To estimate the effect of an increase in minimum wages on gender, this paper utilizes a natural experiment opportunity, arising from increases in 21 states of the U.S. and the District of Columbia in 2015. In my study, I implement a difference-in-differences (DID) methodology to evaluate the impact of the increase in minimum wages implemented in 2015 on gender in the Production industry, the Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports and Media industry and the Transportation and Material Moving industry. Through my research, instead of focusing on the employment effects of minimum wages, I shed light on the effectiveness of minimum wages as a tool of redistribution of income for low wage earners. My results conclude that the greatest impact of an increase in minimum wages in 2015 can be witnessed in the Production industry, where earnings of single women with one child increased by 9.60 percent and earnings of divorced women with no child increased by 9.65 percent. My findings report that the second largest impact of an increase in minimum wages in 2015 was observed in the Transportation and Material Moving industry, where earnings of divorced men with one child increased by 6.80 percent and earnings of married men with no child increased by 6.69 percent. The impact of an increase in minimum wages in 2015 had no impact on the earnings of workers in the Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports and Media industry.

In this dissertation, I apply theoretical and empirical analysis to three topics in political economy and microeconomics. In the first chapter, Crossing the District Line, I study how electoral district maps affect public spending. Electoral district borders regularly cross the borders of local governments. At the same time, elected representatives transfer money to local governments. Political parties may try to target these transfers to certain electoral districts, but can only imperfectly do so because of border mismatch. Using a model of political competition, I show that border mismatch creates inequality: otherwise similar counties receive different amounts of money depending on how the district map is drawn. Empirical evidence suggests that border mismatch has a sizable effect on transfers from U.S. states to counties. I discuss implications for redistricting and the tradeoff between avoiding border mismatch and respecting other redistricting principles. In the second chapter, Do Police Maximize Arrests or Minimize Crime?, I derive an empirical test to better understand the objective of police officers’ stop and search decisions. Uncertainty about the objective of police officers undermines existing tests for racial discrimination. Without knowing how unbiased police officers behave, it is difficult to identify biased or racist behavior in the data. To answer this question, I extend existing models of racial profiling and derive testable implications that require city-level data on police spending, arrests, and demographics. I find empirical evidence consistent with a model of arrest maximization, and inconsistent with crime minimization. iii In the third chapter, Polling Place Location and the Costs of Voting, co-authored with Gaurav Bagwe and Juan Margitic, we study how the distance to a polling place affects voting behavior. The distance between voters and their polling place may be an important determinant in the overall cost of voting, turnout, and election and policy outcomes. We first collect a dataset on distance to polling places for all 8.7 million registered voters in Pennsylvania. We find a small and negative effect on average of distance to polling place on turnout in 2012, 2016, and 2018 elections. The negative effects are much larger, however, among younger voters and among those who walk to work.

Organizations all over the world, both national and international, gather demographic data so that the progress of nations and peoples can be tracked. This data is often made available to the public in the form of aggregated national level data or individual responses (microdata). Product designers likewise conduct surveys to better understand their customer and create personas. Personas are archetypes of the individuals who will use, maintain, sell or otherwise be affected by the products created by designers. Personas help designers better understand the person the product is designed for. Unfortunately, the process of collecting customer information and creating personas is often a slow and expensive process. In this paper, we introduce a new method of creating personas, leveraging publicly available databanks of both aggregated national level and information on individuals in the population. A computational persona generator is introduced that creates a population of personas that mirrors a real population in terms of size and statistics. Realistic individual personas are filtered from this population for use in product development.

Aging population is a worldwide phenomenon. In the United States, as in 2015 about 48 million Americans are over 65 or older, which accounts for 14.9 percent of the total population. And by 2030, one of every five Americans will be over the age of 65. The ramifications of an aging population are serious and potentially large because it challenges the fiscal and macroeconomic stability tasks through increase in government spending on pension, health care and social benefits programs for the elderly such as Social Security and Medicare programs. This dissertation composes of three essays that aim at examining the relationship between government policies and the preparedness for retirement and healthcare aspects of the aging population. In Chapter 1, I examined the effect of federal tax policy in encouraging working classes to save more for their retirement, especially among those who are approaching to be retired. One of the big questions that center the empirical research on retirement and saving is whether the American save enough for their consumption in post-retirement period. Although the answer is still unsolved due to disagreement over what constitutes adequate saving for retirement. It is of great importance to see how government policies help promote saving for retirement. The second and third Chapters examined the effects of the federal minimum wage expansion to home care workers on employment, and on the utilization and the cost of home care services that become increasingly important for senior and disabled people in the country. In sum, the dissertation provides important evidence on how public policies influenced economic behaviors among the older workers and families, and have critical policy implications in bolstering the financial and healthy well-being of the older Americans.

