Abounding acts of repression committed in democracies have continued to be overlooked and under-analyzed by many researchers and scholars due to “democratic exceptionalism”. As the United States enters yet another consecutive year of declining political satisfaction and freedom. It has become pertinent that as conflict study researchers, scholars, and readers alike that there is a basic understanding of coercion including acts that have been committed within our own countries. Countless scholars have focused conflict study research on underdeveloped or emerging democracies, yet many have overlooked the seamy side of developed ones. This article aims to explain the relationship between the United States and state-sponsored repression from the 1990s to 2015. In hopes to better understand how variables like economic, social, and political vulnerabilities as well as race and sex influence repressive trends in the United States. In addition, this article hopes to extend the scope of conflict study research by including mass incarceration as a form of repression that has been used to control not only dissent but also satisfy the needs of elites to maintain a present state of affairs. This article tests various hypothesis to understand how repression continues to function in modern American society.

In this thesis I investigate the labor market outcomes following the imposition of restrictive measures against unauthorized labor. I do this by studying the causal effects of the Arizona’s migration laws LAWA and SB 1070 on labor market outcomes in terms of employment, wages and the usual hours worked per week. In 2008, Arizona implemented The Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA), demanding all employers to use the verification system E-Verify to validate the authorization of employees, and forbid employers of knowingly hire unauthorized immigrant workers. In 2010, The Arizona Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070) followed, illegalizing unauthorized workers to work or apply for a job in the state, and requiring immigrants to carry compulsory documents...

How does immigration affect labor market opportunities in a receiving country? This paper contributes to the voluminous literature by reporting findings from a new (but very old) data set. Beginning in 1951, the Conference Board constructed a monthly job vacancy index by counting the number of help-wanted ads published in local newspapers in 51 metropolitan areas. We use the Help-Wanted Index (HWI) to document how immigration changes the number of job vacancies in the affected labor markets. Our analysis begins by revisiting the Mariel episode. The data reveal a marked decrease in Miami’s HWI relative to many alternative control groups in the first 4 or 5 years after Mariel, followed by recovery afterwards. We find a similar initial decline in the number of job vacancies after two other supply shocks that hit Miami over the past few decades: the initial wave of Cuban refugees in the early 1960s, as well as the 1995 refugees who were initially detoured to Guantanamo Bay. We also look beyond Miami and estimate the generic spatial correlations that dominate the literature, correlating changes in the HWI with immigration across metropolitan areas. These correlations consistently indicate that more immigration is associated with fewer job vacancies. The trends in the HWI seem to most strongly reflect changing labor market conditions for low-skill workers (in terms of both wages and employment), and a companion textual analysis of help-wanted ads in Miami before and after the Mariel supply shock suggests a slight decline in the relative number of low-skill job vacancies.

We estimate the effect of health insurance coverage on opioid use disorder treatment utilization and availability by exploiting cross-state variation in effective dates of Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that aggregate opioid admissions to specialty treatment facilities increased 18% in expansion states, most of which involved outpatient medication-assisted treatment (MAT). Opioid admissions from Medicaid beneficiaries increased 113% without crowding out admissions from individuals with other health insurance. These effects appeared to be driven by market entry of select MAT providers and by greater acceptance of Medicaid payments among existing MAT providers. Moreover, effects were largest in expansion states with comprehensive MAT coverage. Our findings suggest that Medicaid expansions resulted in substantial utilization and availability gains to clinically efficacious and cost-effective pharmacological treatments, implying potential benefits of expanding Medicaid to non-expansion states and extending MAT coverage.

The social safety net faces a period of transition as policymakers seek significant changes to an array of programs that help low-income families pay for food, health care, housing, and other basic needs. These changes are being considered in an economic environment that exposes many families to financial insecurity even as the economy approaches full employment in 2018. As new program rules and budgets are established, policymakers and the public need timely information to understand how these policies will affect people who rely on public assistance. In December 2017, the Urban Institute launched the Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey (WBNS) to monitor changes in individual and family health and well-being as policymakers make changes to federal safety net programs and the labor market continues to evolve. This new annual survey is a key component of Urban's From Safety Net to Solid Ground project supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and other foundations. The project offers insights into the implications of proposed changes to programs such as Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and housing assistance for the well-being of people striving to cover their basic needs. The WBNS builds on the sampling strategy and survey design employed by the Urban Institute for its Health Reform Monitoring Survey (HRMS). Launched in 2013, the HRMS is a survey of the nonelderly population that explores the value of cutting-edge internet-based survey methods to monitor the Affordable Care Act before data from federal surveys are available. The WBNS draws from the same internet panel as the HRMS and similarly provides data well ahead of federal surveys, which have longer time lags between data collection and the release of estimates. Further, the WBNS is unique in the comprehensive nature of its content, which covers a broad cross-section of topics relevant to health and material hardship, including health insurance, housing, food security, employment, family income, program participation, and family financial security. No single federal survey covers the same breadth of issues addressed in the WBNS. These features of the WBNS will provide policymakers and

