In this article, we provide a framework for determining when it is optimal to move when labormarket opportunities are declining. We model the decision to migrate as akin to owning afinancial option in which the exercise price is the fixed cost of moving. We show that a higherfixed cost associated with moving and a higher standard deviation of the quality of the labormarket reduce the incentive to migrate. We then empirically examine whether the standarddeviation of indicators of labor market quality reduce the likelihood of migration. Our findingsstrongly support this hypothesis, and imply that for the relatively mobile population of high-skilled workers the counterfactual outmigration rates that would obtain if future labor-marketquality were known with certainty are more than twice observed rates.

How did personal wealth affect the likelihood southerners fought for the Confederate Army in the American Civil War? We offer competing accounts for how we should expect individual wealth, in the form of land, and atrociously, in slaves, to affect white men’s decisions to join the Confederate Army. We assemble a dataset on roughly 3.9 million white citizens in Confederate states, and we show that slaveowners were more likely to fight in the Confederate Army than non-slaveowners. To see if these links are causal, we exploit a randomized land lottery in 19thcentury Georgia. Households of lottery winners owned more slaves in 1850 and were more likely to have sons who fought in the Confederate Army than were households who did not win the lottery. Our results suggest that for wealthy southerners, the stakes associated with the conflict’s threat to end the institution of slavery overrode the incentives to free-ride and to avoid paying the costs of war.

This dissertation explores the role of health and healthcare delivery for the well-being of individuals in retirement. The summary section provides an introduction to the themes explored throughout this dissertation. Chapters 1 and 2 consider public policies regarding long-term care delivery methods. The final chapter, chapter 3, explores how employer-provided retirement benefits and health interact to influence the retirement behavior and impact the well-being of the older population. This dissertation explores two important decisions facing older individuals- long-term care choices and retirement decisions. The findings in this dissertation are relevant to understanding the role of health status and public healthcare programs in well-being of the elderly. These will also help inform policy decisions regarding public provision of long-term services and design of policies incentivizing later retirement.

What are the effects of immigration on education, income and inequality, and marriage market? Migrants consists a large share of the population in the U.S. and they are a small but expanding group in South Korea. Studies have investigated the effect of immigration on various fields such as the labor market, but there are many aspects of life that the effects have not been explored. My dissertation research explores the effect of immigration on choosing a major in college education, matching between workers and managers, and choosing a spouse. First chapter analyzes the effect of country of origin on the college major choice of second generation immigrants. I use the American Community Survey (ACS) 2009-2013 as primary dataset and focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) major. I use the immigrants who are born in a foreign country and migrated to the U.S. between age 0 and 16 as proxy for second generation immigrants. Using random effects model and controlling for age of arrival, I estimate the effect of each country of origin on choosing a STEM major and decompose the country-specific. Results show that immigrant children from many countries are significantly more likely to choose a STEM major compared to natives. Decomposition shows that selection into migration is more important than the origin country characteristics, and immigrant children are more likely to choose a STEM major when there was a stronger positive selection for the parent cohort immigrants. Second chapter with Jaerim Choi studies the effect of inflow of immigrants on wages and inequality of natives. Adopting the worker-manager matching model from the trade literature, I set up a model where inflow of immigrants changes the matching between workers and managers. As a consequence, native workers and native managers with heterogeneous skill levels are affected differently through changes in the match ratio and the match quality. This impacts wages and inequality of natives. Using the U.S. Census and American Community Survey, I empirically test the model with inflow of immigrants in the U.S. 1980-2010. Using a shift-share instrumental variable for the stock of immigrants, I find that inflow of low-skilled immigrants affects native workers through the change in match quality. Consistent with the theory, inequality within native workers increases.

