Using a regional measure of gender norms from the General Social Surveys and marital histories from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this study explored how gender norms were associated with women’s marriage dynamics between 1968 and 2012. Results suggested that a higher prevalence of egalitarian gender norms predicted a decline in marriage formation. This decline was, however, only true for women without a college degree. For college-educated women, the association between gender norms and marriage formation became positive when gender egalitarianism prevailed. The findings also revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship between gender norms and divorce: An initial increase in divorce was observed when gender norms were predominantly traditional. The association, however, reversed as gender norms became egalitarian. No differences by education were found for divorce. The findings partially support the gender revolution framework but also highlight greater barriers to marriage for low-educated women as societies embrace gender equality.

This paper studies how changes in deportation fear induced by the roll-out of Secure Communities (SC), a far-reaching immigration enforcement program, affected the demand for safety net programs in the United States. We estimate the spillover effect of SC on the take-up of federal means-tested programs by Hispanic citizens, who are not themselves eligible for removal. We find significant declines in SNAP and SSI enrollment, particularly among mixed-citizenship status households. The response is muted for Hispanic households residing in sanctuary cities. Our results are most consistent with network effects that perpetuate fear rather than lack of benefit information, measurement error, or stigma.

In this project, we examine if employment discrimination increased after the 2016 election. We submitted fictitious applications to publicly advertised positions using resumes that are manipulated on perceived race and ethnicity (Somali American, African American, and white American). We examine the proportion of applicants that are contacted by employers. Prior to the 2016 election, employers contacted Somali American applicants slightly less than white applicants but more than African American applicants. After the election, the difference between white and Somali American applicants increased by 10 percentage points. The increased discrimination predominantly occurred in occupations involving significant interaction with customers. This project would not have been possible without our amazing team of research assistants. We are incredibly grateful for the hard work of We thank the Russell Sage Foundation, Minnesota Population Center, and University of St. Thomas for generously providing funding for this project. This project has also benefited from insightful feedback from many people, including participants at the Inequality and Methods workshop organized by

The economic convergence of U.S. regions has slowed greatly, and rates of long-term nonemployment have even been diverging. Simultaneously, the rate of nonemployment for working age men has nearly tripled over the last 50 years, generating a social problem that is disproportionately centered in the eastern parts of the American heartland. Should more permanent economic divisions across space lead U.S. economists to rethink their traditional skepticism about place-based policies? We document that increases in labor demand appear to have greater effects on employment in areas where not working has been historically high, suggesting that subsidizing employment in such places could reduce the rate of not working. Proemployment policies, such as a ramped up Earned Income Tax Credit, that are targeted toward regions with more elastic employment responses, however financed, could plausibly reduce suffering and materially improve economic performance.

Married men have it made, at least when it comes to their wages. An analysis by a Federal Reserve researcher finds that married men "sit atop the wage ladder." Married men earn wages that dominate those of single and married women, as well as single men, the analysis showed. At their peak, married men make more than $80,000 a year. Single men and women and married women make about $50,000 a year . . .

This is the first paper to thoroughly investigate the employment effects of corporate taxation at the industry level. Do corporate taxes affect employment rates at the industry level? If they do, then are the effects consistent across all industries? Answering these questions have proved empirically challenging. This paper uses an identification strategy that exploits variation in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states and tries to understand how it impacts industry employment at the county level by focusing on contiguous counties straddling state borders over the period starting from 1990 to 2010. The results show that any change in corporate tax affect employment rate in the good producing sector, but employment rate within service sector is only affected by an increase, and not by any decrease, in the corporate tax rates. The paper further presents some interesting findings at a further disaggregation by looking at some of the major economic sectors based on their share of gross domestic product.

High-quality renewable energy resource data and other geographic information system (GIS) data are essential for the transition to a clean energy economy that prioritizes local resources, improves resiliency, creates jobs, and promotes energy independence. These data are crucial for making informed decisions—ranging from policy and investment decisions to reliable power sector planning. Decisions that are data-driven reflect appropriate ambition, maximize costeffectiveness, and enable successful implementation of renewable energy investments. Various considerations are important in planning for data-driven decision-making. For instance, data can vary in type and quality, be expensive to obtain, and require specific skills and resources to process and interpret. This guide describes data requirements for making various renewable energy decisions and discusses the tools and analyses necessary to transform these data into recommendations for decision-makers...

