This dissertation is composed of three essays. First chapter. The Impact of Bilingual Edu- cation on Economic and Social Assimilation: Evidence from California’s Proposition 227. Bilingual education is one of the main educational programs schools in the U.S. use to help limited En- glish proficient students, yet very little evidence exists about the causal impacts of bilingual education on adulthood outcomes. I use a triple-differences strategy, in which I compare the outcomes of foreign-born Hispanics to US-born Hispanics who attended elementary school before and after the policy change in California, and address the potential issue of differen- tial cohort trend between foreign-born and US-born using Hispanics from Texas. This paper exploits the 1998 ban on bilingual education in California to identify the causal impact of exposure to bilingual education on the social and labor market outcomes of young adults. Using data from the 2005-2016 American Community Survey on Hispanics aged 19-24, I find that banning bilingual education decreases the likelihood of being married and of having a child for women, but there are no significant impacts for men. The point estimates suggest a positive impact on women’s work hours and wages, but they are not significant, and the la- bor market impacts for men are closer to zero and not significant. I investigate two potential mechanisms for these effects: language skills and education. Reducing exposure to bilingual education increases the likelihood of Speaking Only English (as opposed to being bilingual in English and Spanish), but did not increase educational attainment. Taken together, these findings are consistent with bilingual education playing a role in shaping cultural prefer- ences; women who are less exposed to bilingual education are shedding traditional gender norms about work, marriage and fertility and adopting U.S norms more rapidly. Second chapter. The Impact of Bilingual Education on Long-run Outcomes: Evidence from Ari- zona’s Proposition 203. In this chapter, I investigate the causal impact of exposure to bilingual education on different outcomes of young adults exploiting the ban on bilingual education in Arizona resulting from a voter referendum in 2000. I use a triple-differences strategy, in which I compare the outcomes of foreign-born Hispanics to US-born Hispanics who at- tended elementary school before and after the policy change in Arizona, and address the potential issue of differential cohort trend between foreign-born and US-born using Hispan- ics. Using data from the 2005-2016 American Community Survey on Hispanics aged 18-21, I find that banning bilingual education does not have significant impacts on schooling and language outcomes for both men and women. Third chapter. The Effects of Marginal Tax Rate on Self-employment Entry. This chapter in- vestigates the effects of marginal tax rates on the decision to become self-employed. An individual’s marginal tax rate is a function of family income, but income and employment are jointly determined. Moreover, even lagged income could reflect unobserved individual characteristics that are correlated with both marginal tax rate and employment. I address the endogeneity of marginal tax rates by using an instrumental variables strategy. Specifically, I use panel data from The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and construct simulated tax rates from TAXSIM model along the lines of Powell and Shan (2011) as instruments. I find that while the marginal tax rate does not have a significant effect on self-employment entry on average, there is heterogeneity in effect by gender. An increase in the marginal tax rate significantly increases the likelihood that women enter self-employment, and this appears largely driven by women who held previous jobs in the service sector.

Gentrification has been argued to contribute to urban inequalities, including those of health disparities. Extant research has yet to conduct a systematic study of gentrification’s relation with neighborhood health outcomes nationally. This gap is addressed in the current study through the utilization of census-tract data from the Center for Disease Control’s 500 Cities project, the 2000 Census and the 2010–2014 American Community Survey to examine how gentrification relates to local self-rated physical health in select cities across the United States. We examine gentrification’s association with neighborhood rates of poor self-rated physical health. We contextualize this relationship by evaluating gentrification’s relation with city-level self-rated health inequalities. We find gentrification was significantly and positively related with self-rated physical neighborhood health outcomes. However, the presence and magnitude of gentrification within a city was not associated with health outcomes for cities overall. Based on these findings, we argue that gentrification’s health benefits for cities are limited at best, though gentrification does not appear to be associated with deepening city- level health inequalities, either.

Centralized organizations can internalize transaction costs and externalities, addressing possible inefficiencies of decentralized management. In practice, however, centralized organizations can have its own inefficiencies and decentralized management can do relatively well. Empirically testing relative efficiency is difficult because distinct organizations emerge endogenously in various contexts. This paper, in contrast, draws upon the unique history of New Mexico, leveraging a natural experiment to assess how the partial transition in the early 20th century from the original small decentralized communal Spanish irrigation systems (acequias) to centralized quasi-public irrigation districts altered agricultural development and production. Surface water irrigators in arid regions confront public good issues for building and maintaining shared infrastructure as well as common-pool resource issues to appropriate the surface water. My results confirm that irrigation districts can significantly improve outcomes when investing in costly infrastructure to expand irrigated acreage, increasing farmland values up to 33%. However, I find no broader evidence that the centralized control of water distribution provides any gains to acreage previously under irrigation by the decentralized acequias.

This article advances the concept of racialized legal status (RLS) as an overlooked dimension of social stratification with implications for racial/ethnic health disparities. We define RLS as a social position based on an ostensibly race-neutral legal classification that disproportionately impacts racial/ethnic minorities. To illustrate the implications of RLS for health and health disparities in the United States, we spotlight existing research on two cases: criminal status and immigration status. We offer a conceptual framework that outlines how RLS shapes disparities through (1) primary effects on those who hold a legal status and (2) spillover effects on racial/ethnic in-group members, regardless of these individuals' own legal status. Primary effects of RLS operate by marking an individual for material and symbolic exclusion. Spillover effects result from the vicarious experiences of those with social proximity to marked individuals, as well as the discredited meanings that RLS constructs around racial/ethnic group members. We conclude by suggesting multiple avenues for future research that considers RLS as a mechanism of social inequality with fundamental effects on health.

This paper examines the optimal taxation of families in an environment in which (i) families earning abilities and tastes for children are families private information, and (ii) child-rearing requires both parental time and goods. Potential parents simultaneously decide labor income and number of children and a government uses information on family income and size to construct an optimal tax system: a combination of an income tax schedule with child tax credits. The optimal child tax credits are distinctly affected by the parental time and cost of goods involved in child-rearing. In the quantitative part, I calibrate my model to the US data and show that child-rearing costs translate into a pattern of optimal credits that is U-shaped in income. In particular, the credits to families are decreasing over the first half of the income distribution. In addition, the credits are decreasing by family size owing to economies of scale in the impact of child-rearing costs on family welfare. For median-income families, the credit for the second (third) child equals 28% (2%) of the credit for the first (second) child.

E‐cigarettes are controversial products. They may help addicted smokers to consume nicotine in a less harmful manner or to quit tobacco cigarettes entirely, but these products may also entice youth into smoking. This controversy complicates e‐cigarette regulation as any regulation may lead to health improvements for some populations, and health declines for other populations. Using data from 2007 to 2016, we examine factors that are plausibly linked with U.S. state e‐cigarette regulations. We find that less conservative states are more likely to regulate e‐cigarettes and that states with stronger tobacco lobbies are less likely to regulate e‐cigarettes. This information can help policymakers as they determine how best to promote public health through regulation.

Fifty years after the national Kerner Commission report on urban unrest and fifty-three years after California’s McCone Commission report on the 1965 Watts riots, substantial racial disparity in education, housing, employment, and wealth is still pervasive in Los Angeles. Neither report mentions wealth inequality as a cause for concern, however. This article examines one key dimension of racial wealth inequality through the lens of home ownership, particularly in South Los Angeles, where the 1965 Watts riots took place. It also analyzes the state’s role in housing development in codifying and expanding practices of racial and class segregation that has led to the production and reproduction of racial inequality in South Los Angeles compared with Los Angeles County.

Statistical agencies are increasingly adopting synthetic data methods for disseminating microdata without compromising the privacy of respondents. Crucial to the implementation of these approaches are flexible models, able to capture the nuances of the multivariate structure in the original data. In the case of multivariate categorical data, preserving this multivariate structure also often involves satisfying constraints in the form of combinations of responses that cannot logically be present in any data set—like married toddlers or pregnant men—also known as structural zeros. Ignoring structural zeros can result in both logically inconsistent synthetic data and biased estimates. Here we propose the use of a Bayesian non‐parametric method for generating discrete multivariate synthetic data subject to structural zeros. This method can preserve complex multivariate relationships between variables, can be applied to high dimensional data sets with massive collections of structural zeros, requires minimal tuning from the user and is computationally efficient. We demonstrate our approach by synthesizing an extract of 17 variables from the 2000 US census. Our method produces synthetic samples with high analytic utility and low disclosure risk.

The aim of this paper was to provide a discussion and overview of the main databases available to understand mobility within the European Union. Following some key questions of interest, the paper maps existing data sources and evaluates them for their usefulness and quality in supporting intra-EU migration research. Eurostat’s database on population statistics, the Labour Force Survey (both core and 2008/2014 ad-hoc modules), the migration databases of UNDESA and OECD, as well as the EIMSS survey and the special wave 72.5 of the Eurobarometer are the among the most useful sources identified at the regional level. Despite a general trend of improving European mobility statistics, some challenges and limitations regarding the measurement of intra-EU mobility seem to persist. Firstly, missing data on migrants’ previous country of residence and/or lack of cross-tabulation opportunities make it impossible to assess those movements that truly takes part within the external borders of the EU and/or the share of EU versus third-country nationals within those flows. Secondly, more information on migration over the lifetime would be key to gain a comprehensive understanding of mobility patterns and tendencies within Europe. This connects to the third and final shortcoming of currently available statistics: the lack of data on circular and short-term migration, including cross-country commuting. Recommendations for bridging availability and quality gaps in the current state of European mobility data are offered throughout the paper.

