In this paper, we explore how estimated returns to human capital characteristics in predicting earnings are affected by measurement error. We find that estimated returns to age and education may depend on the source data for earnings and that the impact of changing the source data may differ by race. Using standard analytical tools for measuring wage discrimination, we find that less of the racial wage gap is explained by worker characteristics when using a Current Population Survey (CPS) selfreported earnings measure rather than a measure of earnings from the Social Security Administration’s Detailed Earnings Record (DER). While other studies have examined issues of misreporting, specifically at the tail ends of the income distribution, our analysis extends beyond distributional changes to examine the impact of the source of earnings data on inequality measurement. Overall, our results provide informative and relevant information for understanding the extent to which self-reported earnings data and reported earnings from administrative records influences the estimation of inequality and our interpretation of factors that drive earnings inequality by race, specifically the black-white earnings gap.

Movements in house prices may affect household consumption through wealth, collateral, income, or substitution effects. However, individual and aggregate consumption responses depend on whether house prices are moving due to aggregate, regional, local, neighborhood , or idiosyncratic shocks. I first show that there is significant city-, neighborhood-, and idiosyncratic-level variation in house prices. Second, I show that the different components of house price movements are associated with different consumption movements. Using a large panel of consumers over the period 2004-2015, I find that aggregate price movements are associated with the largest consumption movements, however neighborhood-level price movements have a stronger effect than city-level price movements. There are theoretical reasons to think that different components of house price movements should have differential effects on consumption. Previous work has shown that older homeowners have larger consumption responses to house price rises than younger households since older homeowners are more likely to downsize or sell their housing stock, implying future housing costs for them are lower, which generates a net positive wealth effect (Campbell and Cocco (2007)). The same logic applies to movements across locations. Households are more likely to move across counties or neighborhoods than they are to move across cities, states, or regions. Thus, a house price increase in a particular neighborhood generates a wealth effect for households likely to move to other neighborhoods. A house price increase in a city does not generate a similar consumption response if a household never intends to leave the city. To investigate this mechanism I then build a partial equilibrium, life-cycle model with heterogeneous agents to explore the effect on consumption of different levels of house price shocks.

Cette thèse propose une analyse empirique et comparative des conditions d’emploi des descendants d’immigrés en France et aux États-Unis. L’objectif est de mieux caractériser l’intégration sur le marché du travail des descendants d’immigrés, en adoptant une approche multidimensionnelle. La comparaison entre la France et les États-Unis permet de mettre en lumière les dimensions sur lesquelles portent les inégalités en termes de conditions d’emploi entre les descendants d’immigrés et de natifs dans chacun des pays, afin de mieux spécifier ces inégalités. Notre analyse explore dans un premier chapitre, le déclassement professionnel, dans un deuxième chapitre, trois aspects de la sécurité socio-économique de la qualité de l’emploi et enfin, dans un dernier chapitre, la distribution des écarts de salaire. Bien que des écarts en termes de conditions d’emploi existent dans les deux pays en défaveur des descendants d’immigrés, ces écarts ne semblent pas être le résultat d’inégalités mais plutôt d’effets de structure, telles que les différences d’âge ou de niveau d’éducation entre les deux groupes. Les professions et secteurs d’activité dans lesquels les descendants d’immigrés travaillent expliquent aussi ces écarts. Les résultats montrent des similarités entre les deux pays : une fois le biais de sélection à l’accès à l’emploi pris en compte, le fait d’avoir des parents immigrés n’a pas d’effet significatif sur le déclassement professionnel (chapitre 1) mais un effet positif et significatif sur le salaire (chapitre 2). En revanche, les deux pays se distinguent sur plusieurs points. En France, être descendant d’immigrés contribue à significativement freiner l’accès à l’emploi et à diminuer la sécurité de l’emploi. En revanche, aux États-Unis cela a un effet négatif uniquement sur le temps de travail (chapitre 2). Cette thèse défend la prise en compte de l’hétérogénéité qui existe au sein de la population des descendants d’immigrés en termes de pays d’origine de leurs parents. En effet, des effets contradictoires selon le pays d’origine des parents peuvent conduire à des effets non significatifs au niveau agrégé, comme c’est le cas pour le déclassement par exemple. Le dernier chapitre montre un écart salarial plus marqué pour les bas salaires dans les deux pays, avec toutefois comme différence majeure que ce qui reste inobservable contribue à diminuer l’écart salarial entre descendants de natifs et d’immigrés aux États-Unis mais à . . .

An important unknown in understanding the impact of climate change is the scope of adaptation, which requires observations on historical time scales. We consider how weather across U.S. history (1860–2000) has affected various measures of productivity. Using cross-sectional and panel methods, we document significant responses of agricultural and individual productivity to weather. We find strong effects of hotter and wetter weather early in U.S. history, but these effects have generally been attenuated in recent decades. The results suggest that estimates from a given period may be of limited use in forecasting the longer-term impacts of climate change.

