I examine the consequences of health insurance mandates on firm size distributions by developing a conceptual framework adapted from the model presented in Melitz (2003). Within the framework of my model, I arrive at three main results. First, I find that imposing an employer mandate on firms encourages entry for smaller, less productive firms that would not be affected by the mandate. My second finding is that revenues gained through fines imposed by the mandate can be used to lower corporate taxes without creating a budget deficit. Finally, I find that imposing an employer mandate increases aggregate price levels, which harms consumer welfare. I estimate that one would need to increase consumption by 6.8 percent to fully compensate a consumer for welfare losses brought about by these higher aggregate price levels. While my model is used to examine the Employer Mandate, it can be adapted to examine a large class of size-specific policies.

Late in the summer of 1972, the adult world bookstore opened its doors in the neighborhood of Redford, a residential community located in northwest Detroit. The bookstore - and the pornographic material it housed - quickly caught the attention of Pastor James O. Banks of the Redford Presbyterian Church, who on September 17 used his weekly sermon to discuss the Adult World. In his remarks the pastor condemned the bookstore, bemoaning what its opening symbolized both for the Redford neighborhood and more broadly for Christian values. He sought to draw distinctions . . .

Attaining rental housing is difficult for ex-offenders because most landlords are unwilling to rent to them and rents are often unaffordable. This is the first paper to estimate the relationship between affordable rental housing market conditions and the probability that released felons return to prison. I find that ex-offenders who return to areas with relatively higher vacancy rates for affordable rental housing are significantly less likely to recidivate. This finding is driven by blacks and the availability of rental-units in single-family homes, whose landlords are more likely to rent to ex-offenders. I find no effect for changes in the share of affordable units in multi-family buildings, which is consistent with these units often being rented by property management companies who are less likely to rent to ex-offenders. I conclude that accessibility-not just affordability-of rental housing is important for decreasing recidivism of ex-offenders.

Le 1er chapitre examine le role de la culture d’origine sur la maniere dont les jeunes hommes et femmes different dans leurs choix de retarder le depart du foyer parental. Je montre que dans les cultures caracterisees par des valeurs traditionnelles portant sur les roles de genre, les jeunes hommes ont plus d’incitations que les jeunes femmes a rester chez leurs parents. Lorsque les femmes de ces cultures vont vivre dans une societe plus liberale par rapport aux roles de genre, elles quittent…

A new sample containing rental price and characteristic data for over 15,000 New York City units was collected from historical newspapers for the period 1880 to 1910. These units were geolocated to the historical map of Manhattan Island to explore their geographic coverage, using Geographic Information System (GIS) software. This paper presents the new sample and discusses its representativeness of the New York City housing market during the sample period, with reference to the (limited) previous measures available in the literature and an analysis of the summary statistics of various subsamples of the data which can highlight selection biases. Finally, an analysis of the social status and ethnic composition of individuals located in the sample units in Census year 1880 is presented. Understanding the biases that might be present in this new sample will inform its usefulness in uncovering the workings of historical housing markets and in contributing to the scarce available information on historical housing costs.