The SID analytical approach involving occupations summarises social distance patterns through statistical dimension scores (e.g. Chaps. 4, 5, and 6). Other approaches of network analysis can also be used to summarise similar data on social interactions (e.g. Chaps. 7 and 8). The usual focus is on the most important elements of the interaction structure—for example, the first and most important dimension of the SID solution or the most influential patterns of network connections. Previously, we have also looked at social interaction data for large populations, such as countries. However, there are some interesting extensions in the options for calculating and exploring dimension scores and network structures. In this chapter, we discuss making more use of ‘subsidiary’ dimensions from the SID solution (Sect. 11.2), undertaking SID analysis on smaller population groups of particular interest (Sect. 11.3). and ways of using other network analysis tools to study sub-populations of special interest (Sect. 11.4).

: Policies aimed at increasing higher education attainment are central to efforts aimed at eliminating racial gaps in earnings, employment and labor force participation (LFP). We use data from the American Community Survey (ACS) spanning 2008-2016 to investigate the returns to higher education by racial groups with particular attention to the returns realized by American Indian and Alaskan natives (AIAN). First, we find that there are sizable gaps in earnings, employment, and LFP. On average AIAN earn 15 percent less, have 6.2 percentage point lower employment rates, and 10.0 percentage point lower LFP rates than white Americans even after controlling for differences in education and experience. Next, while all workers experience sizable returns to education, the returns to education are different by racial group. We find that AIAN college graduates reap larger returns in terms of LFP and employment but experience smaller gains in earnings than otherwise similar white college graduates. These results suggest that policies promoting higher education are necessary but not sufficient to address white-AIAN labor market disparities. We simulate LFP, employment and earnings under the hypothetical case in which the distribution of AIAN higher education increases to match that of whites and estimate that, even under this very optimistic scenario, white-AIAN labor market disparities would remain stark.

Sustainability requires reducing the carbon intensity of human well-being (CIWB): the level of anthropogenic carbon emissions per unit of human well-being. Here, we examine how multiple forms of inequality affect sex-specific measures of CIWB using data for the 50 US states, while taking into account the effects of other socio-economic and political factors. Results from longitudinal models indicate that state-level female CIWB and male CIWB are both positively associated with (1) income concentration, measured as the income share of the top 10%, and (2) the percent of the population at or below the poverty line. Overall inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, has no net effect on male CIWB or female CIWB. These findings suggest that reducing forms of inequality, especially poverty and the concentration of income among the most affluent, are potential pathways to sustainability.

Background: Mounting evidence suggests that holding multiple concurrent jobs in public and private (dual practice) is common among health workers in low- as well as high-income countries. Nurses are world’s largest health professional workforce and a critical resource for achieving Universal Health Coverage. Nonetheless, little is known about nurses’ engagement with dual practice. Methods: We conducted a scoping review of the literature on nurses’ dual practice with the objective of generating hypotheses on its nature and consequences, and define a research agenda on the phenomenon. The Arksey and O’Malley’s methodological steps were followed to develop the research questions, identify relevant studies, include/ exclude studies, extract the data, and report the findings. PRISMA guidelines were additionally used to conduct the review and report on results. Results: Of the initial 194 records identified, a total of 35 met the inclusion criteria for nurses’ dual practice; the vast majority (65%) were peer-reviewed publications, followed by nursing magazine publications (19%), reports, and doctoral dissertations. Twenty publications focused on high-income countries, 16 on low- or middle-income ones, and two had a multi country perspective. Although holding multiple jobs not always amounted to dual practice, several ways were found for public-sector nurses to engage concomitantly in public and private employments, in regulated as well as in informal, casual fashions. Some of these forms were reported as particularly prevalent, from over 50% in Australia, Canada, and the UK, to 28% in South Africa. The opportunity to increase a meagre salary, but also a dissatisfaction with the main job and the flexibility offered by multiple job-holding arrangements, were among the reported reasons for engaging in these practices. Discussion and conclusions: Limited and mostly circumstantial evidence exists on nurses’ dual practice, with the few existing studies suggesting that the phenomenon is likely to be very common and carry implications for health systems and nurses’ welfare worldwide. We offer an agenda for future research to consolidate the existing evidence and to further explore nurses’ motivation; without a better understanding of nurse dual practice, this will continue to be a largely ‘hidden’ element in nursing workforce policy and practice, with an unclear impact on the delivery of care.

