Measuring spouses’ ages allows us to explore larger sociological issues about marriage, such as whether narrowing gaps signal gender progress or if a rise in female-older unions reveals a status change. Using Census and American Community Survey data, I test the merits of beauty-exchange and status homogamy theories as explanations for how heterosexual marital age gaps changed over a 40-year period of social and economic revolution. Analyses address questions about how age gaps compared for people with different characteristics, whether similarly aged couples exhibited greater educational and socio-economic homogamy than others, and if the odds of being in age-heterogamous marriages changed.

This study analyzes the effect of past occupation on employment outcomes for displaced workers. The data used is a pooled cross sectional sample of displaced workers from 1996 to 2016, and employment outcomes are measured in three ways: the length of an individual’s unemployment spell, the change in weekly earnings between their lost and current job, and the total lost income caused by displacement over a five-year period. Considerable differences are found among occupations for all three outcome measures. To investigate the causes of this heterogeneity, I analyze the impact of human capital and aggregate occupation demand on occupation effects. Variation in the value of human capital in recovering from job loss can explain much of the occupational differences in weekly income change and five-year lost income. Differences in aggregate occupation demand, conversely, are found to mainly explain occupational heterogeneity in unemployment length.

Maryland’s Eastern Shore is a place with significant assets including natural beauty, productive farmland, and an iconic seafood industry. The region also faces significant challenges—some that would be familiar to residents of any other part of Maryland, and some that stem from the region’s distinctive geography and development patterns. The Eastern Shore’s labor market is characterized by higher unemployment and lower wages than other parts of the state. Partly as a result, families in the region are more likely to struggle to afford the basics. Parts of the Shore lack adequate numbers of health care providers and require residents to travel long distances for care, even in the event of a medical emergency. Finally, while the threat of climate change looms over our entire state, it is already a dangerous reality for many of the Eastern Shore’s coastal communities. Actions—or in some cases inaction—by the federal government could exacerbate each one of these challenges. State policymakers as well as local governments on the Eastern Shore must make important choices in responding . . .

Education policy is a core element of the modern state’s sovereignty and autonomy. Education serves the state as a means of integrating society through culture and ideology, furthermore as a key tool for improving political power and legitimacy, and finally fuelling and stimulating economic growth via human capital investment. Eighteenth century state-building brought the expansion and improvement of educational institutions, and the nineteenth century the development of the fully-fledged education-state. In the twentieth “human capital” century, education policy reached its pinnacle, characterized by unprecedented growth in terms of educational attainment, investments and returns. However, in the last decades, weaknesses of education policy have become visible: the declining growth of human capital returns, problems of reducing social inequality as well as deficient cultural and social integration. Throughout centuries the schooling of girls followed the schooling of boys with delay. Yet, today girl's gross tertiary school enrolment is globally ahead of boys. Indeed, progress of education is a process of longue durée.

As housing costs increased in recent years, particularly in large coastal cities, a common public narrative has attributed the trend to high-income in-migration. For example, the technology industry in the San Francisco Bay Area has attracted many high-income workers to the area, which locals and national journalists alike argue has caused a burdensome increase in housing costs for long-term residents. The association has arguably been exacerbated by strict regulations on new housing construction. Using data from the 2005—2016 American Community Survey and Wharton Residential Land Use Regulatory Index, this paper empirically tests whether this narrative has general applicability for 132 metropolitan areas in the United States. Despite positive associations between high-income in-migration and monthly rental costs, results from panel decomposition models find no or negative associations with rent burdens. However, metropolitan areas with stably high levels of high-income in-migration also exhibit high rates of out-migration. The results suggest the null or negative associations between high-income inmigration and rent burdens may be due to displacement of lower-income residents. More prominently, the results suggest housing market dynamics in places like San Francisco are not generalizable to most US cities. Our findings warrant caution with the general public narrative around high-income in-migration and housing regulation.

Exploiting county-level variation in oil-producing areas from shocks to world oil and gas prices, we study how local labor market conditions affect disability take-up. We extend well-known previous work using a similar research design by analyzing a different price shock; a larger, more representative set of labor markets; and a more recent period marked by skyrocketing disability payments. Our estimated elasticity for SSDI payments with respect to earnings of -0.29 is surprisingly similar to earlier findings. Our preferred SSI elasticity estimate of -0.16 is smaller than previous findings, but we show that SSI programmatic changes explain most of the difference.

This paper investigates supply-side discrimination in the labor market for Boston taxi drivers. Using data on millions of trips from 2010?2015, I explore whether the labor supply behavior of taxi drivers differs by the gender, racial/ethnic, or age composition of Boston neighborhoods. I find that disparities in shift hours due to neighborhood demographics exist even when differences in local earnings opportunities are taken into account. I observe heterogeneity in the amount that drivers discriminate and find that this discrimination is primarily statistical rather than taste-based. As drivers gain experience and learn to better anticipate wage variation, discrimination decreases.

