multivariate models of marital events data from the American Community Survey. I find that the falling observed divorce rates over the last decade are apparent in the fully adjusted model as well. Further, age specific divorce rates show that the trend in the last decade has been driven by younger women (despite higher divorce rates among older women than in the past). Finally, I analyze the characteristics of newly-married couples over the last decade, and identify trends that portend further declines in divorce rates. Marriage is become more selective, and more stable, even as attitudes toward divorce are becoming more permissive, and cohabitation has grown less stable. The U.S. is progressing toward a system in which marriage is rarer, and more stable, than it was in the past, representing an increasingly central component of the structure of social inequality.

We find no statistical evidence to suggest that places with more illegal immigrants are more at risk for drunk driving deaths. Of course, there are individual instances to the contrary and those illegal immigrants who commit real crimes should be punished like everybody else, but their presence doesn’t seem to affect overall drunk driving deaths. Although our regressions results are correlative and not causal in nature, they suggest that illegal immigrants do not affect overall drunk driving deaths.

Since the early 1970s, the United States has experienced a dramatic surge in imprisonment , especially of African American men. This paper investigates the causal effects of black male incarceration on black women's marriage and labor market outcomes , as well as its effects on black children's family structure, long-run educational outcomes, and income. To establish causality, I exploit plausibly exogenous changes in sentencing policies across states and over years and construct a simulated instrumental variable for the incarceration rate, using offender-level data on the universe of prisoners admitted to and released from prisons between 1986 and 2009. The instrument characterizes how sentencing policies affect incarceration at both the extensive margin (i.e., whether to incarcerate an arrestee) and the intensive margin (i.e., how long to imprison an inmate). First, I find that high incarceration rates of black men negatively affect black women's marriage outcomes, although they increase the likelihood of employment for those with higher education levels. Second, higher black male incar-ceration rates hurt black children by increasing the likelihood of out-of-wedlock birth and living in a mother-only family, and decreasing the likelihood of having some college education in the long run. Third, black men at either the extensive or intensive margin of incarceration have different impacts on women and children. The results suggest the consequences of tough-on-crime policies for inequality and racial gaps, which could be taken into account when reforming sentencing policies.

A sanctuary policy is a policy that limits the enforcement of immigration laws against undocumented immigrants. Sanctuary policies have gained more attention in recent U.S. policy debates. Opponents claim that sanctuary policies attract criminals and lower the opportunity cost of crime through weaker sanctions and lower apprehension probability. Supporters counter that these policies produce a spiral of trust that supports police and raises informal social control over crime. Using city crime data from 1999 to 2010, I estimate the effect of sanctuary policies on crime. Using a difference-indifference approach, this paper finds no evidence that sanctuary policies cause an increase in crime and some evidence that they may lead to a decrease in robbery and burglary. JEL Classification Code: J68, K37, R59

The black-white gap in low birth weight in the United States remains large and mostly unexplained. A large literature links segregation to adverse black birth outcomes but, to the best of our knowledge, no studies explore how this relationship has changed over time. We explore the relationship between racial residential segregation on black and white birth weights for the period 1970-2010. We find a negative effect of segregation on black birth outcomes that only emerges after 1980. We explore the potential pathways through which segregation influenced black birth outcomes and how these mechanisms may have changed over time. Measures for maternal socioeconomic status and behaviors accounts for 35 to 40 percent of the full segregation effect between 1990 and 2010. Single-motherhood and mother's education, and unobservable factors that load onto these variables, play important and increasing roles. After controlling for MSA and parent characteristics, segregation explains 21-25 percent of the raw black-white gap in low birth weight between 1990 and 2010.

Last years have witnessed a growing interest in economics and cross-cultural studies in the role of the historical family as the instigator of disparate developmental trajectories. This new emerging literature has already provoked a considerable amount of controversy, involving debates on the precise underlying mechanisms, the role of non-familial institutions and the possibility of reversed causality, as well as the quality of historical data. Using novel historical database of European family this paper reaffirms the hypothesis that historical family organization could be one of the intermediate factors associated with developmental and value disparities among European nations today pointed out in earlier scholarship. We show that countries starting out from more patriarchal family structures in the past exhibit more hierarchical gender relations, more collectivist mindsets, and lower levels of economic and human development in the present. These findings suggest that the criticism of the family role in comparative development may be premature, and that links between historical family organisation and developmental gradients merit further attention.

Recent demographic trends and a rapidly changing immigration policy landscape, including rising federal immigration enforcement, have important implications for state and local child welfare agencies. A growing share of children in the United States have at least one immigrant parent—slightly more than one in four as of 2017. Nearly 90 percent of these children were born in the country and are therefore U.S. citizens, and about one-quarter have an unauthorized immigrant parent. Key Findings Short on time? Check out this executive summary, which highlights the full report's top findings. Executive Summary Children of immigrants, like other U.S. children, may enter the child welfare system if there are reports of abuse or neglect. Yet immigrant families can face unique challenges when it comes . . .

The contributors to this latest volume of Research in the Sociology of Health Care investigate macro-level system issues and micro-level issues involving the socially disadvantaged and underserved. Looking specifically at the factors impacting on health and health care differentials, this book is an examination of the health and health care issues of both patients and providers of care in the United States and around the globe. Chapters focus on linkages to policy, population concerns and patients and providers of care as ways to meet health care needs.

This paper evaluates the effects of the War on Poverty’s Legal Services Program (LSP) on family structure and welfare participation. LSPs provided subsidized legal assistance to poor communities, focusing on divorce and welfare access. We use a difference-in-differences research design based on the rollout of the program to 251 counties from 1965 to 1975. We find temporary increases in divorce and persistent increases in welfare participation and nonmarital birth rates. Nonmarital births rose because marriage rates fell, not because birth rates rose. Expanded access to legal institutions thus contributed, directly and indirectly, to changes in family structure in the 1960s.

Analysis of data over 50 years in the labor market reveals how the definition of "female work" has changed • A comprehensive study by Lean In organization founded by Cheryl Sandberg and McKinsey also reveals the stage in the corporate pyramid in which women get stuck

With the rapid increase in educational attainment, technological change, and greater job specialization, decisions regarding human capital investment are no longer exclusively about the quantity of education, but rather the type of education to obtain. The skills and knowledge acquired in specific fields of study are more valuable for some jobs compared to others, which suggests the existence of differences in the quality of the educationoccupation match in the labor market. With this premise in mind, this paper aims to estimate the effect of the quality of this education-occupation job match on workers' wages and to explore the factors that contribute to the existence of such mismatch among workers with higher education (college or more). Using data from the American Community Survey 2010-16, we construct two indices that measure the quality of the education-occupation match: based on the predicted and observed distribution of workers using their fields of education and their jobs' occupation classification. Results suggest there is a wage gap of around 3-4 percent when comparing workers that have good job matches to those who have bad matches. Given the importance of the penalty for mismatched jobs, we find that structural characteristics such as unemployment, and individual characteristics such as gender, race, immigration status, and even homeownership affect the quality of horizontal mismatch as well.

A displaced worker might rationally prefer to wait through a long spell of unemployment instead of seeking employment at a lower wage in a job he is not trained for. I evaluate this trade-off using micro data on displaced workers. To achieve identification, I exploit the fact that the more a worker has invested in occupation-specific human capital, the more costly it is for him to switch occupations and therefore the higher is his incentive to wait. I find that between 9% and 17% of total unemployment in the United States can be attributed to wait unemployment.