This study employs a multilevel research design to examine business ownership across ethnic groups inthe greater Los Angeles area. It finds significant divide between white and non-white businesses along the labor markethierarchy. The entrepreneurial environment, ethnic residential communities, ethnic business spatial clustering, ethnic con-centration in particular niche sectors, and ethnic diversity in local areas are all related to business ownership and disparitiesacross ethnic groups. The results suggest that ethnically diverse neighborhoods and co-ethnic business communities couldprovide a conducive institutional environment and resources for minority businesses to start. However, in contrast to whiteowned businesses, ethnic minority businesses’ concentration in the low-end and easy-entry sectors may reinforce their dis-advantages and hinder upward economic mobility. This study provides policy implications for community regional devel-opment through entrepreneurship especially when race and ethnicity are concerned.

This chapter focuses on women, work, and family, with a particular focus on differences by educational attainment. First, we review long-term trends regarding family structure, participation in the labor market, and time spent in household production, including time with children. In looking at family, we focus on mothers with children. Next we examine key challenges faced by mothers as they seek to combine motherhood and paid work: workforce interruptions associated with childbearing, the impact of home and family responsibilities, and constraints posed by workplace culture. We also consider the role that gendered norms play in shaping outcomes for mothers. We conclude by discussing policies that have the potential to increase gender equality in the workplace and mitigate the considerable conflicts faced by many women as they seek to balance work and family.

We present theory and evidence highlighting the role of natural amenities in neighbourhood dynamics, suburbanization, and variation across cities in the persistence of the spatial distribution of income. Our model generates three predictions that we confirm using a novel database of consistent-boundary neighbourhoods in U.S. metropolitan areas, 1880–2010, and spatial data for natural features such as coastlines and hills. First, persistent natural amenities anchor neighbourhoods to high incomes over time. Secondly, naturally heterogeneous cities exhibit persistent spatial distributions of income. Thirdly, downtown neighbourhoods in coastal cities were less susceptible to the widespread decentralization of income in the mid-twentieth century and experienced an increase in income more quickly after 1980.

Increasing the number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees is a national priority and one way to promote the socioeconomic mobility of students from low-income families. Prior research examining why demand for STEM majors outstrips supply often points to students’ lack of academic preparation, preferences for non-STEM majors, or a lack of information. This paper draws on a randomized experiment to investigate an alternative explanation related to resource constraints. Findings indicate that university students from low-income families who were offered additional need-based grant aid were 7.87 percentage points more likely to declare a STEM major than similar peers, representing a 42% increase. There is no evidence that the grant offer influenced the share of students who declared a major; rather, it reduced the likelihood of majoring in a non-STEM field. Need-based grants thus appears to be one avenue for increasing the share of low-income students studying STEM.

We present a joint modeling approach for multiple imputation of missing continuous and categorical variables using Bayesian mixture models. The approach extends the idea of focused clustering, in which one separates variables into two sets before estimating the mixture model. Focus variables include variables with high rates of missingness and possibly other variables that could help improve the quality of the imputations. Non-focus variables include the remainder. In this way, one can use a rich sub-model for the focus set and a simpler model for the non-focus set, thereby concentrating fitting power on the variables with the highest rates of missingness. We present a procedure for specifying which variables with low rates of missingness to include in the focus set. We examine the performance of the imputation procedure using simulation studies based on artificial data and on data from the American Community Survey.

An empire of industry moved through West Virginia prior to the US Civil War, and saw a breed of capitalists and politicians who acquired control of land through purchase and through patent, developed control of the vote through industrial political influence, and encouraged the West Virginian to separate from an eastern Virginian society based in planter-elite agrarian society. The West Virginian who believed that self-sufficiency and subsistence farming could sustain his family saw his vote for statehood and separation from the Old Dominion transformed into an industrial coup. Land slowly but steadily slipped away from the hands of the mountaineer and into the hands of industrialists who extracted wealth, transforming the new state into an environment that privileged the capitalist and industry above the yeoman farmer. For the industrialists who made West Virginia their home, it appears that extraction of minerals and timber was not the only value taken from West Virginia. Political power and entre into the world of the global industrialist may have been a strong motivating factor, as opposed to simply reaping financial rewards. This work seeks to highlight the influence of these industrialists at the local level in such a way as to demonstrate the weight of this collective group of individuals upon the crafting of West Virginia statehood.

Recent literature analysing wage effects of immigration assumes labour supply is fixed across education-experience cells. This article departs from this assumption estimating a labour market equilibrium dynamic discrete choice model on U.S. micro-data for 1967–2007. Individuals adjust to immigration by changing education, participation, and/or occupation. Adjustments are heterogeneous: 4.2–26.2% of prime-aged native males change their careers; of them, some switch to white-collar careers and increase education by about three years; others reduce labour market attachment and reduce education also by about three years. These adjustments mitigate initial effects on wages and inequality. Natives that are more similar to immigrants are the most affected on impact, but also have a larger margin to adjust and differentiate. Adjustments also produce a self-selection bias in the estimation of wage effects at the lower tail of the distribution, which the model corrects.