In this paper, I study the impact of legal differences in state employment nondiscrimination acts (ENDAs) for gay men and lesbian women on labor market outcomes. Employing a DDD approach, I show that enacting an employment non-discrimination act is associated with increased wages of gay men and decreased employment of lesbian women. If all employment non-discrimination acts are treated as identical, these laws increased the hourly wages of gay men by 2.7% and decreased the employment of lesbian women by 1.7% and their hours worked by 0.7 hours. The results show that the strength of the law can result in heteroge-neous effects of the laws for gay men, but not for lesbian women. ENDAs with both punitive and compensatory damage provisions resulted in smaller wage increases for gay men than ENDAs with only compensatory damage provisions. ENDAs with longer statutes of limitations for complaints increased the employment of gay men, whereas laws with shorter statutes of limitations decreased employment. Based on the estimates from the state-level employment non-discrimination acts, I argue that extending federal protections under Title VII would lead to a small increase in the wages of gay men, but would significantly reduce the employment of lesbian women.

The older population is diverse, and will only become more so in the coming years. This article documents the diversity of the older population, and emphasizes how the changing demographics of that population present specific challenges for older women. We examine how the socially conditioned categories of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation are associated with differential health and resource profiles, which result from the dominant structures and cultural norms that characterize caregiving, job markets, and government policies.

The number of persons aged 65 years and older is expected to double to 92 million in the US by 2060, representing a potentially large social and financial burden of age-related neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and dementias and Parkinson’s disease (PD).Thus effective preventative public health strategies are essential. Regular physical activity (PA) and an active lifestyle have many health benefits, and evidence has accumulated that PA preserves brain structures and functions via multiple physiologic mechanisms, including mediation of inflammation and a general reduction of cardiovascular risk factors. In the Parkinson’s Environment and Gene (PEG) case-control population-based study, we enrolled 357 incident PD cases and 341 controls in central California and assessed PA levels via self-report of (1) overall PA over 4 age periods; (2) competitive sports; and (3) occupational histories. Our findings suggest that higher lifetime moderate to vigorous activity, especially consistently high level of such activities throughout adulthood and sports activities in youth were negatively associated with PD risk, but we found no beneficial role for occupational physical activity. We further examine how PA at the late-life influence the risk of dementia/cognitive impairment without dementia (CIND) using a prospective cohort, Sacramento Area Latino Study on Aging (SALSA) study, in which 1789 older Mexican Americans were enrolled at baseline and a majority actively followed between 1998 and 2008. We used Cox proportional hazards regression models to estimate the individual and joint effects of PA, apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 and diabetes status on risk of dementia/CIND and observed a nearly 10-fold increased risk among those with all three risk factors. Results from mediation analyses indicate that some of the PA effects on mortality and dementia/CIND but not depression might be mediated through wellknown inflammatory pathways represented by biomarkers, specifically interleukins 6 (IL-6) and/or tumor necrosis factor - alpha (TNF-α). However, a large proportion of the PA effects on mortality, cognition, and mood seems to operate independently of the inflammatory pathways or the biomarkers we had available and thus remain unexplained. Taken together, our results provide support for the hypothesis that PA protects against the onset of neurodegenerative diseases and all-cause mortality, and they suggest that antiinflammatory action may partly explain the protective effects of PA on dementia/CIND and mortality.

This paper first documents trends in employment rates and then reviews what is known about the various factors that have been proposed to explain the decline in the overall employment-to-population ratio between 1999 and 2016. Population aging has had a notable effect on the overall employment rate over this period, but within-age-group declines in employment among young and prime age adults have been at least as important. Our review of the evidence leads us to conclude that labor demand factors, in particular trade and the penetration of robots into the labor market, are the most important drivers of observed within-group declines in employment. Labor supply factors, most notably increased participation in disability insurance programs, have played a less important but not inconsequential role. Increases in the real value of the minimum wage and in the share of individuals with prison records also have contributed modestly to the decline in the aggregate employment rate. In addition to these factors, whose effects we roughly quantify, we also identify a set of potentially important factors about which the evidence is too preliminary to draw any clear conclusion. These include improvements in leisure technology, changing social norms, increased drug use, growth in occupational licensing, and the costs and challenges associated with child care. Our evidence-driven ranking of factors should be useful for guiding future discussions about the sources of decline in the aggregate employment-to-population ratio and consequently the likely efficacy of alternative policy approaches to increasing employment rates.