This paper quantitatively investigates patterns and trends of single motherhood in Vietnam by using the Vietnam Population and Housing Census 1999 and 2009 provided by IPUMS and utilizing descriptive statistical analysis. We construct measures of single motherhood, including different types of single mothers along marital status, living arrangement, and structure of household head. We find that while two-parent mother is still a dominant form of motherhood in Vietnam, single motherhood has increased from 5.63% in 1999 to 6.41% in 2009. In other words, over the course of 10 years, the proportion of single mothers has increased by about 14%. Most single mothers are older and have an on average lower level of education than two-parent mothers. Like two-parent mothers, the majority of them is self-employed or works in the family enterprise sector. Interestingly, most single mothers live with children only and assume the role of household head.

In the early twentieth century, the cotton-growing regions of the US South were dominated by families of tenant farmers. Tenant farming created both opportunities and incentives for prospective tenants to marry at young ages. These opportunities and incentives especially affected African Americans, who had few alternatives to working as tenants. Using complete-count Census of Population data from 1900-1930 and Census of Agriculture data from 1889-1929, we find that increases in tenancy over time increased the prevalence of marriage among young African Americans. We then study how marriage was affected by one of the most notorious disruptions to southern agriculture at the turn of the century: the boll weevil infestation of 1892-1922. Using historical Department of Agriculture maps, we show that the boll weevil's arrival reduced both the share of farms worked by tenants and the share of African Americans who married at young ages. When the boll weevil altered African Americans' opportunities and incentives to start families, the share of African Americans who married young fell accordingly. Our results provide new evidence about the effect of economic and political institutions on demographic transformations.

While a great deal of attention has been given to the 1990s crime drop, less is known about the more recent decline in homicide rates that occurred in several large U.S. cities. This paper aims to explore whether these represent two distinct drops via statistical evidence of structural breaks in longitudinal homicide trends and explore potentially differing explanations for the two declines. Methods: Using homicide data on a large sample of U.S. cities from 1990 to 2011, we test for structural breaks in temporal homicide rates. Combining census data and a time series approach, we also examine the role structural features, demographic shifts, and crime control strategies played in the changes in homicide rates over time. Results: Statistical evidence demonstrates two structural breaks in homicide trends, with one trend reflecting the 1990s crime drop (1994-2002) and another trend capturing a second decline (2007-2011). Time series analysis confirms previous research findings about the contributions of structural conditions (e.g., disadvantage) and crime control strategies (e.g., police force size) to the crime drop of the 1990s, but these factors cannot account for the more recent drop with the exception of police presence. Conclusions: Although both structural conditions and crime control strategies are critical to the longitudinal trends in homicide rates over the entire span from 1990 to 2011, different factors account for these two distinct temporal trends.

In May 1910, the New York Times published an article about an arranged marriage between two migrants from Austria-Hungary. “Hastens to Marry His Mother's Choice” was written as more than a charming story of love at first sight. Indeed, the reporter considered the love story an example of near instant assimilation of migrants into American culture. A deeper investigation of the life stories of the couple shows that they did understand some things about American life on the first day they met, namely, the need to falsely report the bride's age as 20 rather than 17. In other respects, the couple retained their ties to Central Europe, choosing to live and work in rural coal-mining villages dominated by migrants from Austria-Hungary. They experienced firsthand the good and bad of life as Americans: the high wages paid to migrant coal miners and the resulting higher standard of living than could be gained in Hungary, but also the violence of management-labor conflicts in the coal fields and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan against Roman Catholic migrants in the American Midwest. Over a lifetime, the couple changed their names from the Hungarian Mihály to “Mike” and from the Hungarian Piroska to “Pearl.” By the time of Piroska's death, her surviving children were so far removed from Hungarian life that they could not even spell their mother's maiden name.

Concern with childhood nutrition prompted numerous surveys of children’s growth in the United States after 1870. The Children’s Bureau’s 1918 ‘Weighing and Measuring Test’ measured two million children to produce the first official American growth norms. Individual data for 14,000 children survives from the Saint Paul, Minnesota survey whose stature closely approximated national norms. As well as anthropometric details the survey recorded exact age, street address and full name. These variables allow linkage to the 1920 census to obtain demographic and socio-economic information. We matched 72% of children to census families creating a sample of nearly 10,000 children. Children in the entire survey (linked set) averaged 0.74 (0.72) standard deviations below modern World Health Organization height-for-age standards, and 0.48 (0.46) standard deviations below modern weight-for-age norms. Sibship size strongly influenced height-for-age, and had weaker influence on weight-for-age. Each additional child aged six or under reduced height-for-age scores by 0.07 standard deviations (95% confidence interval: –0.03, 0.11). Teenage siblings had little effect on height-for-age. Social class effects were substantial. Children of laborers averaged half a standard deviation shorter than children of professionals. Family structure and socio-economic status had compounding impacts on children’s stature.