I show that the risk of incurring large employee departure-related costs, unrelated to trade secret-related costs, impacts firms' capital structure decisions. I proxy for these costs with the cross-industry labor mobility of a firm's workers using a novel dynamic textual measure for this mobility based on network centrality. When firms face a higher risk of employee departures to firms in other industries, they maintain a lower debt ratio, hold more cash, and pay less dividends. The effect of cross-industry labor mobility on firms' capital structure is stronger for firms with more workers who are skilled or in managerial occupations, firms in labor-intensive industries, firms with greater hiring costs, financially constrained firms, and when workers have lower switching costs. Conversely, the effect of cross-industry labor mobility on firms' capital structure is weaker for firms in industries with higher relative performance and valuations. To infer causality, I make use of several different exogenous shocks to employee departure and job switching costs. Overall, my findings imply that firms choose more conservative financial policies when they face a greater risk of incurring large employee departure costs.

This paper exploits quasi-experimental variation in mortality from cardiovascular diseases across U.S. states to establish a positive causal link between adult life expectancy and average wages per worker. A cohort-specific analysis reveals that wage gains accrue to prime-age workers between 25 and 54 as well as old-age workers above 65. This pattern is consistent with a shift in life-cycle earnings toward a profile that increases more steeply for young ages and that flattens out more slowly at advanced ages. Health improvements, higher educational attainment, and changes in individual behavior constitute potential channels for this shift. JEL-classification: I15, J11, J24, O40

This paper examines how Social Security dependent benefits impact the labor supply of married women aged 25–54. Specifically, I investigate whether the decrease in the rate of return to women's work discourages them from participating in the labor force by simulating expected net payroll tax rates and dependent benefits. Dependent benefits may reduce the net return to women's work, as they usually pay the full payroll tax without receiving marginal benefits for additional earnings if they claim benefits based on their husbands' earnings records. The results show that high net payroll tax rates reduce married women's work incentives, particularly those near retirement age.

In today’s labor market, the majority of individuals experience a lapse in employment at some point in their careers, most commonly due to unemployment from job loss or leaving work to care for family or children. Existing scholarship has studied how unemployment affects subsequent career outcomes, but the consequences of temporarily “opting out” of work to care for family are relatively unknown. In this article, I ask: how do “opt out” parents fare when they re-enter the labor market? I argue that opting out signals a violation of ideal worker norms to employers—norms that expect employees to be highly dedicated to work—and that this signal is distinct from two other types of résumé signals: signals produced by unemployment due to job loss and the signal of motherhood or fatherhood. Using an original survey experiment and a large-scale audit study, I test the relative strength of these three résumé signals. I find that mothers and fathers who temporarily opted out of work to care for family fared significantly worse in terms of hiring prospects, relative to applicants who experienced unemployment due to job loss and compared to continuously employed mothers and fathers. I examine variation in these signals’ effects across local labor markets, and I find that within competitive markets, penalties emerged for continuously employed mothers and became even greater for opt out fathers. This research provides a causal test of the micro- and macro-level demand-side processes that disadvantage parents who leave work to care for family. This is important because when opt out applicants are prevented from re-entering the labor market, employers reinforce standards that exclude parents from full participation in work.

This paper proposes a measure of the intensity of competition in labor markets on the basis of limited data. Large-scale socioeconomic surveys often lack detailed information on competitive behavior. It is particu- larly difficult to determine whether a worker moves between the different segments of the labor market. Here, the Maximum Entropy principle is used to make inferences about the unobserved mobility decisions of work- ers in US household data. A class of models is proposed that reflects a parsimonious conception of competition in the Smithian tradition, as well as being consistent with a range of detailed behavioral models. The Quantal Response Statistical Equilibrium (QRSE) class of models can be seen to give robust microfoundations to the persistent patterns of wage inequality among equivalent workers. Furthermore, the QRSE effectively endogenizes the definition of labor market segments, allowing us to in- terpret the estimated competition intensities as partial measures of labor market segmentation. Models of this class generate predictions that cap- ture between 97.5 and 99.5 percent of the informational content of the sample wage distributions. In addition to providing a very good fit to the wage data, the predictions are also consistent with bounded rationality of workers.

In this dissertation, I analyze the impact of three environmental education strategies implemented in rural northern Tanzania focused on forest-related knowledge. In Chapter Five, I assess the impact of two strategies—face-to-face group discussion and mobile phone texting—on knowledge. I also compare the effectiveness of the two strategies in terms of change in knowledge among participants and cost-effectiveness. I find a positive association between environmental education and knowledge, but only for the face-to-face group discussion strategy. In Chapter Six, I assess the impact of using a photo-map (a high-resolution map made from satellite imagery) on knowledge about forest health status. Increasingly, satellite images are being used for knowledge transfer and land use planning as they facilitate visual learning. While survey data show no evidence of increased knowledge, qualitative data suggest that knowledge increased among participants. To understand the actual health status of the forest, I analyzed satellite imagery and determined how the forest's land use land cover changed between 2003 and 2014. I compared land cover results with participants' knowledge about health status. Results suggest that people's answers to the question about forest health status were politicized; participants ensured that their answers aligned with community's conservation obligations. In Chapter Seven, I assess factors that influence engagement in environmentally friendly behaviors and found that, as in previous studies, both knowledge and sense of personal responsibility are strong determinants of engagement among people in Loliondo.

