Approximately 3 million American adults lack access to higher education based on where they live. These people live more than 25 miles from a broad-access public university and do not have access to the high-speed internet connection needed for online education. This work examines how many students (who are physically isolated from higher education) have the opportunity to access online education and how many are still isolated. Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), we identify three types of education deserts: physical education desert only, online education desert only, and both a physical and online education desert.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) included reforms to increase the availability and affordability of private, individual health insurance. This dissertation examines how these changes affected labor force participation decisions of older workers not yet eligible for Medicare, particularly retirement decisions. Telephone interviews conducted in 2014 with thirty 45-64 year-olds found access to affordable individual insurance coverage was a factor (though not the primary factor) in labor force participation decisions by overcoming barriers to coverage related to health, cost, and employment status, and increased flexibility to work part-time, retire, or start a business. Difference-in-differences analysis of the Current Population Survey (2010-2017) showed that among 55-64 year-olds, living in states where individual health insurance market regulations to increase affordability and accessibility were new under the ACA was associated with a small but statistically significant increase in likelihood of retirement. This increase ranged from 1.6-2.8 percentage points compared to those living in states that already had these regulations.

This work presents a nonparametric statistical test, S-maup, to measure the sensitivity of a spatially intensive variable to the effects of the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP). S-maup is the first statistic of its type and focuses on determining how much the distribution of the variable, at its highest level of spatial disaggregation, will change when it is spatially aggregated. Through a computational experiment, we obtain the basis for the design of the statistical test under the null hypothesis of non-sensitivity to MAUP. We performed a simulation study for approaching the empirical distribution of the statistical test, obtaining its critical values, and computing its power and size. The results indicate that the power of the statistic is good if the sample (number of areas) grows, and in general, the size decreases with increasing sample number. Finally, an empirical application is made using the Mincer equation in South Africa.

We provide the first estimates of ethnic segregation between 1850 and 1940 that cover the entire United States and are consistent across time and space. To do so, we adapt the Logan-Parman method to immigrants by measuring segregation based on the nativity of the next-door neighbor. In addition to providing a consistent measure of segregation, we also document new patterns such as the high levels of segregation in rural areas, in small factory towns and for non-European sources. Early 20th century immigrants spatially assimilated at a slow rate, leaving immigrants’ lived experience distinct from natives for decades after arrival.

Using high-quality administrative microdata spanning 2011-2013, this paper develops new routines to compare creative economies using the creative trident framework, and applies them to the UK and US national and regional contexts. We find the UK creative economy is larger in workforce shares, and grows faster over the study period; the US’ is absolutely larger, and is distributed more evenly across industries. Regional results are shaped by deeper differences in national urban systems. The paper highlights possibilities for widely varying national configurations of creative economies, considers potential mechanisms driving differentiation, and reflects on the usefulness of the creative trident approach.

The U.S. system of graduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has served the nation and its science and engineering enterprise extremely well. Over the course of their education, graduate students become involved in advancing the frontiers of discovery, as well as in making significant contributions to the growth of the U.S. economy, its national security, and the health and well-being of its people. However, continuous, dramatic innovations in research methods and technologies, changes in the nature and availability of work, shifts in demographics, and expansions in the scope of occupations needing STEM expertise raise questions about how well the current STEM graduate education system is meeting the full array of 21st century needs. Indeed, recent surveys of employers and graduates and studies of graduate education suggest that many graduate programs do not adequately prepare students to translate their knowledge into impact in multiple careers. Graduate STEM Education for the 21st Century examines the current state of U.S. graduate STEM education. This report explores how the system might best respond to ongoing developments in the conduct of research on evidence-based teaching practices and in the needs and interests of its students and the broader society it seeks to serve. This will be an essential resource for the primary stakeholders in the U.S. STEM enterprise, including federal and state policymakers, public and private funders, institutions of higher education, their administrators and faculty, leaders in business and industry, and the students the system is intended to educate.

Is infrastructure construction an effective way to boost employment in distressed local labor markets? I use new, geographically detailed data on highway construction funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to study the relationship between construction work and 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 among 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 a significant enough intervention 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 employment "multiplier."