Primarily women of color and immigrants, home care aides, house cleaners, and nannies are the paid care workers who play an essential role in New York City’s dynamic economy. New Yorkers entrust these workers to care for their loved ones when they cannot. Care workers are there when children muster the courage to take their first steps; care workers feed parents who once prepared family dinners; and care workers make sure people who need assistance to leave their homes get fresh air and sunlight. Despite the vital importance of paid care workers to the daily functioning of the city and its economy, the working conditions of care workers often make them unable to care for their own loved ones the way they care for others’. Care workers are rarely paid a sustainable living wage and suffer from insecure and temporary employment. Their contributions are frequently unappreciated by the public, their employers, and even their clients. Hidden in private homes out of public view and working alone, care workers are especially vulnerable to long and emotionally trying days, compensation that pales in comparison to the worth of their work, and denial of the most basic workplace rights and protections. In an effort to better address care workers’ distinct needs, in February 2017, the City of New York opened a first-of-its-kind Paid Care Division within the Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA). DCA’s Office of Labor Policy & Standards (OLPS) houses the Paid Care Division, the only governmental office in the United States charged with raising job standards in care industries. To meet this challenging but critical mandate, the Division works in partnership with paid care worker organizations, employers, and other stakeholders. The Division’s approach is interdisciplinary: it engages in policy development, outreach and education for workers and employers, intake and referral to outside resources for paid care workers, and original research. The Division also draws on DCA resources and enforcement authority, including its enforcement of NYC’s Paid Sick Leave Law (PSL), to meet care workers’ needs and elevate their important work. As the Division concludes its first year, this report provides an analysis of what it has learned, an overview of its accomplishments, and a roadmap for action it plans to take in the years to come. Specifically, the report elaborates on the close partnerships the Division has fostered with City agencies, academic institutions, and organizing and advocacy groups. These partnerships have culminated in the adoption of model standards for paid care jobs. The Division’s work also includes proactive investigations into possible violations of PSL at several dozen home care agencies, covering approximately 30,000 workers. Additionally, in collaboration with Professor Ruth Milkman of The City University of New York (CUNY), DCA is releasing the results of a year’s worth of focus group research through a companion publication, Making Paid Care Work Visible: Findings from Focus Groups with New York City Home Care Aides, Nannies, and House Cleaners. Making Paid Care Work Visible draws insights from discussions with 115 care workers about their work. The report also relays stakeholders’ recommendations for future City action on behalf of paid care workers and identifies the Division’s priority work areas going forward. In 2018, the Division will continue its outreach and education activities in partnership with groups organizing and serving paid care workers, assess the ways in which its legal services program might better respond to and address the unique enforcement challenges in care workplace settings, vigorously enforce PSL in care industries, and work with stakeholders to identify new policies the City could adopt to raise the prevailing standards in paid care jobs.

Using the latest available data from the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS),1 this brief is an update to our previous analysis that examined health insurance coverage among children ages 3 and younger and their parents in 2015 (Haley et al. 2017a, 2017b). Our research found high rates of coverage through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) among young children and their parents in 2015, with nearly half of young children and one-fifth of the parents of young children covered by Medicaid/CHIP; this share was higher than that among older children and their parents. Certain family characteristics, such as lower incomes, younger parents, and mixed immigration status, were more prevalent among parents of younger children, placing them at higher risk of lacking coverage. Coverage also varied across states for both young children and their parents.

Social norms are thought to motivate behaviors like political participation, but context should influence both the content and activation of these norms. I show that both race and neighborhood context moderate the social value of political participation in the United States. Using original survey data and a survey experiment, I find that Whites, Blacks, and Latinos not only conceptualize participation differently, but also asymmetrically reward those who are politically active, with minority Americans often providing more social incentives for participation than Whites. I combine this survey data with geographic demography from the American Community Survey and find that neighborhood characteristics outpace individual-level indicators in predicting the social value of political participation. The findings suggest that scholars of political behavior should consider race, place, and social norms when seeking to understand participation in an increasingly diverse America.

Using newspaper job ad text from 1960 to 2000, we measure job tasks and the adoption of individual information and communication technologies (ICTs). Most new technologies are associated with an increase in nonroutine analytic tasks, and a decrease in nonroutine interactive, routine cognitive, and routine manual tasks. We embed these interactions in a quantitative model of worker sorting across occupations and technology adoption. Through the lens of the model, the arrival of ICTs broadly shifts workers away from routine tasks, which increases the college premium. A notable exception is the Microsoft Office suite, which has the opposite set of effects.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the cost of child care in the U.S. has increased substantially over the past few decades. This paper marshals data from a variety of sources to rigorously assess the issue. It begins by using a large survey dataset to trace the evolution in families’ child care expenditures. I find that the typical family currently spends 14 percent more on child care than it did in 1990. This is less than half the increase documented in previous work. In addition, most families allocate approximately the same share of income to child care as they did several decades ago. The next section of the paper examines the trend in the market price of child care. The evidence suggests that after persistent, albeit modest, growth throughout the 1990s, market prices have been essentially flat for at least a decade. In the paper's final section, I analyze several features of the child care market that may have implications for prices, including the demand for child care, the skill-level of the child care workforce, and state regulations. A few findings are noteworthy. First, I show that child care demand stagnated around the same time that market prices leveled-off. Second, although the skill-level of the child care workforce increased in absolute terms, highly-educated women increasingly find child care employment less attractive than other occupations. Finally, child care regulations have not systematically increased in stringency, and they appear to have small and inconsistent effects on market prices. Together, these results indicate that the production of child care has not become more costly, which may explain the recent stagnation in market prices.