Returns to experience for U.S. workers have changed over the post-war period.This paper argues that a simple model goes a long way towards replicating these changes. The model features three well-known ingredients: (i)an aggregate production function with constant skill-biased technical change; (ii) cohort qualities that vary with average years of schooling; and crucially (iii) time-invariant age-efficiency profiles. The model quantitatively accounts for changes in longitudinal and cross-sectional returns to experience, as well as the differential evolution of the college wage premium for young and old workers.

In this dissertation I answer questions surrounding the division of wealth and income in the U.S. economy. In the first 2 essays I look at the impact of fertility and transfer taxes on the wealth distribution. In the final essay I use recession to show motivators behind occupational sorting . . . The literature shows that standard heterogeneous agents models struggle to replicate the magnitude of the wealth inequality observed in the data. For example, the Gini coefficient of the wealth distribution generated in a baseline Aiyagari (1994) model is only around 0.4, while the U.S. wealth gini coefficient is close to 0.8 (see Quadrini and R´ıos-Rull (1997)). An important part of the puzzle is that the rich save more and spend less than predicted by standard models, and consequently accumulate a large amount of wealth. According to Alvaredo et al. (2013), the top . . .

We show that three strike laws lead to worse intergenerational mobility for children aged eight to nine at implementation. The effects are focused in states that actually used their law. Our results complement the literature that examines the impact on the extensive margin (are parents incarcerated or not) since we show that the intensive margin (sentence length) matters also. Using several data sets and multiple measures of mobility from Chetty et al. (2014) we find worse income mobility and reduced college attendance for these children. Negative impacts on income and college attendance are also found using the American Community Survey.

These lines are from Merle Travis' 1946 country song Sixteen Tons, which re­fers to debt bondage in the Kentucky coal mines. Travis was inspired by his father-a coal miner-who told him that he could not afford to die because he owed his soul to the company store.2 He was not the only one describing these practices, though he may have been the only one to do it in song. A nineteenth century Dutch turf maker, for example, described a worker who became 'more and more a slave' due to his indebtedness.3 The payment system referred to in Sixteen Tons and by the turf maker is bet­ter known as the truck system. According to historian George W. Hilton, a major contributor to research on the practice, the truck system may be defined as 'a set of closely related arrangements whereby some form of consumption is tied to the employment contract'.4 Laborers were paid wholly or partly in a non-cash manner: directly in food rations, housing, or other products, or indirectly in good from a store owned by their employer. A common method was providing goods on credit that was later deducted from the total amount earned, or the payment of wages in tickets only redeemable for goods in the employer's store. This often-unwritten form of compulsion to spend part of their wages in their employer's or affiliated store has been called 'retail coercion'.5

In the mid-nineteenth century, St. Stephen, New Brunswick, and Calais, Maine, Irish cultural institutions developed earlier on the New Brunswick side of the border, but until the late 1860s, nativism was more public and organized in Maine. Census returns linked to parish assessments show that although Irish immigrant men were poorer than men born in Maine or New Brunswick, differences between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants within the youngest and oldest age groups were much narrower than has sometimes been assumed in popular cultural memory.

We study the role of changes in the wage structure and expectations about marriage in explaining the college gender gap reversal. With strongly diminishing marginal utility of wealth and in the presence of a gender wage gap, single women have a greater incentive than single men to invest in education. Marriage market distortions tend to depress the overall benefit of education for women relative to men. We parameterize the model using US census data for the cohort born in 1950 and show that it can generate a reversal. The most important driving force is the decline in marriage rates.