Demographic data have been an important part of IECAM’s early childhood data collection. The main source of demographic data is the U.S. Census’s American Community Survey. We have the following demographic data for young children in Illinois: population by age/age groups, by race/ethnicity; poverty, parental employment, and household language use. Available geographies include a wide range of regions in the state of Illinois from counties to school districts, we also have a few special-purpose regions, such as the ISBE and IDHS regions.

This study examines the main push and pull factors driving Hispanic self-employment in the USA by modeling the self-employment decision as a function of sectoral earnings differences, country of origin, and other factors. Findings indicate that a main reason His- panics engage in self-employment is they can earn more working for themselves than in wage/salary work. Im- migrants appear to be pushed into self-employment as a result of limited opportunities in the wage work sector. Although low relative earnings in wage/salary work could push workers with limited English proficiency into self-employment, our findings indicate barriers to this. Results suggest that workers pulled into self- employment are those with more work experience and a college degree. Workers who originate from Southern South America and Colombia have relatively high self- employment rates, while Mexico-origin workers have relatively low self-employment rates. We also uncover differences across Hispanic origin groups in terms of the influence of gender, education, and personal wealth on self-employment participation.

This dissertation empirically measures how the laws governing taxation and finance affect behavior and addresses how those laws should adapt to changing circumstances. The first chapter examines the effect of joint-taxation and “marriage bonuses” on marriage formation in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It uses a natural experiment to identify the effect and finds that tax incentives caused an increase in the marriage rate of up to 9%. The second chapter shows that idiosyncratic risk has spiked in every economic downturn since the 1920s and develops new models to explain this phenomenon. It then explores the implications of spikes in idiosyncratic risk for corporate and securities law. The third chapter compares the existing corporate tax to a hypothetical “cash flow tax” to determine how much of the corporate tax base is composed of the normal return to capital. It finds that the normal return to capital made up a relatively small percentage of the corporate tax base over the last 20 years. Because taxes on the normal return to capital are the most likely to be passed on to labor, this suggests that labor’s long-run share of the corporate tax burden is likely to be lower than typically thought.

By reviewing US state-level panel data on infrastructure spending and on per capita income inequality from 1950 to 2010, this paper sets out to test whether an empirical link exists between infrastructure and inequality. Panel regressions with fixed effects show that an increase in the growth rate of spending on highways and higher education in a given decade correlates negatively with Gini indices at the end of the decade, thus suggesting a causal effect from growth in infrastructure spending to a reduction in inequality through better access to education and opportunities for employment. More significantly, this relationship is more pronounced with inequality at the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution. In addition, infrastructure expenditures on highways are shown to be more effective at reducing inequality. By carrying out a counterfactual experiment, the results show that those US states with a significantly higher bottom Gini coefficient in 2010 had underinvested in infrastructure during the previous decade. From a policy-making perspective, new innovations in finance for infrastructure investments are developed, for the US, other industrially advanced countries and also for developing economies.

Prior research shows reduced criminality to be a beneficial consequence of education policies that raise the school leaving age. This paper studies how crime reductions occurred in a sequence of state-level dropout age reforms enacted between 1980 and 2010 in the United States. These reforms changed the shape of crime-age profiles, reflecting both a temporary incapacitation effect and a more sustained, longer run crime reducing effect. In contrast to the previous research looking at earlier US education reforms, crime reduction does not arise solely as a result of education improvements, and so the observed longer run effect is interpreted as dynamic incapacitation. Additional evidence based on longitudinal data combined with an education reform from a different setting in Australia corroborates the finding of dynamic incapacitation underpinning education policy-induced crime reduction.

The U.S. student population is increasingly comprised of racial/ethnic minority and immigrant students. Drawing on national-level data, we document the gaps in educational achievement and attainment for minority and immigrant students that are apparent at all levels of education, from early education through postsecondary schooling. These achievement gaps reflect, in part, the broader racial and ethnic hierarchy of the U.S., but the experiences of immigrant-origin minority students additionally contribute to the complexity of racial and ethnic stratification in education. Though research shows that socioeconomic status accounts for much of the differences in achievement, factors such as schools and teachers, peer relationships, and neighborhoods and communities may also contribute to the variation in academic outcomes.

