This paper studies the incidence and efficiency of a progressive income tax in a spatial equilibrium. We use US census data to estimate an empirical spatial equilibrium with heterogeneous workers, landowners, and firms. The US income tax shifts skilled workers out of high-productivity cities, leading to a deadweight loss of 2% of tax revenue. Flattening the tax schedule significantly increases welfare inequality between skilled and unskilled workers and does not increase overall worker welfare, as the efficiency gains are captured by landowners. This suggests that progressive income taxes reduce welfare inequality without reducing total worker welfare.

This article overviews the research opportunities made possible by a National Institute on Aging-funded program project, Early Indicators, Intergenerational Processes, and Aging. Data collection began almost three decades ago on 40,000 soldiers from the Union Army in the U.S. Civil War. The sample contains extensive demographic, economic, and medical data from childhood to death. In recent years, a large sample of African-American soldiers and an oversampling of soldiers from major U.S. cities have been added. Hundreds of historical maps containing public health data have been geocoded to place soldiers and their family members in a geospatial context. With newly granted funding, thousands of veterans will be linked to the demographic information available from the census and vital records of their children.

This study provides a systematic review of empirical evidence on the labour supply effects of health insurance. The outcomes in the 63 studies reviewed include labour supply in terms of hours worked and the probability of employment, self-employment and the level of economic formalisation. One of the key findings is that the current literature is vastly concentrated on the US. We show that spousal coverage in the US is associated with reduced labour supply of secondary earners. The effect of Medicaid in the US on labour supply of its recipients is ambiguous. However we have initial evidence of labour supply distortion caused by Childrens Health Insurance Program, Affordable Care Act and other public health insurance expansions. A tentative result is that dependent young adults in the US who can access health insurance via their parents employer have lower labour supply through fewer hours worked while keeping the same employment probability. The employment-coverage link is an important determinant of labour supply of people with health problems. The same holds for self-employment decisions. Universal coverage may create either an incentive or a disincentive to work depending on the design of the system. Finally, evidence on the relationship between health insurance and the level of economic formalisation in developing countries is fragmented and limited.

Who Speaks for the Poor? explains why parties represent some groups and not others. This book focuses attention on the electoral geography of income, and how it has changed over time, to account for cross-national differences in the political and partisan representation of low-income voters. Jusko develops a general theory of new party formation that shows how changes in the geographic distribution of groups across electoral districts create opportunities for new parties to enter elections, especially where changes favor groups previously excluded from local partisan networks. Empirical evidence is drawn first from a broadly comparative analysis of all new party entry and then from a series of historical case studies, each focusing on the strategic entry incentives of new low-income peoples' parties. Jusko offers a new explanation for the absence of a low-income people's party in the USA and a more general account of political inequality in contemporary democratic societies.

We jointly analyze the effects of low-skilled immigration and offshoring on wages of American workers of different skill levels and task specializations. We show that offshoring affects native wage response to immigration and explain the likely economic mechanism responsible. