Individual labor supply decisions and factors thet shape them are among the most studied topics in economics. This thesis focuses on the two important topics in this broad field. The first is the relative importance of government policies and non-policy factors in shaping the labor supply of elderly people. Second topic is the effect of a major policy intervention, the introduction of the statutory minimum wage in Germany, on the individual wage expectations and durations of unemployment spells. In the second chapter, I study the increase in the labor force supply of elderly in the US. In particular, since the mid-1980, the labor force participation and hours worked by the US seniors, those above 62, has been steadily increasing. The labor force participation was at the minimum of 16% in 1985 and reached 26% in 2013. This is in contrast to the steady decline of the labor force supply of seniors between 1950 and 1985. The labor supply behavior of seniors has very important implications for the sustainability of the Social Security system, which is a problem faced by many developed countries. As a result, understanding the driving factors behind the changes in the labor supply of seniors is critical.

It is well known that the explicit costs of raising a child have grown over the past several decades. Less well understood are the implicit costs of having a child, and how they have changed over time. In this article, we are the first to examine the evolution of the implicit costs of motherhood over the lifecycle and across generations using high quality administrative data. We estimate that the lifetime labor market income gap between mothers and women who never have children (never-mothers) decreases from around $350,000 to $280,000 between women born in the late 1940s and late 1960s. Gaps tend to increase monotonically over the lifecycle, and decrease monotonically between cohorts. Our evidence suggests that changes in the gaps are caused by changing labor force participation rates.

United States (US) based research suggests that distance between residency and employment constrains labour market outcomes for black Americans. Work on this phenomenon, termed spatial mismatch, suggests that residential segregation from whites shapes labour market outcomes among blacks by restricting access to job-dense suburbs. However, few studies examine patterns and drivers of spatial mismatch among Asian and Hispanic subpopulations. Using data on job counts from the 2010 Zip Code Business Patterns data set and on population counts from the 2010 US decennial Censuses, I estimate spatial mismatch for the largest ethnoracial groups in the USA: black, white, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese Americans. To measure spatial mismatch, I create indices of dissimilarity between jobs and residency for all Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) with available data. Estimates of spatial mismatch based on panethnic categories mask subpopulation heterogeneity. Most subgroups experience higher spatial mismatch than indicated by the panethnic category. The results also show novel racial differences: the average Vietnamese and Cuban American experience higher spatial mismatch than the average black American. Segregation from whites is a central predictor of exposure to spatial mismatch across all minority groups, though findings suggest that this relationship is not driven by suburbanisation.

The sharing of sensitive personal health data is an important aspect of biomedical research. Methods of data de-identification are often used in this process to trade the granularity of data off against privacy risks. However, traditional approaches, such as HIPAA Safe Harbor or k-anonymization, often fail to provide data with sufficient quality. Alternatively, data can be de-identified only to a degree which still allows to use it as required, e.g. to carry out specific analyses. Controlled environments, which restrict the ways recipients can interact with the data, can then be used to cope with residual risks. The contributions of this article are twofold. Firstly, we present a method for implementing controlled data sharing environments and analyze its privacy properties. Secondly, we present a de-identification method which is specifically suited for sanitizing health data which is to be shared in such environments. Traditional de-identification methods control the uniqueness of records in a dataset. The basic idea of our approach is to reduce the probability that a record in a dataset has characteristics which are unique within the underlying population. As the characteristics of the population are typically not known, we have implemented a pragmatic solution in which properties of the population are modeled with statistical methods. We have further developed an accompanying process for evaluating and validating the degree of protection provided. The results of an extensive experimental evaluation show that our approach enables the safe sharing of high-quality data and that it is highly scalable.

We study the evolution of intergenerational inequality of college attainment in the United States over the 20th century. For this purpose, we expand the Breen-Goldthorpe model of educational investment behaviour and show formally that a rise in the costs of college education and in inequality in economic resources by social origins lead to an increase in inequality in educational attainment. In our empirical analysis we use five different national representative surveys and focus on the chances of college attainment by parental college education for birth cohorts from 1900 to 1987. Our results confirm that relative inequality in college attainment, measured in terms of odds ratios, declined over most of the 20th century with equalization levelling off beginning with birth cohorts in the 1960s. At the same time, the absolute differences in the percentage of graduates among children of college-educated parents and children of non-graduates have remained remarkably stable across the century. Based on our formal model, we finally explore future scenarios for the trends in college attainment inequality. Given high resource inequality and rising costs for college education, our models point to a decline in college attainment of individuals with non-graduate backgrounds and consequently to a rise of relative inequality in college attainment by parental education. While not yet discernible, such a development might lead to a possible U-shape trend for recent and current birth cohorts in the near future.