Theory and evidence suggest that people born in different countries complement each other in the labor market. Immigrant diversity could augment productivity by enabling the combination of different skills, ideas and perspectives, resulting in greater productivity. Using matched employer–employee data for the USA, this paper evaluates this claim, and makes empirical and conceptual contributions to prior work. It addresses the potential bias from unobserved heterogeneity among individuals, work establishments and cities. The paper also identifies diversity impacts at both city and workplace scales, and considers how relationships vary across different segments of the labor market. Findings suggest that urban immigrant diversity produces positive and nontrivial spillovers for U.S. workers. This social return represents a distinct channel through which immigration may generate broad-based economic benefits.

Assumptions that single mothers are “time poor” compared with married mothers are ubiquitous. We tested theorized associations derived from the time poverty thesis and the gender perspective using the 2003–2012 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS). We found marital status differentiated housework, leisure, and sleep time, but did not influence the amount of time that mothers provided childcare. Net of the number of employment hours, married mothers did more housework and slept less than never-married and divorced mothers, counter to expectations of the time poverty thesis. Never-married and cohabiting mothers reported more total and more sedentary leisure time than married mothers. We assessed the influence of demographic differences among mothers to account for variation in their time use by marital status. Compositional differences explained more than two-thirds of the variance in sedentary leisure time between married and never-married mothers, but only one-third of the variance between married and cohabiting mothers. The larger unexplained gap in leisure quality between cohabiting and married mothers is consistent with the gender perspective.

Buenos Aires and Chicago grew during the nineteenth century for remarkably similar reasons. Both cities were conduits for moving meat and grain from fertile hinterlands to eastern markets. However, despite their initial similari- ties, Chicago was vastly more prosperous for most of the twentieth century. Can the differences between the cities after 1930 be explained by differences in the cities before that date? We highlight four major differences between Buenos Aires and Chicago in 1914. Chicago was slightly richer, and significantly better educated. Chicago was more industrially developed, with about 2.25 times more capital per worker. Finally, Chicago’s political situation was far more stable and it was not a political capital. Human capital seems to explain the lion’s share of the divergent path of the two cities and their countries, both because of its direct effect and because of the connection between education and political instability.

Female prison admissions grew 62% between 1990 and 2010, while arrests for females over the same period only increased by 14%. As a larger portion of arrested women have been sent to prison over time, it seems that increased prison admissions over time are not due only to more women committing crimes, but also to more severe punishment for arrested females. Using data on arrests, prison admissions, and county characteristics, I examine factors in the increased arrest rate and imprisonment rate for females and males according to offense type over 1990 to 2010 using panel regressions with county and state-time fixed-effects. The results indicate that female arrests for violent and property crimes increase in counties with a higher percentage of female-headed households with no husband present, and that prison admissions for females are lower in counties with higher median incomes. The presence of a treatment facility in the area does not appear to significantly affect changes in imprisonment when controlling for arrests.

Smoking during pregnancy is most prevalent among women with a low socioeconomic status and is negatively associated with important infant health measures such as birth weight. Cigarette taxes decrease smoking among pregnant women and lead to improved birth outcomes, especially among those with a low socioeconomic status. In this paper we investigate whether increasing cigarette taxes also translates into improved educational attainment of offspring from a low socioeconomic background. In order to answer this question, we exploit variation in cigarette taxes across U.S. states over time and analyze tax effects on grade retention and school enrollment among a large sample of adolescents representative of the population. We find that higher cigarette taxes during pregnancy are strongly associated with improved educational outcomes of children from a low socioeconomic background, but seem to have no effect on children from a higher socioeconomic background. Our findings therefore suggest that cigarette taxes can be an effective policy instrument for mitigating the propagation of a low socioeconomic status from one generation to the next.

Public-sector jobs in Massachusetts are more likely than private-sector jobs to be good jobs that provide a family-supporting income and wealth-building benefits, so they need to be preserved. At a time of growing economic inequality, jobs in the public sector help preserve the middle of the income distribution—the middle class. Public-sector jobs also help build strong communities because Bay State public-sector workers are more likely to be long-term community residents, increasing neighborhood cohesion, strengthening civic engagement, and reducing crime.