In lowland coastal regions of the southeastern United States, stormwater ponds are being built as the “green infrastructure” best management practice of choice for addressing the hydrologic changes associated with rapid urban and suburban development. In addition to dampening storm flows, stormwater ponds may provide pollution control and other ecosystem services. However, ponds are not native to this landscape. This review summarizes what is known about the effectiveness of these engineered ponds, which take many shapes and forms, in the context of hydrology, contaminant fate, and management. Research needs are identified and include evaluating pond performance and redesign options more comprehensively and applying a social-ecological framework for the future of stormwater pond management.

With America's population aging and America's late-life workforce eschewing the traditional retirement path, the stability of retirement pathways must be reanalyzed to better reflect this heterogenous demographic. Through generational analysis, we see that there is only a slight change in employment stability for generations of those 50-74. However, we see vast differences in employment stability by spousal status. Employment of a spouse and being coupled versus living alone result in differing opportunities to switch careers or retire. This research indicates that a dyadic focus in retirement plans and employment stability is crucial for analyzing the older generations' life trajectories.

In countries in the developed world, income inequality is increasing, while tech­nological and societal changes open labour market opportunities for women. At the same time they are undergoing an important demographical transition with decreasing fertility and increasing population ageing. All these trends affect the decisions that different generations make over the life-cycle. In this thesis, I inves­tigate the role that these trends play for education, fertility, and pensions using overlapping generations models. This type of economic models allow us to inves­tigate the decisions of economic agents along the life cycle taking into account the interaction with other generations. The structure of this thesis will follow the life-cycle of an economic agent: In the second chapter I investigate how income inequality is affecting the educational de­cisions of young agents and their social mobility. In the third chapter, I investigate the decision of couples to have children and educate them and how this decision is affected by changes in the gender wage gap. In the forth chapter, I investigate how in an economy with a pay-as-you-go pensions system the intragenerational con­flict between rich and poor as well as the intergenerational conflict between old and young about the allocation of public resources into education and pensions are affected by income inequality and population ageing. The research that I con­duct in this thesis aims at contributing to our understanding of the mechanisms at play...

The HealthPartners Institute ModelHealthTM:Tobacco MN was developed to evaluate the health impact and cost-effectiveness of observed reductions in the prevalence of cigarette smoking in Minnesota and to estimate the impact of Minnesota tobacco control policy. ModelHealth: Tobacco MN was constructed by modifying the original US version, ModelHealth: Tobacco.1,2 ModelHealth:Tobacco MN estimates behavioral, health, and medical utilization and productivity impact of tobacco control programs and policy. The model employs a flexible microsimulation framework in which individuals, rather than population groups, are simulated over time. Individual behaviors and outcomes are simulated and recorded each year, and the experiences of simulated individuals are aggregated up to the community level to estimate population health and economic impact. The model starts with a simulated population that is representative of the Minnesota population with respect to age, sex, race-ethnicity and educational status. Over time, youth who are representative of the sex and race-ethnicity distribution of recent birth cohorts age into the model. This document provides an overview of the base model’s structure, the development of the inputs to the base model, and discussion of the modeling framework and embedded algorithms. Inputs specific to clinical interventions, policies and programs (counseling, tobacco taxes, media campaigns etc.) are discussed in manuscripts or other reports specific to their analysis.