BACKGROUND: More than six million American Indians live in the United States, and an estimated 1.6 million will be aged ≥65 years old by 2050 tripling in numbers since 2012. Physical functioning and related factors in this population are poorly understood. Our study aimed to assess lower body functioning and identify the prevalence and correlates of "good" functioning in a multi-tribe, community-based sample of older American Indians. METHODS: Assessments used the Short Physical Performance Battery (SPPB). "Good" lower body functioning was defined as a total SPPB score of ≥10. Potential correlates included demographic characteristics, study site, anthropometrics, cognitive functioning, depressive symptomatology, grip strength, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, heart disease, prior stroke, smoking, alcohol use, and over-the-counter medication use for arthritis or pain. Data were collected between 2010 and 2013 by the Cerebrovascular Disease and Its Consequences in American Indians Study from community-dwelling adults aged ≥60 years (n = 818). RESULTS: The sample's mean age was 73 ± 5.9 years. After adjustment for age and study site, average SPPB scores were 7.0 (95% CI, 6.8, 7.3) in women and 7.8 (95% CI, 7.5, 8.2) in men. Only 25% of the sample were classified with "good" lower body functioning. When treating lower body functioning as a continuous measure and adjusting for age, gender, and study site, the correlates of better functioning that we identified were younger age, male gender, married status, higher levels of education, higher annual household income, Southern Plains study site, lower waist-hip ratio, better cognitive functioning, stronger grip strength, lower levels of depressive symptomatology, alcohol consumption, and the absence of hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and heart disease. In our fully adjusted models, correlates of "good" lower body functioning were younger age, higher annual household income, better cognitive functioning, stronger grip, and the absence of diabetes mellitus and heart disease. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that "good" lower body functioning is uncommon in this population, whereas its correlates are similar to those found in studies of other older adult populations. Future efforts should include the development or cultural tailoring of interventions to improve lower body functioning in older American Indians.

Intergenerational outcome (IO) studies model the transmission of socioeconomic status between familial generations. Given the balancing of time horizons and future expectations implicit in migration decisions, IO studies are particularly salient to an empirical understanding of migration. However, few datasets exist which provide the necessary longitudinal observations for migrant populations, therefore such IO studies remain rare. This paper presents a novel cohort of 288,000 individuals from fifty years of English census data (1851-1861 and 1881-1901), representing some 36,000 core family groups who originated beyond the national boundary of England prior to 1851. The intercensal linking method employed here (network persistence linkage, or NPL) is also unique. It exploits persistent coresident proximity to enrich individual identifiers and includes an equal number of females as well as males. Socioeconomic outcomes are defined with the HISCAM scale, a measure of social proximity derived by statistical correspondence analysis of occupations within historic civil and genealogical records. Descriptive analysis of outcomes over three generations shows that immigrants had significant socioeconomic mobility, especially females, although this was not always an upward move. Immigrant families with very advantaged positions may have experienced rapid regression to the mean. An ordinary least squares (OLS) estimate of intergenerational transmission finds that both males and females transmitted a significant effect to their children’s status through their own socioeconomic prestige. This effect is stronger between the immigrant and his/her child than between that child and the third generation. The country of origin had a significant effect on the status of both subsequent generations, although there is also evidence that this dissipated among the grandchildren of British Isles immigrants. This study demonstrates that it is possible to link females as well as males across historical population datasets, and that omitting them from intergenerational outcome models may overestimate inheritance and underestimate mobility.

For more than a century, advocates have promoted minimum wage laws to protect workers and their families from poverty. Opponents counter that the policy has, at best, small poverty-reducing effects. We summarize the evidence and describe three factors that might dampen the policy’s effects on poverty: imperfect targeting, heterogeneous labor market effects, and interactions with income support programs. To boost the poverty reducing effects of the minimum wage, we propose increasing the federal minimum wage to $12 per hour and temporarily expanding an existing employer tax credit. This is a cost-saving proposal because it relies on regulation and creates no new administrative functions. We recommend using those savings to “make work pay” and improve upward mobility for low-income workers through lower marginal tax rates.