The free movement of workers has been a central part of the project of European integration for more than 50 years. It aims to improve the functioning of the economy by increasing the size of the labour market. IN a larger market, each worker has a higher probability of finding a suitable employer, and vice versa. Hence temporary imbalances between worker supply and demand are mitigated and business cycle swings smoothened, in national economies as well as in specific industries. Long-term income differences between countries are also reduced, as workers move primarily from lower-income to higher-income countries.

In this study, we show that an inflow of immigrants reduces volunteering, a proxy of social capital investment, in receiving communities. Since the 1960s, there has been a large decrease in social capital in the USA as well as a considerable inflow of immigrants. This increased heterogeneity of US cities may have increased the cost of investing in social capital, and thereby, reduced such investment. By using the current population survey September Volunteer Supplement for 2005–2011, we examine the relationship between the proportion of foreign-born people and social capital investment by US-born individuals, proxied by volunteering. Once we correct for immigrants’ self-selection to different destinations using a supply–push instrumental variable, we find that a 1 standard deviation increase in the proportion of foreign-born individuals in a state reduces the probability of US-born individuals volunteering by 0.09–0.15 standard deviations and cuts number of hours volunteered by 0.13–0.21 standard deviations.

Effective 2001, California passed the Prudence Kay Poppink Act, which broadened California’s disability employment discrimination law to cover individuals with less-severe disabilities by lowering ...

Many studies document links between income poverty, material hardship, and mental health; however, we know less about the mental health consequences of within-person changes in income poverty and material hardship, particularly for low-income workers. The authors examine these relationships with longitudinal data from a sample of frontline service workers interviewed in two cities (one each in the United States and Canada). Mixed-effects regression models show between- and within-person differences in income poverty are associated with changes in material hardship, and between- and within-person differences in material hardship are associated with poorer mental health and depression.

In this brief, author Jessica Carson examines differences in health insurance coverage by workers’ income, and explores who is eligible for an employer-based plan, who enrolls in those plans, and the reasons why workers choose not to enroll. She reports that, in 2016, only 33 percent of low-income workers (those below 200 percent of the official poverty threshold) employed full time, year round reported having employer-based health insurance, compared to 57 percent of higher-income workers. Low-income workers are less often offered insurance: 40 percent of low-income workers work for employers who do not offer insurance to any employee, compared to 18 percent of higher-income workers. For those whose employers offer plans, low-income workers are less likely to enroll, citing ineligibility and cost as barriers. When higher-income workers don’t enroll, it is most often because they do not need the plan. More than 25 percent of low-income workers employed full time, year round reported having no health insurance of any kind at any time in the previous year, compared with just 8 percent of higher-income workers. She concludes that as changes to health insurance policy continue to evolve, it is critical to keep in mind that full-time employment isn’t necessarily a ticket to health insurance, and that access to employer-based health insurance is stratified by income and industry.

The aim of the paper is to develop a geographical account of creativity by drawing on Arthur Koestlers work. For Koestler creativity is sparked by the clash of two incompatible frames of meaning, and resolved by a new act of creation. Missing from Koestlers account is geography, however. To show how geography might be brought into Koestlers scheme the paper works through a detailed case study within the recent history of geography: the writing and publication of two very different but equally creative books by the well-known American geographer, William Bunge (1928-2013). In the late 1950s at the University of Washington, Seattle, Bunge wrote Theoretical Geography (1962), a meticulously executed hymn to the mathematics of abstract space, and which helped transform the discipline of geography into spatial science. Then during the late 1960s in inner-city Detroit Bunge wrote Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution (1971), and quite a different hymn. It was a paean to urban rebellion, to grassroots neighbourhood insurrection. It focussed not on abstract space, but a very concrete place: the one mile square that formed the Detroit inner city neighbourhood of Fitzgerald. In this case, Bunges book was a forerunner to radical geography. Catalytic to both of Bunges acts of creation, the paper argues, were the marginal spaces in which he wrote, marginal in the sense that they were distant from mainstream American academic geography. Incorporating them provides not only an explanation creativity within geography, but also geographys own geography.