Recent years have seen growing recognition of the importance of a college-educated workforce to meet the needs of employers and ensure economic growth. Lifelong learning, including completing a postsecondary credential, increasingly is necessary to improve employment outcomes among workers, both old and young, who face rising demands for new and improved skills. To satisfy these needs, many states have established postsecondary completion goals pertaining to the segments of their population ages 25 to 64 years. Although it is not always clear how completion goals will be attained for older students, it is widely recognized that community colleges will play an important role. Here, we use data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to examine enrollment trends by part-time and full-time status for students enrolled in Ohio’s public postsecondary institutions from 2006 to 2014. Unlike previous research that considers all students 25 and older as a homogeneous group, we divide older learners into two groups: ages 25 to 39 and ages 40 to 64. We find that adults in these age groups who attend a public college are more likely to attend a community college than they are a 4-year institution and are more likely to attend on a part-time basis. We discuss the implications of these trends and their relevance to college administrators.

Medicare utilization and costs for residents of the U.S. Gulf Coast, who are highly vulnerable to natural disasters, may be impacted by their disaster exposure. To estimate differences in healthcare utilization by disaster exposure, we calculated Medicare expenditures among residents of U.S. Gulf States and compared them with expenditures among residents of other regions of the U.S. Panel models were used to calculate changes in overall Medicare expenditures, inpatient expenditures, and home health expenditures for 32,819 Medicare beneficiaries. Individual demographic characteristics were included as predictors of change in expenditures. Medicare beneficiaries with National Health Interview Survey participation were identified and Part A claims were linked. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) data was used to determine counties that experienced no, some, high, and extreme hazard exposure. FEMA data was merged with Medicare claims data to create a panel dataset from 2001 to 2007. Medicare Part A claims for the years 2001 to 2007 were merged with FEMA data related to disasters in each U.S. County. Overall Medicare costs, as well as costs for inpatient and home health care for residents of states located along the U.S. Gulf Coast (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida) were compared to costs for residents of the rest of the U.S. Expenditures among residents of U.S. Gulf States decreased with increased hazard exposure. Decreases in inpatient expenditures persisted in the years following a disaster. The use of beneficiary-level data highlights the potential for natural hazards to impact health care costs. This study demonstrates the possibility that . . .

This paper analyzes the impact of immigrant deportations on local crime and police efficiency. Our identification relies on increases in the deportation rate driven by the introduction of the Secure Communities (SC) program, an immigration enforcement program based on local-federal cooperation which was rolled out across counties between 2008 and 2013. We instrument for the deportation rate by interacting the introduction of SC with the local presence of likely undocumented in 2005, prior to the introduction of SC. We document a surge in local deportation rates under SC, and we show that deportations increased the most in counties with a large undocumented population. We find that SC-driven increases in deportation rates did not reduce crime rates for violent offenses or property offenses. Our estimates are small and precise, so we can rule out meaningful effects. We do not find evidence that SC increased either police effectiveness in solving crimes or local police resources. Finally, we do not find effects of deportations on the local employment of unskilled citizens or on local firm creation.

California’s child early care and education (ECE) system is underfunded, and California policymakers have not been willing to acknowledge the true cost of creating a comprehensive ECE system. Proposals for ECE reform have focused primarily on improving access and affordability for families but have ignored the elephant in the room: Early care and education is substantially “funded” through low teacher pay and inadequate supports for ECE teachers. In addition to being a serious injustice, lack of adequate financial and professional supports for ECE teachers compromises the consistency and quality of care children receive.

To understand the importance of informal social networks for invention, I examine one of the largest involuntary disruptions of social networks in U.S. history: alcohol prohibition. The enactment of state-level prohibition laws differentially treated counties depending on whether those counties were wet or dry prior to prohibition. After the imposition of state-level prohibition, previously wet counties had 8-18% fewer patents per year relative to consistently dry counties. The effect was largest in the first three years after the imposition of prohibition and rebounds thereafter. The effect was smaller for groups that were less likely to frequent saloons, namely women and particular ethnic groups. I present evidence that the effect was driven by the disruption of social interactions and rule out alternative explanations. I next use the prohibition experiment to document several facts. I show that the social network increases invention through exposure to ideas in addition to exposure to collaborators and that informal and formal connections are complements in the invention production function. Finally, I show that the social network exhibits path dependence in the sense that as individuals rebuilt their social networks following prohibition, they connected with new individuals and patented in new technology classes. While prohibition had only a temporary effect on the rate of invention, the fact that the post-prohibition network exposed individuals to different ideas means that prohibition had a lasting effect on the direction of inventive activity

