My original hypothesis stated that national discourses on organized crime would be both realistically and unrealistically condemnatory, while local discourses would view mafia members as something akin to folk heroes. To some extent, this hypothesis proved correct. Many national portrayals justly or unjustly characterized members of the mafia as bloodthirsty killers with a lust for violence. Respected publications did so in order to condemn the mafia, while less respected publications, such as pulp fiction novels, did so in order to shock and titillate their audience. On the other hand, local beliefs concerning organized crime, observed in local histories, newspapers, and other publications, took multiple different stances. Some local narratives viewed the mafia as folk heroes, while others viewed the mafia as murderous gangsters in the same way that national publications did. In some cases, the local community accepted violent organized crime members because they frequently gave back to their community, through consumer goods, helpful services, or money. By comparing and contrasting respectable mainstream publications, low art pulp novels and cartoons, local Northeast Ohio newspapers and publications, and local histories written by Northeast Ohio individuals, a blurry outline of how different individuals perceived, interacted with, and described the mob emerges.

With the advent of mass media in the 1960s, immortalized in the TV series Mad Men, the pace of brand introduction, sophistication, and importance accelerated dramatically. The world has witnessed a “Cambrian explosion” of brands. The digital revolution of the twenty-first century with cheap mobiles, big data, social media, and global connectivity has further accelerated this process. Brands have become ubiquitous in today’s marketplace. And analysis of the annual rankings of the world’s most powerful brands by consultancies Brand Finance, Interbrand, and Millward Brown confirms that the strongest brands in about any industry are almost invariably global brands.

We evaluate the economic significance of linguistic barriers to communication in 226 US cities from 1980 to 2010. We address the question: to what extent do linguistic barriers across social groups inhibit the benefits of knowledge exchange? The empirical results show that linguistic, racial and composite diversity increase the average income of working age population in American cities. This positive effect of diversity, however, diminishes the higher is the proportion of foreign-born population who lack English fluency. We call this the paradox of diversity. Overall, our findings provide important policy insights about how social diversity may enhance economic performance within cities.

In the following section, we discuss the arguments for and against expanding school choice, along with some of the relevant literature. Next, we describe the types of high school choices that are available to families and students in Chicago and how they have changed over a 15-year period between 2002 and 2016, followed by a description of the data and analytic sample of first-time ninth-graders in CPS. Finally, we look at the potential consequences of choice and discuss their implications.

A new dataset created from the first 18,000 savings accounts opened (from 1850 to 1858) at the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in New York City is described. The bank was founded by Irish Americans, and most of its depositors in its first decade of operations were recent Irish immigrants. The data offer a unique window on both savings behavior by the poor and not-so-poor in antebellum New York and on how emigrants who came primarily from rural parts of Ireland adapted to urban life. They also contain much that is new on the regional origins of mid-nineteenth century Irish immigrants and on their settlement patterns in New York.

This analysis merges Census Bureau data with Google maps to provide a visual representation of immigration’s impact on public schools at the local level.1 The report is based on Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs), which average about 20,600 students, and allow for detailed analysis in densely populated areas. We also report statistics by state and metropolitan area. The findings show that the impact of immigration on public schools is truly enormous in many areas of the country. (The map can be found online at http://cis.org/ Map-Students-Immigrant-Households.) The number of children from immigrant households . . .

Homeownership rate for young households in the United States has declined significantly since 1976. An examination of the ownership-age profile of college and non-college households suggests that while college graduates are postponing home purchasing, a large fraction of non-college graduates have become permanent renters. This paper shows that the diverging homeownership dynamics between college and non-college graduates can be accounted for by an inelastic supply of houses combined with a change in the income distribution due to a higher population share of college graduates and a widening gap in household income between college and non-college graduates. The change in the income distribution drives up aggregate housing demand and leads to higher house prices. As a result, non-college graduates find owning less affordable while college graduates with steeper earning profile postpone home purchasing. Using data for the 105 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. over 1980 to 2010, I find that cities with more college graduates tend to have higher local house prices, lower young homeownership rate for both college and non-college households, and lower middle-aged homeownership rates especially among the non-college households. Moreover, a rise in the household income of college graduates further increases local housing price and lowers homeownership rates for non-college graduates. The changing income distribution can account for the majority of the observed changes in young and middle-aged homeownership rates for both college and non-college graduates.