Pennsylvania's teachers are undercompensated-and new pension legislation will cut their compensation even more Undercompensation is likely a factor in Pennsylvania's growing teacher shortage Report • By Jeffrey Keefe • February 15, 2018 • Washington, DC View this report at epi.org/138380 What this report finds: We find that Pennsylvania public school teachers are undercompensated relative to other full-time workers with similar education and skills. Their weekly wages are 12.1 percent lower than the wages of comparable full-time employees in Pennsylvania, and their weekly compensation (including both wages and benefits) is 6.8 percent lower. Further, we find that once new pension legislation goes into effect in 2019, the weekly compensation for new teachers will drop even lower, to 10.0 percent less than that of comparable workers. Why it matters: Pennsylvania is suffering from a severe teacher shortage. Research suggests a correlation between compensation and the ability to attract and retain teachers. If teacher compensation decreases even further in Pennsylvania, the teacher shortage will likely only grow worse. What can be done about it: Improving compensation could help mitigate the teacher shortage. But instead of working to improve compensation, Pennsylvania is doing the opposite: its state legislature passed laws reducing teacher pension benefits in 2010 and again in 2017 (the latter goes into effect in 2019). If we want to do something about the teacher shortage, the current trends in teacher compensation need to be reversed. Data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education show that, from 2013 to 2015, the number of students graduating from teacher-training programs plummeted by 63 percent. A growing teacher shortage in the state is disproportionately hurting low-income and high-minority schools-with those schools increasingly relying on uncertified teachers to fill open slots. At the same time, the state has been cutting pension benefits for public school teachers-a move that seems likely to make teaching jobs less attractive and exacerbate the current teacher shortage. Pension legislation passed in 2010 (Act 120) decreased pension benefits for teachers hired in 2011 and later, while a 2017 law (Act 5) will further cut pension benefits for teachers hired in 2019 (and beyond). In light of the Pennsylvania's most recent pension cuts and the challenges the state faces in attracting and retaining qualified teachers, we ask two primary questions in this study: How does teacher pay compare with the pay of other comparable workers in Pennsylvania-that is, are Pennsylvania public school teachers underpaid (which could help explain the teacher shortage) or overpaid (which might justify the pension cuts)? And how will teacher compensation change under Act 5 beginning in 2019? We further break down the compensation data to answer these questions: How does the teacher pay penalty vary by gender? And how does gender and racial/ethnic pay equity among teachers compare with pay equity among other workers? Finally, we examine whether union membership and collective bargaining has any effect on teacher compensation. 1

This thesis consists of three chapters on the economic and political effects of in-migration. In the first chapter, I show that political opposition to immigration can arise even when immigrants bring significant economic prosperity to receiving areas. I exploit exogenous variation in European immigration to US cities between 1910 and 1930 induced by World War I and the Immigration Acts of the 1920s, and instrument immigrants' location decision relying on pre-existing settlement patterns. Immigration increased natives' employment and occupational standing, and fostered industrial production and capital utilization. However, despite these economic benefits, it triggered hostile political reactions, such as the election of more conservative legislators, higher support for anti-immigration legislation, and lower public goods provision. Stitching the economic and the political results together, I provide evidence that natives' backlash was, at least in part, due to cultural differences between immigrants and natives, suggesting that diversity might be economically beneficial but politically hard to manage. The second chapter asks the following question: is racial heterogeneity responsible for the distressed financial conditions of US central cities and for their limited ability to provide even basic public goods? If so, why? I study these questions exploiting the movement of more than 1.5 million African Americans from the South to the North of the United States during the first wave of the Great Migration (1915-1930). Black immigration and the induced white outmigration ("white flight") are both instrumented for using, respectively, pre-migration settlements and their interaction with MSA geographic characteristics that affect the cost of moving to the suburbs. The inflow of African Americans imposed a strong, negative fiscal externality on receiving places by lowering property values and, mechanically, reducing tax revenues. Unable or unwilling to raise tax rates, cities cut public spending, especially in education, to meet a tighter budget constraint. While the fall in tax revenues was partly offset by higher debt, this strategy may, in the long run, have proven unsustainable, contributing to the financially distressed conditions of several US central cities today. The third chapter, coauthored with Michela Carlana, studies the effects of immigration on natives' marriage, fertility, and family formation across US cities between 1910 and 1930. Instrumenting immigrants' location decision by interacting pre-existing ethnic settlements with aggregate migration flows, we find that immigration raised marriage rates, fertility, and the propensity to leave the parental house for young native men and women. We show that these effects were driven by the large and positive impact of immigration on native men's employment and occupational standing, which increased the supply of "marriageable men". We also explore alternative mechanisms - changes in sex ratios, natives' cultural responses, and displacement effects of immigrants on female employment - and provide evidence that none of them can account for a quantitatively relevant fraction of our results.

Research on social vulnerability to disasters has played an important role in the identification of factors that influence one’s ability to prepare for, respond to, cope with, and adapt to changing environmental conditions during the disaster life cycle. However, existing literature often fails to explore the effect of place as a significant dimension for vulnerability, and regards this as a separate consideration. This dissertation explores how social vulnerability is not a static construct over time, and considers place-based contexts as key components of the social vulnerability paradigm. Based on this approach, the main research questions for this dissertation concerns: Does social vulnerability operate differently across spatial contexts along the rural-urban continuum, how has vulnerability changed in the last 30 years, and how does vulnerability interact with place to influence disaster casualty risk outcomes differently for populations living in hurricane-prone areas along the Gulf and Atlantic coastal United States?

While the vast literature on gendered divisions of household labor has rarely examined the experiences of Latino families, the limited research in this area has failed to account for structural contexts, even while pointing to cultural explanations for inequalities. Based on surveys of 542 Mexican American families, we argue that when taken together, structural factors predict housework for Mexican families even when individuals hold traditional cultural attitudes. Household labor continues to be women’s responsibility. Structural factors, compared with cultural factors, were better predictors of women’s household sharing. Women decreased their housework with employment, higher earnings, and increased education. Both structural and cultural factors influenced men’s household sharing. Men increased their household labor when their wives worked outside of the home, had more education, and when men disagreed with a traditional cultural attitude. Including structural and cultural measures in future research can limit the cultural assumptions made of Latino families.

Employment is a critically important means by which midlife and older people generate well-being, both pre- and post-retirement. Understanding features of Boston’s older workforce and the challenges experienced by older people in seeking and retaining employment is an important step toward promoting employment opportunities that will strengthen economic security. Moreover, because midlife and older people make up a large share of the paid labor force in Boston, knowledge developed about these issues may help to ensure that this segment of the population is retained as productive members of the workforce. This paper was produced in support of the Action Plan developed for Age-Friendly Boston, an initiative established in 2014 by Boston’s Mayor Martin J. Walsh through the Commission on Affairs of the Elderly. A needs assessment conducted for the Age-Friendly Boston Initiative revealed that many Boston residents think that more job opportunities are needed for older people, and they perceive barriers to finding and retaining employment in later life. The research outlined in this paper was developed based on review of the literature, demographic analysis of existing data on older Boston residents, and interviews with key informants knowledgeable about the Boston employment landscape, including older jobseekers themselves. The paper is intended to inform efforts taken by the City and others to improve Boston’s employment landscape for older residents. Demographic findings suggest that eight out . . .

Using a nationally representative sample of individuals across all fifty United States from the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS), this research explores differences in the incidence and predictors of health insurance status across region (i.e. West, Midwest, South, and Northeast) for individuals age 18 and older. The data suggests that: 1) Individuals from the Northeast are the most likely to have some form of health insurance, while individuals from the South are the least likely; 2) The factors which influence health insurance status are relatively similar across all regions, though they often differ substantially in magnitude; 3) In some cases region can play a significant role in determining the type of insurance an individual has (i.e. Public versus Private). Policy makers will find these results useful to target specific factors within regions that may prove to increase the number of insured individuals. Furthermore, researchers may choose to use this paper as a current reference and starting point for further in-depth analysis on targeted factors within specific regions.