The racial characteristics of children adopted from abroad by American parents have fluctuated sharply over time in response to changing legislation and attitudes toward intercountry adoptions in the United States and the sending countries. This study investigates how the likelihood of parents adopting a White versus non-White child varies by the characteristics of the adopted child, the parents, and the household. Our analyses, using the 2008–2012 American Community Survey, show that parents consider the child's age, sex, and health; the presence of adopted and biologically related children in the household; and shifts in the availability of children across major sending countries.

This chapter investigates whether child labor restrictions imposed by compulsory schooling laws and child labor regulation have an impact on fertility. Exploiting variation induced by changes in legislation across time and between states during the early 20th century U.S, I nd that parents chose to have less children as a response to the constraints imposed on the labor supply of their prospective children, and that the largest response was among parents whose children were more likely to work. I address possible threats to the validity of the identication strategy, and show that the results are robust to various robustness checks. My results suggest that legislation aimed at increasing children's educational attainment and decreasing the prevalence of child labor has spillover eects on parents' fertility, providing additional empirical support to the notion that nancial incentives play a role in determining household fertility decisions.

I constructed a unique set of data from over 300 California law enforcement agencies, in conjunction with large-scale education microdata covering the high school outcomes of over 3.8 million California ninth-graders from the classes of 2003 to 2014 to examine the extent to which estimated effects of violence exposure, coupled with significant differences in violence exposure rates, contribute to population-level differences in educational attainment. I find that: (1) Gun-violence exposure rates are significantly related to mean dropout rates for Blacks and Hispanics, and are unrelated to mean dropout rates for Whites and Asians. (2) Gun-violence exposure effects on high school completion are not primarily mediated by learning losses (less than 25 percent of the effect), which suggests that gun- violence exposure related dropouts generally have the cognitive capability to excel beyond their realized levels of educational attainment. (3) Gun-violence exposure affects everyone. Blacks and Hispanics are most affected through elevated dropout rates. Exposure effects for Whites tend to manifest by way of higher intragroup variance in dropout rates. Both Whites and Asians are affected by lower levels of reading and math proficiency among high school graduates. (4) Estimates suggest that the Black-White (Hispanic-White) difference in gun-violence exposure levels is associated with 16 (19) percent of the Black-White (Hispanic-White) difference in California dropout rates over the last decade. Findings in this chapter provide clear evidence that negative effects of gun-violence have played a significant role in shaping state-level demographics.

We test whether self-employed individuals report more short-term psychological distress compared to paid employees. The ability to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams could lead self-employed individuals to experience feelings of positive emotion, autonomy, and confidence that can lower short-term psychological distress. Yet, the significant demands of self-employment undertakings might also induce feelings of negative emotions, helplessness, and lack of control typically associated with increased short-term psychological distress. We investigate the relationship between self-employment and self-reported, short-term psychological distress using a sample of 171,883 respondents from the 1997–2015 cross-sectional surveys of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). Results indicate that self-employment has a positive association with psychological distress. Findings are robust to matched-pair sampling and alternate measures of levels of psychological distress.

Education is widely regarded as one of the most critical aspects of society with great potential when successful and dire consequences when neglected. How to best arrange and manage a national education system is fought over constantly in the United States and around the world. Dominating this debate are sides that can be grouped into those who believe education is too important to be subject to the forces of a free market and those who believe education is too important to be subject to a government monopoly. Each side has selected their own set of purposes and goals to be chased while educating children and determined what appears to them, to be the most effective way to reach those goals.

The iconic ‘liberal theory’ of stratification fails to attend to the many types of downward mobility and wage loss generated by late‐industrial stratification systems. Although the liberal theory and its close cousins assume that loss and failure will be interpreted in individualistic terms, recent developments suggest instead that they are generating solidary groups that are increasingly locked into zero‐sum contest and successfully mobilized by politicians and other norm entrepreneurs. These developments imply a Marxisant future for late‐industrial inequality that bears scant resemblance to the highly individualized, unstructured, and non‐conflictual stratification system envisaged by the liberal theory. We outline a new post‐liberal theory of stratification that better captures the forces making for change and resistance in late‐industrial societies.