This paper examines the effect of childhood access to primary schooling on adult black incarceration in the early 20th century. I construct a linked census dataset of incarcerated and non-incarcerated men to observe access to schooling in childhood. I find that full exposure to one of the new primary schools built as part of the Rosenwald program reduces the probability of incarceration by 1.9 percentage points. I argue that the reduction in incarceration comes from increased opportunity costs of crime through higher educational attainment. These results contribute to a broader literature on racial gaps in social outcomes in the US. JEL Codes: I24, N32, K42

The fact that firms benefit from close proximity to other firms with which they can exchange inputs, skilled labor or know-how helps explain why many industrial clusters are so successful. Studying the evolution of coagglomeration patterns, we show that the type of agglomeration that benefits firms has drastically changed over the course of a century and differs markedly across industries. Whereas, at the beginning of the twentieth century, industries tended to colocate with their value chain partners, in more recent decades the importance of this channel has declined and colocation seems to be driven more by similarities in industries’ skill requirements. By calculating industry-specific Marshallian agglomeration forces, we are able to show that, today, skill-sharing is the most salient motive behind the location choices of services, whereas value chain linkages still explain much of the colocation patterns in manufacturing. Moreover, the estimated degrees to which labor and input-output linkages are reflected in an industry’s coagglomeration patterns help improve predictions of city-industry employment growth.

The rags-to-riches paradigm has played an important role in describing immigrant experience in nineteenth-century America and focuses on the immigrant‟s development from poverty to wealth. Due to a conflation of Irish famine and immigrant historiography, Irish immigrants appeared at the bottom of every list of immigrant development: they were seen as the most impoverished immigrants America has ever welcomed. Women, moreover, have often been overlooked in research. In 1995 bank records, from the Emigrants Industrial Savings Bank became publically available. A large proportion of these bank records were owned by Irish immigrants and a significant percentage of account holders were women. This thesis focuses on Irishwomen who moved to New York during the Great Irish Famine and its immediate aftermath. Records from the EISB show that some of these women were able to save considerable sums of money. By combining the bank records of domestic servants, needle traders and business owners, with analyses of working women in historical novels written by the famine generation and newspaper articles, this interdisciplinary thesis aims to give Irish female immigrants a voice in historical research. This thesis enlarges our knowledge about famine immigration and shows us how Irishwomen can enrich our understanding about female economic activity and women on the nineteenth-century job market. Most importantly, this thesis demonstrates that if we want to revise the rags-to-riches paradigm, it is necessary . . .

While Mississippi’s economy is currently producing low unemployment overall, more than one in five women live in poverty—the highest rate in the nation. Women of color continue to be significantly overrepresented in low-wage work and Black workers continue to experience higher unemployment rates, even when they have higher educational attainment. While women of color represent a disproportionately high share of Mississippi’s working poor, nearly 600,000 working-age Mississippians are economically insecure. Employment equity is essential to creating economic prosperity for all Mississippians. Achieving employment equity would mean that every Mississippian who wants to work can find a good job that pays family-supporting wages. It also means that women and people of color are not disproportionately unemployed or stuck in low-wage work. Employment equity in Mississippi will require gender equity and racial equity in the . . .

This paper examines the effects of Asian segregation on students’ academic performance in New York City primary schools. We use exogenous variation in the share of Asian students across cohorts and schools stemming from a fertility shock among Asian population in the Chinese year of the Dragon. A one-percentage-point increase in Asian student share reduces non-Asian math and ELA scores by 0.03 and 0.05 standard deviations. The effects are largest among black and Hispanic students. We find little evidence of effects among white students. The findings suggest that desegregation policies may generate net benefits in terms of student achievement.

The surge in unaccompanied minor crossings between 2011 and 2014 led to an overwhelming increase in the number of juvenile deportation proceedings, which coincided with a peak in intensified immigration enforcement at the state and local levels. Using data on juvenile deportation proceedings, we examine how tougher immigration enforcement might have influenced judicial rulings on these cases and, ultimately, these youths’ ability to stay in the country. We find that the average increase in immigration enforcement over that period is associated with a 15% reduction in the share of juvenile cases ending with permission to stay. The result underscores the importance of the immigration policy context in which courts operate on their rulings, even if immigration law is within the jurisdiction of the Federal government. Given the gravity of the circumstances these children are escaping, further attention to how the piecemeal approach to immigration enforcement might impact the protection of their humanitarian rights is warranted.