Mirroring trends in international tourism, alternative tourism, and ecotourism, the voluntourism industry has grown, developed and diversified significantly over the past two decades. Scientific attention to voluntourism has focused mainly on participant motivations and outcomes. However, explicit research on the outcomes and impacts voluntourism projects generate for their host communities and environments is sparse. As voluntourism becomes increasingly frequent, it is critical to design and implement projects that maximize potential for positive impacts and minimize negative impacts. This study focuses on voluntourism conservation projects in the Madre de Dios region in Peru which is a global conservation priority. Specifically, the research investigates (1) operational characteristics of voluntourism conservation projects, (2) the social networks and relationships among stakeholders to understand the ways in which these relationships influence projects and, ultimately, (3) the ability of voluntourism projects to effectively and collectively contribute to regional conservation needs. Through a social network analysis and interviews with leaders of voluntourism conservation projects, the findings suggest that some projects are well-connected to and coordinated with other conservation entities and efforts of the region. Yet, there are many projects that are disconnected and struggle to coordinate their activities with broader conservation efforts. Operational characteristics relate to a project’s ability to communicate and coordinate with efforts of other conservation entities, implying that voluntourism leaders can adjust operations to allow for a project that, in addition to meeting participant needs, generates relevant contributions to the conservation needs of Madre de Dios.

Analyses of spatial or network data are now very common. Nevertheless, statistical inference is challenging since unobserved heterogeneity can be correlated across neighboring observational units. We develop an estimator for the variance-covariance matrix (VCV) of OLS and 2SLS that allows for arbitrary dependence of the errors across observations in space or network structure and across time periods. As a proof of concept, we conduct Monte Carlo simulations in a geospatial setting based on U.S. metropolitan areas. Tests based on our estimator of the VCV asymptotically correctly reject the null hypothesis, whereas conventional inference methods, e.g., those without clusters or with clusters based on administrative units, reject the null hypothesis too often. We also provide simulations in a network setting based on the IDEAS structure of coauthorship and real-life data on scientific performance. The Monte Carlo results again show that our estimator yields inference at the correct significance level even in moderately sized samples and that it dominates other commonly used approaches to inference in networks. We provide guidance to the applied researcher with respect to (i) whether or not to include potentially correlated regressors and (ii) the choice of cluster bandwidth. Finally, we provide a companion statistical package (acreg) enabling users to adjust the OLS and 2SLS coefficient’s standard errors to account for arbitrary dependence.

This dissertation consists of three essays on prices and frictions. The first chapter documents cyclical properties of distributions of labor factor prices, wages, in the United States from 1979 to 2016. The second chapter investigates which theory of nominal wage frictions in the existing literature has consistent implications with empirical regularities documented in the first chapter. The third chapter estimates the impact of e-commerce, a recent technology innovation reducing information frictions and trade costs, on prices and welfare in Japan. In Chapter 1, I construct distributions of individual workers’ year-over-year changes in nominal hourly wages across time and across US states from two nationally representative household surveys, the Current Population Survey (1979-2017) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (1984-2013). The novel result is that the share of workers with no wage changes, which accounts for the large spike at zero in nominal wage change distribution, is more countercyclical than the share of workers with wage cuts. A strand of related literature interpreted the empirical finding that US states with larger decreases in employment are also the states with lower average wage increases as a sign of wage flexibility. This paper overturns this interpretation by showing that the states with larger employment declines are also the states with greater increases in the share of workers with a zero wage change, suggesting wage rigidity instead. In Chapter 2, I ask which type of nominal wage rigidity model in the existing literature can match empirical regularities documented in Chapter 1. This chapter builds heterogeneous agent models with five alternative wage-setting schemes—perfectly flexible, Calvo, long-term contracts, menu costs, and downward nominal wage rigidity. The models feature not only idiosyncratic uncertainty but also aggregate uncertainty. Using a numerical method, I show among alternative wage setting schemes, the model with downward nominal wage rigidity has the most consistent implications with the empirical findings, regarding the shape and cyclicality of wage change distributions. In Chapter 3, joint work with Misaki Matsumura and David Weinstein, we estimate the impact of e-commerce on Japanese prices and welfare. We find that goods sold intensively online have always had lower relative rates of price increase than goods sold mainly in physical stores, but the gap in inflation rates rose after the advent of e-commerce. This happened in part because goods sold offline began experiencing faster rates of price increase. Second, we compute the welfare gains generated by e-commerce by reducing intercity price differentials and by increasing available varieties. While we show the national gains were substantial, we also find that welfare rose much more for residents of high-income cities with highly educated populations and may have fallen for residents of other cities.