This book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of the correlates and consequences of residential relocation. Drawing on multiple nationally representative data sets, the book explores historic patterns and current trends in household mobility; individuals mobility-related decisions; and the individual, family, and community outcomes associated with moving.

This article examines the association between occupational sex composition and housework, considering total housework time, time on male-typed and female-typed tasks, and the percent of total time spent on male and female tasks. Previous research examining male- and female-typed chores independent of total housework suggests that couples compensate for gender-atypical employment through gender-typical housework performance, but this analysis of the National Survey of Families and Households (1992-1994) and the American Time Use Survey (2003-2013) demonstrates that assuming a quadratic association and failing to contextualize gendered housework performance within total housework performance obscures the true relationship between occupation and housework. In fact, women and men in gender-atypical occupations perform a more gender-atypical combination of chores. The influence of gender deviance neutralization in the housework literature may overshadow alternative explanations and model specifications. In particular, by assuming a quadratic association, researchers may impose, rather than test, gender deviance neutralization.

In this brief, we present a demographic and economic profile of Duluth, MN, and Superior, WI, with a specific focus on families with children. The cities, situated at the western point of Lake Superior (see Figure 1), share a rich economic history as major ports for coal, iron ore, and grain. Each city is also home to numerous colleges and universities, including the University of Minnesota-Duluth and the University of Wisconsin-Superior.

Relying on exhaustive administrative data spanned over four decades, this paper studies the treatment of African American applicants by the Moderately Priced Dwelling Unit (MPDU) program in Montgomery County, MD. We show that this program was equally accessible to African-American applicants, except between 1995 and 2000, when African Americans’ conditional probability of purchasing a home through the program was lowered by 10% compared to that of other applicants, maybe as a temporary response to the sudden surge in African American applicants that occurred at that time. Turning to the outcome of the allocation process, we show that even if the spatial allocation of beneficiaries does reflect preference-based sorting patterns observed on the private housing market at the neighbor- hood level, the program seems to induce some scattering of different ethnic groups at the most local level. When comparing beneficiaries living in the same housing development, but at different addresses, we find that African American beneficiaries have 15% fewer African- American neighbors.

There are three divisions of Social Security: Old-Age, Survivors Insurance, and Disability Insurance.1 Social Security was created in 1935, while the Disability Insurance was added in 1956. Social Security was never intended to be the sole form of income during retirement; it was designed to supplement other forms of savings. The poverty rate for Americans over 65 has decreased from 35 percent in 1959 to 10 percent in 2013. Of the 10 percent in 2013, the majority were females. Four adjustments to the Social Security Program that are often discuss include the tax rate, the income cap, the cost-of-living adjustment, and the age of eligibility. Increasing the tax rate and income cap would increase the revenue of the program. Decreasing the cost-of-living adjustment . . .

This doctoral dissertation consists of the intersection of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium modeling, including heterogeneous agents, and the subjects of public finance and labor economics. The first chapter explains a puzzling empirical phenomenon regarding fertility rate in the United States. Over the last few decades, high-income females have demonstrated a tendency to have more children in the U.S. At the same time, household income structure has changed, becoming more unequal and more favorable to females. However, these changes appear contradictory to the predictions found in classical fertility literature, which suggest that high-income women exhibit low fertility due to the high opportunity cost of raising children. To account for this puzzling empirical phenomenon, we offer a fertility choice model with preference heterogeneity on having children, which allows for a comparative advantage between employment outside the home and child-rearing. We highlight the composition effect of females who desire children newly entering the high-income group, while females less desirous of children exit as the income structure changes. Our model accounts for 55% of the observed variation in the complete fertility rate, while the comparable model without composition effect fails to explain the observation. We also decompose various income shocks and find that changes in skill premium represent the major factor behind the phenomenon. The second chapter examines . . .