In 1868, the state of Georgia began punishing convicts by leasing them to private companies. Georgia’s transition from penitentiary confinement to convict leasing coincided with a shift in the composition of its inmates. Fifteen years after the Civil War, African-Americans in Georgia were imprisoned at a rate more than 12 times that of whites. This article finds that black men were most likely to be imprisoned in the convict lease system where they overcame whites’ efforts to preserve their position as dependent agricultural laborers. Where elite white landowners were able to reconstitute a dependent agricultural labor force, they had little reason to use the convict lease system to punish their workers. But in urban counties and in counties where African-Americans had acquired considerable landholdings, black men faced comparatively high rates of imprisonment for property crimes.

We study whether banks are riskier if managers have less liability. We focus on New England between 1867 and 1880 and consider the introduction of marital property laws that limited liability for newly wedded bankers. We find that banks with managers who married after a legal change had more leverage, were more likely to "evergreen" loans and violate lending rules, and lost more capital and deposits in the Long Depression of 1873-1878. This effect was most pronounced for bankers with wives from relatively wealthy families. We find no evidence that limiting liability increased firm investment at the county level.

Despite employing only 11 percent of all workers and 15 percent of male workers today, manufacturing industries are at the center of most discussions of how to grow the American economy. This is because, in the minds of many, the economy is about producing things, which leads to other economic activities-advertising, researching, transporting goods to market, and retailing. Also, just 50 years ago manufacturing industries employed 36 percent of male workers. Given that the 1950s and 1960s were prosperous, many people tie the explosive growth of the middle class after World War II to the relatively high wages of male manufacturing workers.

Research on sex differences in humans documents gender differences in sensory, motor, and spatial aptitudes. These aptitudes, as captured by Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) codes, predict the occupational choices of men and women in the directions indicated by this research. We simulate that eliminating selection on these skills reduces the Duncan index of gender-based occupational segregation by 20 % to 23 % in 1970 and 2012, respectively. Eliminating selection on DOT variables capturing other accounts of this segregation has a smaller impact.

This paper investigates the causal effects of agglomeration on hours worked by the self-employed. The IV estimations instrument for urbanization and localization using the minimum distance from the work Public Use Microdata Area centroid to the United States’ coastlines and estimated industry share in 1930. The 2SLS results demonstrate that urbanization and localization decrease and increase hours worked of the self-employed, respectively. These results are mainly from outsourcing and competition, whereas sorting, simultaneity, and agglomeration wage effect are less likely to be influential. Additionally, only small business owners perceive the pressures of competition in localization economies. The young unincorporated self-employed are more likely to be affected by peer competitors, whereas the elder unincorporated perceive more pressures from large firms.

Longitudinal analysis using samples from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics suggests that men’s income and wages decrease after entering into single fatherhood by marital separation. This loss exceeds what can be explained by marital separation alone. Using a difference in difference approach, I estimate that single fatherhood suppresses men’s annual income by more than $8,000 per year, putting these men and their children at increased economic risk. Similar labor market changes are experienced by widower fathers, a subset of exogenous single fathers. The apparent effects show persistence after single fathers remarry, but mostly diminish after children mature and leave the household. These results stand at odds with previous research suggesting that fatherhood increases men’s wages and hours, and that male labor market outcomes are not significantly influenced by housework.

I document the relationship between establishment size and various measures of workers' health. Workers at larger establishments are more likely to have chronic health conditions, have had a bed disability day in the last 12 months and be obese. They are also less likely to be smokers. Results for other health measures depend on the specification. My results may help in more effectively targeting workplace wellness programs. The results may also inform the design of better public interventions aimed at reducing occupational injuries. I discuss the relevance of my results for the establishment size-wage premium.

As part of the Illinois–New York Child Care Research Partnership, this report explores the local child care markets in two areas in each state: in New York, Nassau and Westchester counties, and in Illinois, Cook County and a seven-county region in the southwest part of the state. Our analyses address the following descriptive research questions: 1. How are child care programs with distinct characteristics distributed in each of the four study sites? 2. How does the supply of child care match the heterogeneous needs of subsidy-eligible families? 3. Are there patterns of alignment or misalignment that suggest both needs and opportunities for program development or policy intervention? We examine the potential demand for subsidized care in these areas using data from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, giving particular attention to low-income parents working nonstandard schedules. We also identify neighborhoods with large shares of households with limited English proficiency (LEP) because these families may have additional care needs and preferences. We then use data from child care resource and referral agencies and state child care subsidy records to examine the supply of care available to families in different communities, paying particular attention to the type of care, subsidy program participation, hours of operation, child age requirements, national accreditation, and participation in the state quality rating and improvement system.