The three papers in this thesis reflect original microdata collection and linking that im-prove how research can be done with historical labour data. In the first paper Zach Wardand I estimate the e↵ect of age at arrival for immigrant outcomes with a new dataset ofEllis Island arrivals linked to the 1940 U.S. Census. Using within-family variation, wefind that arriving at an older age, or having more childhood exposure to the Europeanenvironment, led to a more negative wage gap relative to the native born. Infant arrivalshad a positive wage gap relative to natives, in contrast to a negative gap for teenagearrivals. Therefore, a key determinant of immigrant outcomes during the Age of MassMigration was the country of residence during critical periods of childhood development.In the second paper Tim Hatton and I examine the votes that led to six British coloniesfederating to become the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. We analyse support forFederation using a new dataset of district-level voting records that we associate with anew dataset of district-level census characteristics. We find little support for the viewthat sectoral interests were important. On the other hand, we find greater support forFederation in districts with a greater share of migrants from outside the colony, amongthose further from the seats of colonial government, and with a greater share of females.Therefore, support for Federation seems to have been associated more with migration,distance, and possibly female surage, than with trade.In the final, and sole-authored, paper I find that surname analysis suggests a low levelof social mobility in Tasmania over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Specifically,newly constructed microdata records suggest that the levels of various markers of statusbetween generations are persistent. Surnames are drawn from birth records, while status s signalled by membership of certain groups, such as being a parliamentarian or attendinga certain school in the nineteenth century, and being awarded an Order of Australia orin the legal profession in the late twentieth century. Therefore, social status in Tasmaniaappears to be correlated over multiple generation

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) take-up tends to increase during recessions. We exploit variation across immigrant groups in the non-pecuniary costs of participating in SSDI to examine the role that costs play in applicant decisions across the business cycle. We show that immigrants from country-of-origin groups that have lower participation costs are more sensitive to economic conditions than immigrants from high cost groups. These results do not seem to be driven by variation across groups in sensitivity to business cycles or eligibility for SSDI. Instead, they appear to be primarily driven by differences in work norms across origin countries. We are grateful to Eric Gould as well as participants at the 2018 Michigan Retirement Research Center (MRRC) researcher workshop and the University of Cyprus brownbag seminar.

How do Right to Work laws affect the distribution of economic resources? While sociological theories would predict inequality to increase following the passage of Right to Work laws, previous research has found these laws to be largely inconsequential for economic inequality. Drawing on power resources theory, I reassess the consequences of Right to Work laws and allow their impact to depend upon local union membership. To do so, I construct unique datasets at the state and commuting zone levels of income and wage inequality, merging data from the Internal Revenue Service, the US census, the American Community Survey, the US Union Sourcebook, the Current Population Survey, and the National Labor Relations Board for years 1939 to 2016. After using two-way fixed effects and instrumental variable regression models to replicate inconsistent results of previous studies, I show that these mask substantial and robust heterogeneity across local areas. Simply put, Right to Work laws are highly consequential when passed in times and places where labor has something to lose. Right to Work laws remove the negative association between labor union membership and inequality, while the consequences of Right to Work passage are greatest in highly unionized areas. In total, results suggest that Right to Work laws work as intended, increasing economic inequality indirectly by lowering labor power resources. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.

The report summarizes demographics and current health status of older adult New York City residents, ages 65 and older. This report also identifies disparities within the older adult population by presenting data by race and ethnicity, country of birth (U.S.-born vs. born outside the U.S.), age group, sex and household poverty level.