This study documents an important role for Social Security income in workers' retirement timing. About 40 percent of public school teachers are not covered by Social Security. This provides an opportunity to analyze the causal impact of Social Security on retirement timing by comparing covered and non-covered teachers. Using individual-level data from the American Community Survey, we find robust evidence of higher rates of retirement among covered teachers at Social Security eligibility ages. This pattern is confirmed using an alternative regression model of participation in the teacher labor force. These estimates suggest that, should the federal government mandate full inclusion in Social Security for all public sector workers, the retirement timing patterns of newly covered teachers and other public sector workers would likely change.

Analyses of the economic effects of the introduction of the public pension system on older men in the US have been hamstrung by difficulties generating reliable estimates of historical labor-force participation rates using data from early US censuses that only asked respondents about their occupations and not whether they were actively employed. We extend a unique feature of the 1901 Canadian census, which asked about retirement status as well as occupation, to older men in the 1900 US Census to estimate labor-force participation rates that adjust for misreporting of employment status. Our estimates show that reported rates substantially overestimate labor-force participation among older men. We also show that adjusted rates based on an econometric correction for misclassified limited dependent variables produces are similar to those based on the 1901 Canadian census. Using this technique to extend our adjustment shows that reported rates overstate older men’s labor-force participation rates in the 1880, 1910, 1920 and 1930 census, as well as the decline in those rates between 1900 and 1910.

Does structural change always promote economic development? This paper examines the long-run impact of cotton agriculture on development in the US South, focusing on a novel aspect of structural change. Exploiting climate-based variation in cotton production, I show that cotton specialization in the late 19th century had a negative impact on local development that lasts to this day. This negative relationship, however, arose only from the second half of the 20th century. I argue the change was caused by cotton mechanization which began in the 1950s. Cotton agriculture had depended on tenant farmers with little human capital. After the mechanization of cotton production, cotton tenants with low human capital were displaced and absorbed by local manufacturing. I find that labor productivity in manufacturing declined in response to the inflow of cotton tenants. The negative impact on manufacturing productivity persisted in the long-run because of directed technical change. Using census data in the recent period, I show that initial cotton specialization reduced the demand for skilled labor in manufacturing in the long-run. These results illustrate that, depending on agricultural backgrounds, structural change can affect evolution of technologies and productivity in the industrial sector negatively.

Using a compiled dataset of 441 censuses and surveys between 1787 and 2015, representing 103 countries and 48.4 million mothers, we find that: (1) the effect of fertility on labor supply is typically indistinguishable from zero at low levels of development and large and negative at higher levels of development; (2) the negative gradient is stable across historical and contemporary data; and (3) the results are robust to identification strategies, model specification, and data construction and scaling. Our results are consistent with changes in the sectoral and occupational structure of female jobs and a standard labor-leisure model.

I find that childhood exposure to the Dust Bowl, an environmental shock to health and income, adversely impacted later-life human capital-especially when exposure was in utero-increasing poverty and disability rates, and decreasing fertility and college completion rates. The event's devastation of agriculture, however, had the beneficial effect of increasing high school completion, likely by pushing children who otherwise might have worked on the farm into secondary schooling. Lastly, New Deal spending helped remediate Dust Bowl damage, suggesting that timely and substantial policy interventions can aid in human recovery from natural disasters.

