Black men born in the US Cotton South during the early twentieth century earned fifty percent less than their white counterparts. In this paper, I examine how transitory economic fluctuations effect the employment choices of farmers. Using US Census data, I find a negative correlation between wage work and cotton production for black farmers. The employment behavior of white households is unaffected by changes in cotton production. The results are consistent with black farmers using wage work as a coping mechanism in response to declining household incomes. The mechanism correlates with lower investments in human capital.

Critics of immigration often allege that immigration worsens US-born workers’ labor market outcomes, such as their employment and earnings. A large body of economic research has examined how immigration has affected natives’ wages. Most of these studies have concluded that immigration has little or no adverse effect on US natives’ wages. However, few studies have examined other key dimensions of US natives’ success in the labor market: unemployment and labor force participation. Understanding how immigration affects unemployment and labor force participation among US natives is important for several reasons. The foreign-born share of the population is the highest in a century, and immigrants account for 1 in 6 workers. Although unemployment is currently near a record low, it soared during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and was slow to return to pre-recession levels. Labor force participation, meanwhile, has been declining for years, a trend that accelerated with the recession and has yet to reverse. Unemployment and labor force participation are markedly worse among disadvantaged groups, such as less-educated workers, that may compete the most intensively with immigrants in the United States.

This paper analyzes the impact of out-migration of college graduates on state higher education investment. A three-stage least squares regression model with state and year fixed effects is developed and estimated, addressing the relationship between state legislative appropriations, tuition, and educated out-migration across 49 U.S. states from 2006-2015. The results support the hypothesis that states respond negatively to benefit spillovers in higher education: for every one percent increase in the rate of educated out-migration, state appropriations decrease by 1.92 percent (roughly $140 per student). These findings suggest that an education subsidy provided to states may be necessary to prevent underinvestment in higher education.

Objective: This article examines adoption as a strategy used by parents in the United States to fulfill their preference for a specific sex composition among their children. Background: Evidence from the United States suggests that parents with children of the same sex are more likely to continue childbearing, as parents generally desire at least one girl and one boy. What is unknown, however, is whether parents use adoption to fulfill this same preference. Method: Using data from the 2016 American Community Survey (n = 1,107,800 children), the authors test the relationships among the sex composition of preceding siblings, child sex, and adoption status. Results: Children who had same‐sex preceding siblings were more likely to be adopted, as opposed to biologically related to their parents, than children who had mixed‐sex preceding siblings. Furthermore, adopted children were more likely to be of the missing sex (i.e., adopted girls were more likely than were adopted boys to have only preceding brothers). Conclusion: These findings suggest a need to consider parental sex preferences and child sex in studies on adoption decisions. Furthermore, the results point to adoption as an additional mechanism parents can use to achieve a balanced sex composition among their children.

This paper investigates some of the causal factors which fomented slave insurrections , discovered conspiracies and panics in the antebellum Southern United States. The analysis relies on a novel dataset, which is an amalgam of decennial census data and a compilation of incidents of slave unrest as recorded by Aptheker (1993), as well as a theoretical model of slave rebellion. An influential strand within the economic history literature, referred to herein as the Wade hypothesis, which attributes the relative decline of Southern industry and urbanization to the inherent difficulty in supervising slaves in an urban environment, is analyzed. The finding that the probability of a slave insurrection event is not correlated with the degree of urbanization in a given county, even when an instrumental variable strategy is employed to rule out potential endogeneity, is interpreted as evidence against this hypothesis.

본 논문에서는 자녀의 숫자가 여성의 노동공급에 어떻게 영향을 미치는지 분석한다. 의학계에서 임의성을 가진다고 알려진 첫번째 임신에서의 유산을 도구변수로 사용하여 자녀의 수가 여성의 노동공급에 미치는 영향을 추정하였다. 미국의 National Survey of Family Growth의 최신 자료를 이용해 분석한 결과 여성의 노동공급은 자녀의 수가 증가해도 대체로 변하지 않는 것으로 나타났다.

The research conducted in this paper explores the determinants of an individual’s job satisfaction. The goal of this paper is to examine how one’s occupation affects overall satisfaction. Data from the National Survey of College Graduates (2010 & 2013) includes the use of overall satisfaction as well as component measures of satisfaction to allow for a more comprehensive understanding. The main models utilize logit regressions and funnel from looking at every occupation together to only including one occupation per model. Results show that with respect to overall satisfaction, post-secondary teachers and those in upper-management are the most satisfied with their jobs. Furthermore, satisfaction with respect to one’s salary is one of the biggest driving factors when determining overall satisfaction in every occupation.

This paper studies the effect of oil wealth on the provision of education in the early 20th century United States. Using information on the location and discovery of major oil fields, I find that oil wealth increased local revenue and education spending. The quality of white teachers increased, and oil-rich counties were more likely to participate in the Rosenwald school building program for blacks. In addition, student-teacher ratios for black school children declined substantially. However, I do not find increased school enrollment rates for either race.