We find evidence that the leadership of overconfident chief executive officers (CEOs) induces stakeholders to take actions that contribute to the leader's vision. By being intentionally overexposed to the idiosyncratic risk of their firms, overconfident CEOs exhibit a strong belief in their firms’ prospects. This belief attracts suppliers beyond the firm's observable expansionary corporate activities. Overconfident CEOs induce more supplier commitments including greater relationship-specific investment and longer relationship duration. Overconfident CEOs also induce stronger labor commitments as employees exhibit lower turnover rates and greater ownership of company stock in benefit plans.

The development of mortality models is important in order to reconstruct histor-ical processes, understand current patterns and predict future trends. Mortality models are particularly useful when the available data are sparse, unreliable or in-complete. Traditionally, mortality patterns in data-rich populations were used to ob-serve mathematical or empirical regularities, which could be applied to data-sparse populations. However, as a wider variety of data have become available, the focus of model building has shifted to developing flexible models that perform well in a variety of contexts.This dissertation introduces Bayesian methods of mortality estimation in three con-texts where the available data are imperfect. The first paper develops a method to estimate subnational mortality in situations with small populations and highly-variable data. The second paper develops a unified modeling framework to estimate and project neonatal mortality in all countries worldwide, including those with lim-ited and poor-quality data. The third paper introduces a new dataset to study mortality inequalities in the United States, and develops methods to deal with the truncated and censored mortality information that is available. In all three contexts,the modeling approaches combine strengths from traditional demographic models,which capture mortality regularities across age, with the flexibility of Bayesian frame-works, which allow for multiple data sources to be incorporated, information to be shared across time and space, and uncertainty to be assessed

Research on social change suggests that cultural values and behaviour have become increasingly individualistic over the past century. Prior researchers theorized that shifts in sociodemographic variables—e.g., changes in urbanization and socioeconomic status, are largely responsible for this cultural change. The research presented in this paper draws from social psychological research to introduce the idea that greater ethnic diversity is related to an increased endorsement of individualistic values and behaviour, and may contribute to the increasing rates of individualism. Across six studies, I investigate the association between the levels of ethnic diversity and individualism across multiple levels of analyses. In Study 1, I demonstrate that historical levels of ethnic diversity across the United States over the last century predict societal indicators of individualism. Study 2 presents evidence that increasing ethnic diversity predicts increasing individualism at the level of U.S. states over the span of 16 years, an effect that exists for both majority and minority group members. In Study 3, I offer evidence that people who perceive greater ethnic diversity in their communities report increased interactions with ethnically different others, and that increased interethnic interactions contribute to a greater endorsement of individualistic values. In Study 4, I present evidence that undergraduate student’s . . .

In the post-World War II period, workers with a high school diploma or less were able to attain jobs with middle-class wages in American industry. Good jobs1 were available in manufacturing and other blue-collar industries that employed large numbers of high schooleducated workers. But as automation, globalization, and related phenomena have led to major structural changes in the American economy, economic opportunity has shifted toward more educated workers with higher skill levels. Whereas two out of three entry-level jobs in the industrial economy demanded a high school diploma or less, now two out of three jobs demand at least some education or training beyond high school.2 Today, there are three pathways to good jobs, each defined by education and skills: the high school pathway, the middle-skills pathway, and the . . .

This dissertation research is a comprehensive study of Asian Americans' socioeconomic achievements. It aims to measure changes of Asian Americans' socioeconomic achievements between 2005 and 2015, to examine the glass ceiling facing Asian Americans, and to evaluate the impacts of the Great Recession and concentration on occupational attainments of Asian Americans. Using American Community Survey data, I attempt to answer the following questions. First, how did the patterns of Asian Americans' socioeconomic achievements changed over a decade between 2005 and 2015? Second, how thick and persistent is the glass ceiling faced by Asian immigrants and U.S.-born Asians? Third, did Asian Americans benefit from geographical and industrial concentration? Fourth, what was the impacts of the Great Recession on Asian Americans?

This paper used microdata from the 2013–2015 American Community Survey to examine differences in federal government, state and local government, private sector, and self‐employment among employed veterans and nonveterans. The U.S. federal and state governments have hiring preferences to benefit veterans, especially disabled veterans. Other factors may also push veterans toward public sector employment. I found that veteran status substantially increased the likelihood of federal employment, with the largest magnitudes for severely disabled veterans. Differences in state and local government employment were modest and exhibited heterogeneity by disability severity.

We develop a model to understand the trade-offs faced by an elected representative in supporting an amnesty when a restrictive immigration policy is in place. We show that an amnesty is more desirable the more restricted are the occupational opportunities of undocumented immigrants and the less redistributive is the welfare state. Empirical evidence based on the voting behavior of U.S. Congressmen on the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 provides strong support for the predictions of our theoretical model.