The 1968 account of the 1967 race riots, authored by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission, thus the Kerner report), directly called into question the fundamental premise of the American Dream. “The idea of the American dream has been attached to everything from religious freedom to a home in the suburbs, and it has inspired emotions ranging from deep satisfaction to disillusioned fury. Nevertheless, the phrase elicits for most Americans some variant of Locke’s fantasy—a new world where anything can happen and good things might” (Hochschild 1995, 17). The premise of the American Dream rests on three fundamental tenets: the equal opportunity to participate and the ability to start over, a reasonable anticipation of success, and the notion that success is under one’s control (Hochschild 1995). The basis of each of these tenets is strongly refuted in the report first released on February 29, 1968 (commonly referred to as the Kerner Commission report in reference to the commission chairman, Otto Kerner). Understanding the shortcomings of American society in implementing its democratic ideals relative to African Americans was advanced long before the Kerner report. Writings by W. E. B. DuBois (1903), Franklin Frazier (1940), Gunnar Myrdal (1944), Kenneth Clark (1965), and Gary Marx (1967), for example, expose a deep-seated disconnect between philosophy and practice. In his 1890 commencement address at Harvard University, DuBois reflected on a “nation [that] was founded on the loftiest ideals, and who many times forgot those ideals with a strange forgetfulness” (1903, 19).

We exploit a unique event in human history, the exodus of the Vietnamese Boat People to the US, to provide evidence for the causal pro‐trade effect of migrants. This episode represents an ideal natural experiment as the large immigration shock, the first wave of which comprised refugees exogenously allocated across the US, occurred over a 20‐year period during which time the US imposed a complete trade embargo on Vietnam. Following the lifting of trade restrictions in 1994, US exports to Vietnam grew most in US states with larger Vietnamese populations, themselves the result of larger refugee inflows 20 years earlier.

Many low-income households experience high frequency labor market transitions. It is unclear how the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) work incentives affect these frequent entry and exit decisions. Exploiting the panel nature of the Current Population Survey, I show that EITC expansions induce less-educated single women with previous work experience to work more months, leading to more annual weeks worked and less annual exit, suggesting the EITC operates in part by keeping previously employed single women in the labor force. Employment responds to changes in the previous year's EITC, consistent with people learning about how the returns to work have changed, and then responding.

Do homeowners of different racial and ethnic groups experience different rates of home price appreciation? I study this question by linking transaction-level repeat sale home price data to demographic information disclosed under the Home Mortgage Dis- closure Act. I find that, after flexibly accounting for differences in income, commuting zone, and the timing of purchase and sale, black homeowners experience apprecia- tion that is 2.5 percentage points lower than their white counterparts; the analogous Hispanic-white gap is 1.5 percentage points. I then document that homeowners of different races and ethnicities, but the same incomes, select homes in neighborhoods with very different characteristics along dimensions that are correlated with home price appreciation, such as racial and income makeup. However, I show that flexibly con- trolling for all of these factors still leaves an unexplained black-white appreciation gap of 1 percentage point, and a Hispanic-white gap of about 0.5 percentage points. Fi- nally, I show that these gaps vary widely across commuting zones, but in ways that are generally not correlated with other salient economic attributes of the commuting zones, such as interracial income mobility gaps.

This dissertation consists of three essays. In the first essay, “The Structural Shift in the Cyclicality of the U.S. Labor Income Share: Empirical Evidence”, I document a structural shift in the cyclicality of the labor share from countercyclical to procyclical. I conclude that this structural shift is due to a decline in the usage of labor hoarding at the firm level and to an increase in the volatility of real wages. I also provide evidence suggesting this shift is widespread to the entire economy and is not due to structural changes in the industrial composition for the U.S. economy. In the second essay, “The Cyclicality of the Labor Share: Labor Hoarding, Risk Aversion and Real Wage Rigidities”, I explore whether the decline in the usage of labor hoarding is able to jointly generate the vanishing procyclicality of labor productivity and the shift in the cyclicality of the labor share. I conclude that while these models are able to generate the vanishing procyclicality of labor productivity, they will generate counterfactually a more countercyclical labor share. This counterfactual result also occurs when I consider instead a decline in the workers’ bargaining power in the wage bargaining process and an increase in the relative importance of aggregate demand shocks. In the third essay, “The Public Sector Wage Premium: An Occupational Approach”, I characterize the strategy undertaken by the U.S. government to provide insurance to workers in occupations that are on the left-tail of the private wage distribution. I conclude that the government is effectively offering a high wage premium to nonroutine manual workers and a wage penalty to non-routine cognitive workers.

This study proposes to investigate the effectiveness of modeling local spatial dependence through a conditionally autoregressive process (CAR) to picture the population distribution across space. Following the current literature, the idea is to model individual location preferences by focusing on a selected sample of location determinants but also taking into account spatial dependence in location choices. By exploiting a Bayesian setting, our novelty is to include spatial CAR census random effects that have been found to be effective in enhancing the role of spatial proximity. Our results indicate that to effectively control for the spatial dimension in location choices, one needs to define both a global indicator for space structure and local spatial dependence which has become increasingly important in recent decades.