Interest in rail transit and walkable built environments has increased in recent years as North American cities have invested large sums on these interventions and scholars have undertaken a vast research program to examine their impact on travel behavior, development, and property values. The economic impact of these “active” transportation interventions is particularly important to understand, given their large fixed cost and the desire of policy-makers to use them as economic development and urban revitalization tools. At the same time, new business creation is an important engine of sustainable local development, necessitating a more detailed understanding of the direct links between infrastructure investment and new business creation. To better understand this process, this dissertation examines the economic impact of rail transit systems and walkable built environments using several quantitative approaches, including quasi-experimental time series regression, spatial econometric approaches, and hierarchical linear modeling. The first chapter evaluates the impact of Phoenix’s light rail system, which opened in 2008, on new firm formation in specific industries. Findings show that the transit adjacency is worth an 88% increase in knowledge sector new starts, a 40% increase in service sector new starts, and a 28% increase in retail new starts at the time the system opened, when compared with automobile-accessible control areas. However, the light rail also appears to suffer from a ‘novelty factor’ – after the initial increase in new establishment activity in adjacent block groups, the effect diminishes at the rate of 8%, 6%, and 7% per year, respectively. The results also provide insight into the spatial extent of light rail impacts to new business formation, with areas 1 mile from stations observing 21% fewer retail new business starts and 12% fewer knowledge sector new starts than areas within ¼-mile of stations. The second chapter evaluates the relationship between transit station proximity and new business creation in five regions with varying levels of maturity in rail transit development and/or entrepreneurial ecosystems – Boston, San Jose, Austin, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. It tests a variety of spatial econometric models to find the best specification and compares the results to the kinds of non-spatial models currently used in the literature. This provides a better understanding of the role of various forms of spatial dependence in the transit—new business creation relationship and shows that existing models may overstate the impact of transit on new business creation. In addition, the paper teases out differences between regions, rail modes, and business types that can be usefully applied to a variety of urban contexts. Finally, the third chapter examines the importance of place-making in economic development by evaluating the relationship between specific urban design features – based on Jacobs’ “four generators of diversity” (1961) and Ewing and Cervero’s “Five-D’s” (2010) – and business sales volume using a hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) framework in Phoenix and Boston. The results indicate that specific features of walkable built environments are positively associated with business performance. However, the relationship between walkable built environments and business performance varies considerably depending on the type of business and city-level context being studied, indicating that significant nuance must be used when considering place-based economic interventions.

In the United States, achieving and maintaining high population immunization rates for a number of vaccines has become a public health priority, and this has resulted in the implementation of a broad set of vaccination policies. In this dissertation I rigorously examine several such policies that have been widely implemented in the United States in the past few decades. Through the application of established empirical methodologies, I am able to estimate the causal effects of these policies on a range of outcomes, and my results have clear policy implications. The first chapter, Effectiveness of Vaccination Recommendations versus Mandates: Evidence from the hepatitis A vaccine, provides novel evidence on the effectiveness of two vaccination policies targeted at infants and very young children– simple non-binding recommendations to vaccinate . . .

South Carolina women face obstacles in the pursuit of quality health care, representation in leadership, and economic security. Moving forward, policymakers should continue to promote equal workplace practices through policies such as the recently adopted legislation to combat pregnancy discrimination in the workplace.1 Policies that ensure equal pay for equal work; higher, livable wages; and access to reproductive health care will help secure the success of women and their families in South Carolina. Women need policies that reflect their roles as providers and caregivers. In South Carolina, mothers are the sole, primary, or co-breadwinners in 70.3 percent of families, and these numbers are higher for some women of color.2 The following policy recommendations can help support the economic security of women and families in South Carolina.

A negative relationship between income and fertility has persisted for so long that its existence is often taken for granted. One economic theory builds on this relationship and argues that rising inequality leads to greater differential fertility between rich and poor. We show that the relationship between income and fertility has flattened between 1980 and 2010 in the US, a time of increasing inequality, as high income families increased their fertility. These facts challenge the standard theory. We propose that marketization of parental time costs can explain the changing relationship between income and fertility. We show this result both theoretically and quantitatively, after disciplining the model on US data. We explore implications of changing differential fertility for aggregate human capital. Additionally, policies, such as the minimum wage, that affect the cost of marketization, have a negative effect on the fertility and labor supply of high income women. We end by discussing the insights of this theory to the economics of marital sorting.

This paper studies the effect of spatial sorting on inequality through two channels: spatial differences in technology and the endogenous organization of production. First, I document a new fact on the spatial differences in the organization of production. The number of workers per manager is decreasing in city size, overall and within industries. I develop and quantify a model of a system of cities where workers with different skills organize in production teams. The model yields continuous wage distributions in cities of different sizes that resemble the data.