BACKGROUND The likelihood that a US child will live with a grandparent has increased over time. In 2015, nearly 12% of children lived with a grandparent. However, the likelihood that a child will ever live with a grandparent is not known. OBJECTIVE We calculate the cumulative and age-specific probabilities of coresidence with grandparents during childhood. We stratify our analyses by types of grandparentgrandchild living arrangements (grandfamilies and three-generation households) and by race and ethnicity. METHODS We use two data sets – the pooled 2010–2015 American Community Surveys (ACS) and the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY–97) – and produce estimates using life tables techniques. RESULTS Results indicate that nearly 30% of US children ever coreside with grandparents. Both three-generation and grandfamily living arrangements are more prevalent among racial and ethnic minority groups, with three-generation coresidence particularly common among Asian children. Black children are nearly two times as likely to ever live in a grandfamily as compared to Hispanic and white children, respectively. Children are much more likely to experience grandparental coresidence during their first year of life than in any other year.

This chapter sets the case-study countries of Chapters 5–11 in a wider context. It does so by presenting evidence on migration levels and trends for a wider range of countries across the world using data prepared by the IMAGE project. It focusses primarily on the first decade of the twenty-first century but draws on earlier data where it is available. It finds that North America and Oceania have the highest migration intensities but that the picture in Europe is mixed. Countries with the highest levels of income tend to have the highest intensities. Declining migration intensities appear to be universal across North America and Oceania, but they are also common in Latin America and, Asia, and even in Africa. They are therefore not confined to just high-income countries. There is no evidence to suggest that falling intensities are just a product of advanced economic development.

The urban built environment develops over decades around fixed infrastructure. Los Angeles began its major growth at the dawn of the automobile era and became a low-density, dispersed metropolis organized around a vast freeway system. Since the 1990s, local governments have sought to restructure Los Angeles, shifting toward higher density, mixed-use housing and commercial development. A large investment in new rail transit lines is seen as critical to achieving these land use goals, mainly through promotion of transit-oriented development. In this article, we examine how employment patterns have changed around newly built Los Angeles rail stations. Results suggest that employment did not increase near stations immediately before or after station opening, but a few stations saw increased employment 5 to 10 years after opening.

This chapter represents the beginning of a project to integrate data and findings on the spatial, economic, and other determinants of the changing population, labour force, and economic shifts in the United States from 1970 to 2012. It explains the relationship between economic and demographic change and demonstrates the valuable utility of using such data sources together. The dependent variables for each decade were the total growth in population and the total growth in employment since the first year in the decade. The overall models clearly indicate that at least a large fraction of population change is related to employment change. Consideration of the various components of population change could reveal that this relationship is even stronger. However, this analysis suggests that a main driver of population growth is economic growth, which leads to employment. The model predicting employment included the change in population during the decade.

To address the housing affordability crisis for low-income Americans, we argue for a refundable renter’s tax credit. The proposed credit would be delivered through the tax code, reach a broad segment of renters, and target those with high housing cost burdens. We simulate the effects of the credit using Current Population Survey data. The credit would reach nearly 60 percent of poor renters and more than 70 percent of renters facing severe housing cost burdens, the credit amount averaging $2,059. Among recipients, the credit reduces the poverty rate by 12.4 percentage points and the deep poverty rate by 8.8 percentage points. For those who remain poor, it reduces the poverty gap by nearly a third. The annual cost is $24.1 billion.

Para fines de este trabajo, nos pusimos en el papel de consultores para la marca estadounidense de ropa “Hot Topic”, marca con una propuesta de valor diferenciada que comercializa productos relacionados a la música, moda, cultura pop y otros accesorios. Supusimos que ésta, con más de 20 años en el mercado, estaba dispuesta a ingresar al mercado latino y estuvo en la etapa de investigación en este país. La consultoría que hicimos tuvo como finalidad el identificar la viabilidad y rentabilidad de iniciar operaciones en Perú. Las claves de Hot Topic, según el estudio realizado, fueron: valor de marca, licencias exclusivas, comunidad diferenciada, experiencia de compra y productos únicos & bien enfocados en su público. El estudio probó que Perú es un mercado óptimo para este tipo de propuestas de valor. No solo porque en él habita un público creciente desatendido (Millennials Tempranos e integrantes de tribus urbanas seleccionadas*). De igual forma que su modelo de negocio hace viable y rentable su incursión en nuestro país. Tomando en cuenta que la inversión inicial de S/ 400K proviene de casa matriz, asumimos que Hot Topic exige un COK no menor de 15% para inversiones fuera de los E.E.U.U. En nuestro estudio se observa que el resultado de nuestra TIR es superior con un 20.99%.