King County leads the way in opportunity and innovation. Home to some of the most recognizable companies in the world, our region is an incubator for cutting-edge research and innovation. Our workforce is diverse, skilled, educated, and creative. Yet even as we are held up as an economic model for the rest of the country, we face a serious challenge within our labor force – one that conflicts with our deeply held local values of inclusion and fairness. Our economic growth is strong and our workforce is skilled, educated and creative. However, our gender wage gap is one of the most . . .

In a recent paper, Garthwaite, Gross and Notowidigdo (2014) report large positive labor supply effects of a major contraction in public insurance coverage in Tennessee, announced at the end of 2004 and implemented in mid-2005, using data from the March CPS. These results are important given the expansions of Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act and the potential for substantial Medicaid contractions under President Trump and the Republican Congress. Their results are surprising given the previous work on the employment effects of health insurance expansions, but the authors argue that these differences in estimates are due to the fact that the Tennessee program went much higher into the income distribution than the programs studied by other researchers. In this paper we show, under reasonable parameter restrictions, that the framework used by Garthwaite, Gross and Notowidigdo (2014) only allows for estimating the lower bound on the labor supply response to the contraction, which makes their results all the more striking. However, we show next that their large estimates are the result of focusing on the March CPS in estimation. When we use their estimation strategy on a dataset based on all the months of the CPS, or a dataset based on the American Community Survey, we find much smaller, and sometimes negative, estimates of the lower bound on the labor supply response. This result holds when we use the whole data set or allow for parameter heterogeneity by hours worked, age and education. Note that compared to the March CPS, these alternative datasets offer much larger sample sizes and are not affected by seasonal factors. We then consider a number of possible explanations for the differences in the estimates, but our results continue when we consider these modifications. We attempt to distinguish between the estimates across databases using placebo tests. While these tests reject many estimates, there is still a very wide range in the surviving estimates. Hence, we conclude that, at best, we do not have good estimates of the treatment effect of interest.

In this paper, I estimate the longer-run impact of variation in labor market entry conditions, driven by the Great Depression, on income and other labor outcomes in the 1940 Census. I use a regression discontinuity research design and find that 10 years after entry, less educated men entering the labor market at the beginning of the Great Depression earned 8.6 % less than those entering just one year prior. I find that the effect is larger (14.7 %) for those born in states more negatively affected by the Great Depression and close to zero for those born in states relatively less affected. The results indicate that the Great Depression had a persistent, negative impact on less-educated entrants that is not significantly different from that experienced by unlucky entrants of modern recessions.

A Wall Street Journal analysis shows that since the 1990's, sparsely populated counties have replaced large cities as America's most troubled areas by key measures of socioeconomic well-being, a decline that's accelerating

One of the bedrock assumptions of democratic theory is that the views of citizens influence government policy decisions. Previous studies have found a strong cross-sectional relationship between public opinion and state policy outputs. But the ultimate test of responsiveness is the extent to which changes in the mass publics preferences cause changes in public policies. In this paper, we reassess the quality of representation in the American states over the past three quarters of a century using a large battery of historical evidence and new statistical techniques. We show that changes in the mass publics policy views are associated with changes in state policy outputs. Moreover, we show that adaptation of elected officials to changes in opinion is more important than partisan selection as the mechanism for responsiveness in state politics. Finally, we evaluate the influence of institutional reforms, such as direct democracy, term limits, and campaign finance reforms. Our findings have large implications for our understanding of public opinion, representation, and elections in the American states.

Background: The effects of changes in immigration policy on health outcomes among undocumented immigrants are not well known. We aimed to examine the physical and mental health effects of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme, a 2012 US immigration policy that provided renewable work permits and freedom from deportation for a large number of undocumented immigrants. Methods: We did a retrospective, quasi-experimental study using nationally representative, repeated cross-sectional data from the US National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) for the period January, 2008, to December, 2015. We included non-citizen, Hispanic adults aged 19-50 years in our analyses. We used a difference-in-differences strategy to compare changes in health outcomes among individuals who met key DACA eligibility criteria (based on age at immigration and at the time of policy implementation) before and after programme implementation versus changes in outcomes for individuals who did not meet these criteria. We additionally restricted the sample to individuals who had lived in the USA for at least 5 years and had completed high school or its equivalent, in order to hold fixed two other DACA eligibility criteria. Our primary outcomes were self-reported overall health (measured on a 5 point Likert scale) and psychological distress (Kessler 6 [K6] scale), the latter was administered to a random subset of NHIS respondents. Findings: Our final sample contained 14973 respondents for the self-reported health outcome and 5035 respondents for the K6 outcome. Of these individuals, 3972 in the self-reported health analysis and 1138 in the K6 analysis met the DACA eligibility criteria. Compared with people ineligible for DACA, the introduction of DACA was associated with no significant change among DACA-eligible individuals in terms of self-reported overall health (b=0.056, 95% CI -0024 to 014, p=0.17) or the likelihood of reporting poor or fair health (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 0.98, 95% CI 0.66-1.44, p=0.91). However, DACA-eligible individuals experienced a reduction in K6 score compared with DACA-ineligible individuals (adjusted incident risk ratio 0.78, 95% CI 0.56-0.95, p=0.020) and were less likely to meet screening criteria for moderate or worse psychological distress (aOR 0.62, 95% CI 0.41-0.93, p=0.022). Interpretation: Economic opportunities and protection from deportation for undocumented immigrants, as offered by DACA, could confer large mental health benefits to such individuals. Health consequences should be considered by researchers and policy makers in evaluations of the broader welfare effects of immigration policy.