In 1863, along the southern periphery of the American Civil War, a Union Brigadier General began recruiting Southern white men into a Union cavalry regiment known as the First Florida Cavalry (US). This study investigates the regiment and those who enlisted in it to show the fluidity of Southern loyalty during the Civil War and the conditions of the Deep South Homefront that existed on the periphery of Union occupation and continue to exist on the periphery of Civil War historiography. While scholars have recently addressed many aspects of Southern dissent in the Civil War, significantly less attention has been given to those who fought in the Union ranks. Utilizing previously unused archival materials paired with geospatial mapping, this study reveals the lives of Southerners who enlisted and their homeland. It examines both those who formed the regiment and those who enlisted in it. This analysis illuminates common soldier experience in the Sectional Conflict’s Southern borderland. This study concludes that the volatile nature of loyalty and the needs of the homefront in the Deep South encouraged both Union generals to form the First Florida Cavalry and Southerners to enlist in it. While this assessment analyzes only several hundred men, it provides insights into the larger populations of Southern Union soldiers throughout the Deep South and their competing loyalties to nation and community.

We examine the relation between a firm's information environment and the wages paid to its rank-and-file employees. Using establishment-level Census data, we document that firms with poorer information environments, measured by less readable annual reports and the lack of management earnings forecasts, pay their workers more. This relation is stronger when employees own more stock in their firm, bear greater information acquisition costs, and have more influence in the wage-setting process. We also utilize instrumental variables and exploit the passage of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as a shock to a firm's information environment and find evidence suggesting a causal effect of disclosures on wages. Overall, these results are consistent with the theory of compensating wage differentials, as employees appear to receive higher wages for bearing additional information risk associated with working for a firm with a poorer information environment.

Drawing upon and extending the managerial discretion literature, we examine how top managers and board members behave in terms of adapting strategies and compensation mechanisms within the context of high-discretion that emanates from industry deregulation. We consider not only the increased opportunity to use discretion but also the inherent uncertainty arising from the availability of multiple options and risk of maladaptation, which we refer to as a discretion dilemma. Our longitudinal study examines the changes in the variance of strategies and compensation practices among banks and demonstrates the ways in which upper echelons manage the discretion dilemma. Our results demonstrate interesting reactions of both top managers and board members. Standard deviations of strategies among banks slightly decrease during the early part of the deregulation period examined but increase during the later part of the deregulation period. The results imply that top managers’ choices of strategies are not different from each other initially, but they gradually pursue their unique strategies. Meanwhile, standard deviations of compensation variables increase during the early part of the deregulation period but decrease during the later part of the deregulation period. The results suggest that bank boards explored unique governance mechanisms right after deregulation, but this exploration behavior decreased later. This finding demonstrates that boards function actively only in the presence of external shocks but typically not after the situation is stabilized. Additionally, it is important to note that the reaction pattern observed between top managers and board members is quite different. As previously indicated, board members pursued exploration first and then convergence in the governance adaptation process whereas it took top managers some time to start exploration.

We maintain that a subtle and hitherto unrecognized form of racial inequality at the privileged occupational level is emerging. “New governance” reform, a rapidly encroaching form of privatization which has altered conditions of work and the status of workers is causing African American women to lose the public sector as the long-standing “occupational niche” in managerial and professional employment. Findings from Integrated Public Use Micro-Series data indicate that—in the context of wages—the new “business logic” characterized most importantly by enhanced managerial discretion, has progressively disadvantaged African American women, relative, White gender counterparts. Specifically, relative parity in wages achieved in the public sector, compared to the private sector in 1996 period progressively eroded across two time points, 2003 and 2010 because of widening racial gaps in the public sector. Further, niche status varies across occupational categories: wage gaps widen more in managerial than in professional positions. We discuss prospects for the public sector to remain an occupational niche for African American women in privileged employment and call for more research on racial stratification in the public sector.