Policy debates often focus only on major decisions made in Washington, DC. But for many Americans, the decisions made much closer to home have just as large, if not larger, effects on day-to-day life. In important respects, the United States remains true to its original system of federalism: states and localities play a prominent role in setting policies that affect the economy more broadly. State and local government total expenditures amount to $2.9 trillion in the United States. While this is less than the federal government’s $4.3 trillion of expenditures, nearly two-thirds of federal total expenditures are transfers (either to individuals or state and local governments). This means that state and local governments have in some respects a more prominent role in decision-making than the federal government. Indeed . . .

Various national and regional socioeconomic shocks such as recessions can affect the stability of regional economies. Still, regions react in diverse ways to the same forces; some recover slowly despite being less affected while others recover rapidly despite being heavily impacted. To examine the dynamics of regional economies, this study focuses on the extent to which a region can avoid faltering in a crisis (stability) and how quickly it can respond positively to the crisis (resilience), while sustaining a long-run pattern of expansion (growth). This study presents two new measures of recessionary periods of 382 U.S. metropolitan areas for stability and resilience, in addition to the use of the overall growth rate, using monthly data from January 1990 through March 2017. This study categorizes metropolitan areas into eight categories by using nationwide or median figures. Results demonstrate that a good deal of variation exists among . . .

Family planning programs have been employed in effort to lower fertility rates, with spread of contraceptive method knowledge often being the first step Data from 2017 IPUMS Performance Monitoring and Accountability (PMA) 2020 Survey – Niger 2017

We study the link between the individual propensity to violate moral principles and the demand for finance based on two data sets: the World Values Survey and a data set with the legal records of U.S. chief executive officers (CEOs). We find that individuals who are more tolerant of moral principle violations are more likely to borrow. Corporate executives with legal records are also associated with larger mortgages. Reverse causality and attitudes toward risk are unlikely explanations for our findings. We contend that noncompliance relaxes participation constraints in capital markets by lowering the psychological costs of entering and breaking a contract.

The goal of this research was to discover if there is a significant gender difference which affects total income in the entertainment industry. While I was unable to find any scholarly research on the specific issue of women in the entertainment industry, I was able to review articles regarding women in the general workforce over time as well as entertainment industry-specific trade publications. With this information, I created a model including the key variables number of children, age, age-squared, and marital status because these were seen in previous research to have an effect on women’s income. The sample that was analyzed comes from the American Community Survey between, and including, the years 2001-2017 and included only those within the occupation Agents and Business Managers of Artists, Performers, and Athletes. I also separated the male and female datasets in order to analyze the gender difference for all variables in the model as opposed to solely looking at gender’s effect on total income. Regression of the model using both datasets showed that there is a significant gender difference for all variables except for number of children for females, which is due to certain econometric factors as well as socioeconomic factors. Age and age-squared are two highly significant variables, highlighting the importance of age’s quadratic relationship with total income over time.

Health insurance is a primary driver of rising medical expenditures. Economic theory suggests that insurance induces an increase in risky behaviors, but previous empirical evidence is mixed. I use a mandate in the Affordable Care Act in which contraceptives were covered at zero cost to consumers to test for unintended effects of insurance on risky sex. Leveraging mandated zero cost-sharing for contraception and pre-policy insured rates as a measure of treatment intensity, I provide evidence that this 2012 policy reduced fertility but caused unintended consequences: a decline in condom use and a subsequent increase in sexually transmitted infections (STIs). I discuss shortcomings of controlling for nonparallel pre-trends using state-trends, and I suggest an alternative to control for pre-trends directly in the context of dose-response difference-in-differences. Finally, estimates based on the 2010 dependent coverage mandate indicate health insurance provides an overall net positive effect on insurance and STI prevention.

In both developing and industrialized countries today, mothers constitute a substantial share of the labour force. Mother's engagement in paid labour has also been encouraged across levels of economic development through a political agenda for equal rights, opportunities, and investments in early childhood care. At the same time, mothers have not make up for their increased efforts in paid labour by relinquishing responsibilities in the private sphere. Care tasks are still a quintessential facet of working mothers' daily routines as well as their identities. Indeed, a long tradition of feminists have made it abundantly clear that unpaid care work performed by both employed and non-employed mothers, remains the undervalued foundation of labour markets across the world. This dissertation studies the consequences of motherhood on different facets of women's paid labour in the public sphere, which here is referred to as labour market outcomes. This does not imply that paid labour is the only valuable form of work, or that mothers are the only people who provide unpaid care. Mothers' paid work in the labour market, however, does define the scope of this dissertation.