The American Civil War stands apart culturally from other US conflicts in the level of participation and dedication to the cause among citizens and soldiers alike and a distinct approach to themes of religion, Nature, symbolism, the individual, divinity, and immortality. While other historians have researched various aspects of Civil War culture, few have yet addressed with comparative research the distinct sources of these influences. One particular philosophical component researched here that was not present at other times in American history is that of Transcendentalism, which developed in the Northern states prior to and during the Civil War. Other historians have not yet given Transcendentalism's influence on the war's culture serious consideration. This research examines Transcendentalist principles in Civil War-era primary source literature and compares it to primary sources from other American wars. An apparent difference in these documents is a common reflection of the Transcendentalists' belief in the divine equality, immortality, and unity of all people and the individual's ability to influence the world. Transcendental philosophy emphasized intuition, character, and the metaphysical as the basis of reality and experience. Thus the Transcendentalist influence led the culture to place the criteria of individual value, accomplishment, and even victory, outside the experience of physical sense or situation, helping the population to cope with wartime trauma and lending spiritual breadth to the cause. As a result, there grew a wartime culture of individual devotion, respect, and a distinct metaphysical spirituality that sharply contrasts with that of other American wars where these aspects were often completely absent.

The background statistics are revealing. Boston has the sixth-highest proportion of foreign-born residents among the twenty-five largest U.S. cities. Between 1990 and 2010, Boston's foreign-born population grew from 114,597 to 167,311. Immigrants now account for 26.7% of the city's residents, up from 20% in 1990 and 13% in 1970. This is nearly twice the Massachusetts state percentage of 14%. Some suburbs had an even higher percentage of foreign-born in 2010: Chelsea (45%), Malden (41%), and Lynn (30%). And East Boston had a population of over 50% foreign-born.

My main inspiration for this project came from a beautiful visualization called A Day in the Life of Americans by Nathan Yau from Flowing Data. In my research to inspect the inner workings of this visualization, I came across a replica of this project by a group of Harvard students . This project by the Harvard students inspired some of the features that I added to the original visualization. However, the data used in both of these projects was from 2014, and more importantly, it was about the whole U.S. population. As a student who is in their last semester at college, I wanted to see a more relatable aspect. In other words, my main question for this project is how U.S. full-time college students spend their day. Specifically, I wanted to visualize the duration and the transition, examine the distribution and the differences of the activities by groups.

This paper examines the coevolution of land use and zoning in Seattle from 1920 to 2015. Multiple waves of zoning and land use conversion data at the parcel level allow for a decomposition of the long-run effects of zoning and an exploration of the mechanisms through which zoning influenced future land use. In particular, I disentangle short-run impacts on land use from long-term institutional hysteresis, showing that the latter played a sizable role in shaping future land use. Additionally, data on variances allows me to examine early compliance levels, an underexplored topic with implications for long-run impacts. While much has been written about persistence in urban form due to purely economic forces, relatively little research has explored how institutional forces can entrench or alter this trajectory, and I find that such institutional constraints can have substantial influence.

We conduct an information experiment about college returns and costs embedded within a representative survey of US household heads. Baseline perceptions of college costs and benefits are substantially biased, with larger biases among lower-income and non-college households. Respondents are randomly exposed to objective information about average college “returns” or costs. We find a significant impact of the “returns” experiment, persisting in a follow-up survey two months later: intended college attendance expectations increase by about 0.2 of the standard deviation in the baseline likelihood, and gaps by household income or parents’ education decline by 20–30%. We find no impact of the cost information treatment. Further analysis supports the information's salience, as opposed to information-based updating, as the main channel through which the returns intervention impacts intentions.

The process of data mining with differential privacy produces results that are affected by two types of noise: sampling noise due to data collection and privacy noise that is designed to prevent the reconstruction of sensitive information. In this paper, we consider the problem of designing confidence intervals for the parameters of a variety of differentially private machine learning models. The algorithms can provide confidence intervals that satisfy differential privacy (as well as the more recently proposed concentrated differential privacy) and can be used with existing differentially private mechanisms that train models using objective perturbation and output perturbation.

This thesis will examine the overall impacts that obesity (BMI) has on productivity characterized as the number of hours typically worked per week and will then compare this relationship between active and sedentary industries. The data was obtained from IPUMS 2010 Health Survey. The overall findings of this paper reveal that there is a negative correlation between BMI and number of hours worked per week, supporting my expectations and most of the previous literature. The findings also suggest that individuals in active roles have a higher productivity penalty, missing 1.21 more work hours per week than those in sedentary positions who miss 0.71 hours per week compared to their healthy weight counterparts. This paper will address previous literature on the topic, my own econometric model as well as limitations to my study.