Using the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) and a novel method for measuring changes in educational attainment we examine the link between educational attainment and shale oil and gas extraction for the states of Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia. The three states examined are economically-small, relatively more rural, and have high levels of shale oil and gas reserves. They also are varied in that West Virginia is intensive in shale gas extraction, while the other two are intensive in shale oil extraction. We find significant reductions in high school and college attainment among all three states’ initial residents because of the shale booms.

U.S. Army doctrine requires that commanders understand, visualize, and describe the infrastructure component of the Joint Operating Environment to accomplish the Army's missions of protecting, restoring, and developing infrastructure. The functionality of modern cities relies heavily on interdependent infrastructure systems such as those for water, power, and transportation. Disruptions often prop-agate within and across physical infrastructure networks and result in catastrophic con-sequences. The reaction of communities to disasters may further transfer and aggravate the burden on infrastructure and facilitate cascading secondary disruptions. Hence, a holistic analysis framework that integrates infrastructure interdependencies and community behaviors is needed to evaluate vulnerability to disruptions and to assess the impact of a disaster. Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely (SMART) documents are used to assess, measure, and predict the impact of potential infrastructural interdictions. Assessing individuals within the population allows analysis of social well-being in relation to potential cascading infrastructure failure.

Firms react to changes in factor prices with intensive and extensive-margin employment adjustments at the occupational-level. We study the distributional and aggregate consequences of this make-or-buy dynamic by developing a novel network model of heterogeneous firm-to-firm trade where the boundary of each firm depends on factor prices and firm-occupation comparative advantage in input-production. We show that the model can be easily aggregated and taken to industry-level data, and use the calibrated model to examine recent trends in employment, wages and trade in the USA. We use public OES and CPS data to show empirical evidence that a significant fraction of the growth in wage inequality in the USA is due to changes in firm/industry specialization and occupation sorting. To understand and measure the underlying causes of these trends, we calibrate the model to occupation and industry data from the OES and input-output tables. The results suggest that 1/3rd of the increases in wage inequality stem from decreases in inter-industry trade frictions with the remaining 2/3rds stemming from changes in technology and labor supply. Falling trade frictions are also responsible for all of the increases in occupational sorting and concentration. Had trade frictions been held at their 2002 level, productivity growth would have led to an increase in vertical integration, rather than the decrease observed in the data . . .

How much does it matter whether Democrats or Republicans control the government? Unless the two parties converge completely, election outcomes should have some impact on policy, but the existing evidence for policy effects of party control is surprisingly weak and inconsistent. We bring clarity to this question, using regression-discontinuity and dynamic panel analyses to estimate the effects of party control of state legislatures and governorships on a new annual measure of state policy liberalism. We find that throughout the 19362014 period, electing Democrats has led to more liberal policies, but that in recent decades the policy effects of party control have approximately doubled in magnitude. We present evidence that this increase is at least partially explained by the ideological divergence of the parties officeholders and electoral coalitions. At the same time, we also show that party effects remain substantively modest, paling relative to policy differences across states.

New large-scale data linking projects are revolutionizing empirical social science. Outside of selected samples and tightly restricted data enclaves, little is known about the quality of these “big data” or how the methods used to create them shape inferences. This paper evaluates the performance of commonly used automated record-linking algorithms in three high quality historical U.S. samples. Our findings show that (1) no method (including hand linking) consistently produces samples representative of the linkable population; (2) automated linking tends to produce very high rates of false matches, averaging around one third of links across datasets and methods; and (3) false links are systematically (though differently) related to baseline sample characteristics. A final exercise demonstrates the importance of these findings for inferences using linked data. For a common set of records, we show that algorithm assumptions can attenuate estimates of intergenerational income elasticities by almost 50 percent. Although differences in these findings across samples and methods caution against the generalizability of specific error rates, common patterns across multiple datasets offer broad lessons for improving current linking practice.