Earning a postsecondary degree is a well-established pathway out of poverty, and degrees are especially life-changing for women raising children on their own. Analysis by the Institute for Women's Policy Research finds that in 2016, single mother poverty rates were an average of 33 percent lower at each additional level of education, with bachelor's degree attainment or higher leading to decreases in single mother poverty of over 40 percent compared with one degree lower. Just 13 percent of single mothers who hold a bachelor's degree live in poverty compared with 41 percent with only a high school diploma (Figure 1). Figure 1. Share of Women Aged 25 and Older Living in Poverty by Marital Status, Parental Status, and Educational Attainment, 2016 Notes: Single women include those who are never married, widowed, divorced, or separated and can include women living with a cohabiting partner. Single and married mothers include women with children under 18 years of age. Source: IWPR analysis of 2016 American Community Survey microdata (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Version 6.0). Increasing degree completion among single mothers would have a substantial effect on family economic security. Just 24 percent of single mothers aged 25 and older have an associate or bachelor's degree, compared with 27 percent of women without children and 37 percent of married mothers (Figure 2).

Research by Saint Louis University has shown that there has been a 171% increase in theforeign-born population in the St. Louis metropolitan region from 1990 through 2016. The St.Louis region now has a foreign-born population that is estimated to be 135,074. With theincrease in the foreign-born population, new questions have arisen about the changingcharacteristics of the foreign-born population that are making St. Louis their home.This report builds on the research currently being conducted at Saint Louis University, whichuses micro data from the American Community Survey (a.k.a. IPUMS). The micro datasetprovides information on individual level responses to the America Community Survey. TheIPUMS data allows researchers to answer questions that can’t be adequately answered using . . .

A large literature exploits geographic variation in the concentration of immigrants to identify their impact on a variety of outcomes. To address the endogeneity of immigrants' location choices, the most commonly-used instrument interacts national inflows by country of origin with immigrants' past geographic distribution. We present evidence that estimates based on this "shift-share" instrument conflate the short- and long-run responses to immigration shocks. If the spatial distribution of immigrant inflows is stable over time, the instrument is likely to be correlated with ongoing responses to previous supply shocks. Estimates based on the conventional shift-share instrument are therefore unlikely to identify the short-run causal effect. We propose a "multiple instrumentation" procedure that isolates the spatial variation arising from changes in the country-of-origin composition at the national level and permits us to estimate separately the short- and long-run effects. Our results are a cautionary tale for a large body of empirical work, not just on immigration, that rely on shift-share instruments for causal inference.

Early childhood is a crucial period for the development of socio-emotional and cognitive skills, and parental investments of time in children have an important influence on that development. However, scholars have documented large and growing disparities in maternal investments of time in children by parental social class. Yet, these existing estimates of class gaps in parenting time do not account for class differences in family structure nor for the homogamy of couples. We apply matching methods to the 2003-2016 American Time Use Survey data to generate synthetic parental dyads and so to more fully characterize class gaps in total parental time with children. We find that accounting for class gaps in partnership status by maternal education leads to greater absolute (though not relative) class gaps in total minutes of parental childcare. However, accounting for homogamy and specialization reveals substantially larger absolute and relative class gaps in total parental childcare.

Across job categories, tech pros earn a healthy salary. Now we’ve got a better idea of just how outsized it is compared to the “average” salary, especially if you’re young. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) takes a more granular look at Census findings and returns datasets anyone can use. Business Insider recently used the service to examine the average salary by age in the United States. As you might expect (or remember), it doesn’t pay to be young. The average 19-year-old makes $18,000 per year (which is at least better than Universal Basic Income). IPUMS data trends show earnings climb as we age, steadily. There’s no inflation to account for in this scenario. (If you’d like to see the full annual earnings sheet, Business Insider has it broken down from ages 18 through 70.)

This paper analyzes whether postsecondary training programs have kept up with shifts in the occupational structure of the labor market over the past decades. I show long-term trends in the distribution of degrees and certificates across occupation groupings in the nation's largest community college system. Using an instrumental variables approach I then estimate that an occupation's share of community college completions grows 0.47 percentage points for every percentage point increase in its share of employment. However, I show that this relationship is primarily due to increases in student demand rather than to colleges expanding capacity.

Finding top-rank products based on a given user’s preference is a user-view rank model that helps users to find their desired products. Recently, another query processing problem named reverse rank query has attracted significant research interest. The reverse rank query is a manufacturer-view model and can find users based on a given product. It can help to target potential users or find the placement for a specific product in marketing analysis. Unfortunately, previous reverse rank queries only consider one product, and they cannot identify the users for product bundling, which is known as a common sales strategy. To address the limitation, we propose a new query named aggregate reverse rank query to find matching users for a set of products. Three different aggregate rank functions (SUM, MIN, MAX) are proposed to evaluate a given product bundling in a variety of ways and target different users. To resolve these queries more efficiently, we propose a novel and sophisticated bound-and-filter framework. In the bound phase, two points are found to bound the query set for excluding candidates outside the bounds. In the filter phase, two tree-based methods are implemented with the bounds; they are the tree pruning method (TPM) and the double-tree method (DTM). The theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methods.