Since Bartik (1991), it has become popular in empirical studies to estimate regressions in which the variable of interest is a shift-share, such as when a regional labor market outcome is regressed on a weighted average of observed sectoral shocks, using the regional sector shares as weights. In this paper, we discuss inference in these regressions. We show that standard economic models imply that the regression residuals are likely to be correlated across regions with similar sector shares, independently of their geographic location. These correlations are ignored by inference procedures commonly used in these regressions, which can lead to severe undercoverage. In regressions studying the effect of randomly generated placebo sectoral shocks on actual labor market outcomes in U.S. commuting zones, we find that a 5% level significance test based on standard errors clustered at the state level rejects the null of no effect in up to 45% of the placebo interventions. We derive novel confidence intervals that correctly account for the potential correlation in the regression residuals.

Higher education faces a looming demographic storm. Decades-long patterns in fertility, migration, and immigration persistently nudge the country toward the Hispanic Southwest. As a result, the Northeast and Midwest—traditional higher education strongholds—expect to lose 5 percent of their college-aged populations between now and the mid-2020s. Furthermore, and in response to the Great Recession, child-bearing has plummeted. In 2026, when the front edge of this birth dearth reaches college campuses, the number of college-aged students will drop almost 15 percent in just 5 years. In Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, Nathan D. Grawe has developed the Higher Education Demand Index (HEDI), which relies on data from the 2002 Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) to estimate the probability of college-going using basic demographic variables. Analyzing demand forecasts by institution type and rank while disaggregating by demographic groups, Grawe provides separate forecasts for two-year colleges, elite institutions, and everything in between. The future demand for college attendance, he argues, depends critically on institution type. While many schools face painful contractions, for example, demand for elite schools is expected to grow by more than 15 percent in future years. Essential for administrators and trustees who are responsible for recruitment, admissions, student support, tenure practices, facilities construction, and strategic planning, this book is a practical guide for navigating coming enrollment challenges.

We construct a publicly available atlas of children's outcomes in adulthood by Census tract using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population. For each tract, we estimate children's earnings distributions, incarceration rates, and other outcomes in adulthood by parental income, race, and gender. These estimates allow us to trace the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration back to the neighborhoods in which children grew up. We find that children's outcomes vary sharply across nearby areas: for children of parents at the 25th percentile of the income distribution, the standard deviation of mean household income at age 35 is $5,000 across tracts within counties. We illustrate how these tract-level data can provide insight into how neighborhoods shape the development of human capital and support local economic policy using two applications. First, the estimates permit precise targeting of policies to improve economic opportunity by uncovering specific neighborhoods where certain subgroups of children grow up to have poor outcomes. Neighborhoods matter at a very granular level: conditional on characteristics such as poverty rates in a child's own Census tract, characteristics of tracts that are one mile away have little predictive power for a child's outcomes. Our historical estimates are informative predictors of outcomes even for children growing up today because neighborhood conditions are relatively stable over time. Second, we show that the observational estimates are highly predictive of neighborhoods' causal effects, based on a comparison to data from the Moving to Opportunity experiment and a quasi-experimental research design analyzing movers' outcomes. We then identify high-opportunity neighborhoods that are affordable to low- income families, providing an input into the design of affordable housing policies. Our measures of children's long-term outcomes are only weakly correlated with traditional proxies for local economic success such as rates of job growth, showing that the conditions that create greater upward mobility are not necessarily the same as those that lead to productive labor markets.

Tougher immigration enforcement was responsible for 1.8 million deportations between 2009 and 2013 alone—many of them were fathers of American children. We exploit the geographic and temporal variation in the escalation of interior immigration enforcement to assess its impact on the structure of families to which many of the deported fathers of U.S.‐born children belonged. We find that the average increase in immigration enforcement during the 2005 to 2015 period has raised by 19 percent the likelihood that Hispanic U.S.‐born children might live without their parents in households headed by naturalized relatives or friends unthreatened by deportation. Likewise, the same increase in immigration enforcement has raised by 20 percent these children's propensity to live with likely undocumented mothers who report their spouses as being absent—a reasonable finding given that most children with a likely undocumented father have undocumented mothers. Given the negative consequences of being raised by a single parent or without parents, plus the parallel increase in interior immigration enforcement, gaining a better understanding of the collateral damage of heightened enforcement on the families to which these children belong is well warranted.