The study examines the effect of trade liberalization on poverty reduction across 60 provinces in Vietnam over a decade from 2002 to 2012 using fixed effects approach. In this study, trade liberalization is proxied by tariff exposure, which is constructed by combining information on geographic variation in the sector composition of the economy and temporal variation in tariff lines by product category. This yields a measure indicating how changes in exposure to tariff reductions vary by geographic area over the period 2002 and 2012. Taking advantage of the available multi-province and six-year dataset, the study includes a set of fixed effects: the province-fixed effects, which capture potential unobservable characteristics that are likely to affect poverty reduction, such as historical and institutional factors; and the time-fixed effects, which controls for aggregate time trend. The results indicate the statistically significant and positive correlation between tariff exposure and poverty, showing that exposure to trade liberalization is associated with poverty reduction and provinces being relatively more exposed to trade liberalization have experienced a stronger reduction in poverty. It is also found that tariff reductions have contributed to the reduction of the depth and severity of poverty in Vietnam. The results are robust to specification and controlling for region dummies and provincial characteristics. While there have been a limited number of studies on the relation between trade liberalization and poverty, poverty gap and poverty severity, the study is expected to make an empirical contribution to the literature of trade liberalization as well as development economics.

Organizational practices are an increasingly important mechanism for retaining and motivating employees. Using a new survey tool in partnership with PayScale.com between 2014 and 2016, I first document the cross-section of job satisfaction and organizational practices in the labor market, and, secondly, recover a willingness to pay for these amenities. I show that these amenities create a time-varying, firm-specific rent that amplifies traditional selection problems. My identification strategy exploits employees' outside option, which is uncorrelated with contemporaneous organizational factors, but still capitalizes workplace amenities. Employees are willing to pay 2-3% of their earnings for a standard deviation rise in organizational practices.

The number of young children (aged 0-4) in Ohio dropped from 735,204 in 2005 to 686,414 in 2014 -- a 6.6% decrease. Overall, young children made up a little less than 6% of Ohio's total population in 2014. The majority of Ohio's young children were White (71.3%), 14.5% Black, 3.7% Hispanic of any race, 1.9% Asian, and 8.6% identify as another race.

In this brief, we report nationally representative estimates of food insecurity among college students using data from the October and December Supplements to the Current Population Survey (CPS). We find that levels of food insecurity among households with students in four-year colleges and vocational education were 11.2 and 13.5 percent, respectively, in 2015—rates that are largely similar to national levels. However, households with students enrolled in two-year colleges were more likely to be food insecure in the period after the 2008 recession, with average rates of food insecurity of 21.2 percent during 2008–14. In 2015, the rate of food insecurity among households with two-year college students dropped to an estimated 13.3 percent.

Since the first empirical paper on the topic more than two decades ago (Bad- gett, 1995), the common story in the literature on wages and sexual orien- tation has been that gay men face a wage penalty compared to heterosexual men while lesbians are paid the same as or more than heterosexual women. However, none of the papers in the literature have thoroughly addressed the role of marital status in these wage gaps. Using data from the 2013-2015 American Community Survey and OLS as well as selection-corrected estima- tors, we show that the gay male penalty exists only for the group of married men, while the lesbian wage premium persists across marital status but is smaller for married lesbians.

Abstract: The divergence between the literature on fertility decision making and the differences factors on determinants signifies the importance of this study. The study will conduct empirical analysis from the perspective of demographical dimension, socio-economics, intergenerational factors and microeconomics factors that is associated with fertility decision making from the theoretical perspective of quality vs. quantity of children. Order Probit model was employed using the selected sample of female at the age 15 to 49. The finding revealed educated women in Malaysia and UK decision on the number of children based on their fertility preference and career advancement. The other explanation is based on the relative price change by Becker’s demand of children – cost of child-rearing activities, urbanization, opportunity costs of child-bearing.Keywords: Fertility-decision, socio-economics, demographical, intergenerational, microeconomics