More than 2.2 million individuals are incarcerated in the United States and more than 620,000 are released from prison annually. Among individuals released from prison, one third will return to prison at some point (Rhodes et al. 2014). Research suggests the mark of a criminal record imposes impediments to employment, exacerbating economic disparities and contributing to recidivism (Pager 2003, Mueller-Smith 2015). Based in part on the belief that successful reintegration requires employment and economic opportunities in the formal workplace, the tax code provides subsidies for employers that hire ex-felons. The tax code also provides broad-based incentives intended to encourage economic opportunity and formal employment that may benefit ex-prisoners, including the earned income tax credit (EITC) and place-based subsidies for disadvantaged neighborhoods, like Empowerment Zones. However, targeted incentives have low rates of takeup and high administrative burdens, and there are few broadly available incentives for childless adults. We examine the labor market outcomes and economic characteristics of the incarcerated population using data maintained by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in an effort to improve tax policies to aid the re-integration of ex-prisoners. Starting in 2012, the Federal Bureau . . .

Population aging is expected to slow economic growth yet there is little evidence about the magnitude of its effects. We use variation in the predetermined component of population aging across U.S. states to estimate the impact of population aging on GDP growth between 1980- 2010. We find that each 10% increase in the fraction of the population ages 60+ decreased percapita GDP by 5.5%. Two-thirds of the reduction was due to slower growth in productivity, while one-third arose from slower labor force growth. Our estimate implies population aging reduced the annual rate of GDP growth by 0.3 percentage points during 1980-2010.

Few studies have been able to measure the evolution of segregation on health disparities or assess whether those disparities existed in rural communities prior to the Great Migration of African Americans to urban centers. We use a newly developed measure of historical racial residential segregation based on individual-level data. The measure exploits complete census manuscript files to identify the races of next-door neighbors. This measure is the first and only measure of historical segregation for rural communities, allowing us to greatly extend the empirical analysis of the effects of racial segregation on health over space and time. Using this comprehensive measure of racial residential segregation, we estimate the historical relationship between racial segregation and mortality. We find that conditional on racial composition, racially segregated environments had higher mortality rates and it was not always the case that the outcomes for blacks were worse than those of whites. These effects of segregation on health differed between urban and rural locations. We conclude by noting how comprehensive measures of segregation can extend the analysis of structural factors in racial health disparities to rural residents and to the historical evolution of health disparities.

College graduates are important for regional economies but also quite geographically mobile. This paper examines the relationship between college graduation rates among persons from a state (relative production) and the later share of college graduates for persons residing in the state (relative stock) using decennial census and American Community Survey microdata. The descriptive relationship has increased over time and is nearly proportional in recent years. Instrumental variables (IV) methods are used to estimate causal effects. The preferred IV results yield an average point estimate for the production‐stock relationship of 0.52, but the effect likely decreases with age.

What are the welfare effects of immigration on low-skilled and high-skilled natives? To address this question, we develop a general equilibrium model featuring two skill types, search frictions, wage bargaining, and a welfare state that redistributes income through unemployment benefits and the provision of public goods. Our quantitative analysis suggests that, in all 20 countries studied, immigration attenuates the effects of search frictions. The resulting gains tend to outweigh the welfare costs of redistribution. Immigration has increased native welfare in almost all countries. In two-thirds of countries, both high- and low-skilled natives have benefited from the presence of immigrants, contrary to what models without search frictions or redistribution predict. Average total welfare gains from migration are 1.25% and 1.00% for high- and low-skilled natives, respectively.

It is widely acknowledged that married individuals have better health outcomes than unmarried individuals. However, this marital advantage paradigm has been developed primarily based on heterosexual populations. No studies to date have discussed the health effects of marriage among bisexuals, although a few have shown mixed results for gays and lesbians. We analyzed pooled data from the 2013-2016 National Health Interview Survey (n=129,519) and found that the health advantage of marriage only applied to heterosexuals and likely gays and lesbians. Married bisexuals did not enjoy better health than unmarried bisexuals. On the contrary, they exhibited poorer health outcomes than never-married and cohabiting bisexuals. This health disadvantage among married bisexuals was not attributable to economic resources or health behaviors. To explain this finding, we adopt a minority stress perspective. We argue that prejudices and stereotypes against bisexuals, such as an inability to commit to monogamous relationships and untrustworthiness as romantic partners, may reduce the health advantage attached to marriage.