Have workers stopped moving to the highest-density, highest-productivity places in the country because of a decline in the urban wage premium, or because the rent is too high? We analyze how important these two explanations are by studying them in one and the same empirical analysis. We find that that non-college workers now effectively face a housing-inclusive urban wage penalty, while workers with college education continue to face a significant urban wage premium. We relate these findings to the share of native-born cross-state migrants across areas of different density levels, and stumble upon a puzzle: why aren’t more college workers moving to the city?

We estimate the short and long-run effects of resource booms on people (rather than places) using household data. We find evidence of positive effects during the boom and negative effects during the bust. The cumulative effect on income was arguably negative when restricting the sample to observations from prime working years (<55) and unambiguously positive otherwise. We reconcile the difference by showing that the boom delayed retirement. The evidence suggests the boom was a curse for the average household. It failed to generate clear-cut income gains during prime working years and its volatility caused costly income-smoothing adjustments later in life.

This paper analyzes how a change in the size of mortgage payment affects household’s labor supply. Using income tax data for the universe of Polish population and exploiting variation in floating-rate mortgage payments driven by interbank rates fluctuations, I show that an increase in payment induces households to work and earn more. Higher income covers 30-45% of the increase in payment. The effect increases with households’ debt-toincome ratio, is higher for more flexible income sources and is accompanied by a decrease in proxies for consumption expenditures. The effect is driven by several mechanisms: spousal labor supply, change of job and additional income from after-hours work. Consistent with a model of labor decisions with consumption commitements, but contrary to other mechanisms such as debt overhang, household debt can increase labor supply

Is infrastructure construction an effective way to boost employment in distressed local labor markets? Using new geographically detailed data on highway construction that was funded bythe American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, I study how road construction projects affect local employment growth. The method for allocating funds across space facilitates a plausible selection-on-observables strategy. I find that highway funding impacted construction employment at the county level: A dollar of additional Recovery Act spending on local construction increased local construction payrolls by thirty cents during the five years after the Act's passage. The magnitude of this effect matches the national labor share of construction revenues, suggesting that targeted spending did not crowd out other local construction. These effects are most pronounced in counties with smaller populations and smaller shares of residents that commute to outside counties for work. However, when testing for general equilibrium effects on local employment and payroll aggregates, I find effects close to zero, with very wide confidence intervals across all specifications. Although the Recovery Act was an intervention significant enough to have a sizable impact on the construction sector in counties with low mobility, these findings suggest that the local variation in highway spending was too small relative to baseline regional volatility to detect a “local multiplier” effect impacting jobs outside of construction.

Objectives Childrearing responsibilities create additional demands on women's time and effort, especially in low-income families. We explore whether childrearing demands and differences in time use increase the risk of overweight and obesity for women in different income brackets. Methods We use data for women ages 18–55 years from the 2006–2008 and 2014–2015 American Time Use Surveys (N = 17,914). We predict whether women engage in particular activities using logistic regression and, among those who do particular activities, we predict the minutes spent in various activities using ordinary least squares models. We also predict women's risk of overweight or obesity using logistic regression. All models examine conditional relationships between income level and motherhood status. Results Replicating prior research, we find a greater risk of overweight and obesity for mothers with low (odds ratio, 1.66; p < .001) and subpoverty (odds ratio, 1.93; p < .001) incomes compared with mothers with moderate/upper incomes and all child-free women. Motherhood and income status jointly predict women's time use, but including these time use behaviors in models of overweight and obesity does not attenuate the significantly higher risks for mothers with low and subpoverty incomes. Conclusions Mothers experiencing economic hardship are at greater risk of overweight and obesity relative to other women. Additional research is warranted, however . . .

This paper investigates the impact of higher education on the gender pay gap in the US in 2018. It is hypothesized that a degree provides a signal that a woman is committed to a career, due to the high costs incurred whilst investing in higher education, which in turn removes some of the bias against females in the workplace. This is proven by comparing the returns to education between females and males and between graduates and non-graduates in order to show that there are benefits in terms of income from obtaining a degree other than through productivity. Findings show that an additional year of education is correlated with a 11.38% increase in annual income, and the benefits women gain from signalling as a graduate equate to 1.1 percentage points. However, these results also show that despite women having a larger increase in the returns to education between graduates and non-graduates, the gender pay gap is higher for those with a degree than those of a lower education level, which suggests that characteristics of graduates and the nature of graduate jobs is in fact fuelling the gender pay gap as opposed to the education itself.

Local Differential Privacy (LDP) protocols enable an untrusted data collector to perform privacy-preserving data analytics. In particular, each user locally perturbs his/her data to preserve privacy before sending it to the data collector, who aggregates the perturbed data to obtain statistics of interest. Over the past several years, researchers from multiple communities--such as security, database, and theoretical computer science-- have proposed many LDP protocols. These studies mainly focused on improving the utility of the LDP protocols. However, the security of LDP protocols is largely unexplored. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap. We focus on LDP protocols for frequency estimation and heavy hitter identification, which are two basic data analytics tasks. Specifically, we show that an attacker can inject fake users into an LDP protocol and the fake users send carefully crafted data to the data collector such that the LDP protocol estimates high frequencies for certain items or identifies them as heavy hitters. We call our attacks data poisoning attacks. We theoretically and/or empirically show the effectiveness of our attacks. We also explore two countermeasures against our attacks. Our experimental results show that they can effectively defend against our attacks in some scenarios but have limited effectiveness in others, highlighting the needs for new defenses against our attacks.

This is a description of a practical experiment in alternative game design, intended to test and define a new kind of player experience in mobile/net gaming. This 'Audio-mostly' concept is created as a test-bed and prototype for sound-based game applications. The underlying principle lies in expanding the imagination of the user, rather than the graphic capabilities of the platform. It should be noted that this research project was principally concerned with defining the design parameters and aesthetics needed for the creation of effective audio based games, it was never intended as a purely academic investigation of the subject's reactions to the test bed. To this end, we have chosen to use a less rigid style in presenting this project It should also be noted that an audio-mostly game should not be confused with a game specifically designed for the visually impaired, instead it is a game intended for normally sighted people to be used in situations where audio-based gameplay has an advantage over traditional visual based games (Mobile phones in transit for example).

I had a dream … That I published an article about the aspirations of high school students by race and gender, using the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. Subsequently, there was a flood of news articles with the headlines, “More than 50 percent of Black male 9th graders want to go to college” or “Black male 9th graders more likely to desire college than White males.” The authors of these articles talked about the potential of helping these young men realize their dreams. They also gave commentary on what the Black community needs to do to help the next generation of first-generation college students. The comment sections were filled with people applauding young Black students who want to do the right thing, while giving meaningful suggestions about how to help Black students who remain ambivalent about their future.

While foreign-born Americans live longer than the native-born, some immigrant groups live in unfavorable socioeconomic conditions. What are the implications of immigrants’ mortality advantage and economic disadvantage for their financial security in later life? In this paper, I explore life course patterns of immigrants’ risks of being in poverty after age 50 and calculate nativity- and race/ethnicity-specific poverty life expectancy at age 65. I use data from the Current Population Survey, US vital life tables, and the National Health Interview SurveyLinked Mortality Files. I find that while the risks of being in poverty remains relatively stable for the US-born after age 50, it increases for the foreign-born. I examine a few mechanisms that may drive this pattern, including mortality selection, the inflow of later-life immigrants, and nativity differences in access to salary/wage income and welfare. Regarding poverty life expectancy, I find that some immigrant groups have longer life expectancy compared with white, US-born adults but shorter poverty-free life expectancy.

Little evidence is available to assess the effect of substituting occupation-based income scores for individual incomes before 1940. The example of immigrant assimilation in Canada 1911–31 reveals differences in the extent and even the direction of assimilation depending on whether income scores are used and how the occupational income score is constructed. Given the increasingly wide use of income scores, we summarize a number of procedures to address the limitations associated with the absence of individual level income variation. An adjustment of conventional income scores for either group earnings differences and/or intertemporal change using summary information for broad groups of occupations reduces the deviation between scores and actual incomes.

The aim of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the differentials between race and sexual orientations in the distribution of income/salary and the amount or public assistance received. Using data from the U.S. Census from 2013-2017, I explore different alternatives for the sexual orientation wage gap: human capital differences, industry choice, numbers of hours worker per week and other labour market decisions. Depending on the outcome, I find that people of colour face primarily face a wage penalty. White workers face a wage advantage. However, the extent of the gap is dependent on the individual's gender, racial and sexual orientation combination. To provide additional explanation, I use the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition to examine the distributions between each racial and sexual group. The results show that there is a definite wage gap between racial and sexual orientation groups, while workers of colour face the highest unexplained portions of that gap.

The housing crisis in California has led to the need to find a solution that can provide much needed relief to those suffering from the massive supply shortage in the state. Out of the five housing propositions on the California 2018 midterm election ballot, Proposition 10, the ballot for rent control got the most media attention. This paper will look to quantity the effect of rent control and see if the benefits outweigh the costs. The paper will focus on the 1979 passing of rent control in Santa Monica and utilize a difference in difference method to see how key variables such as quality, public assistance and turnover rates change over time.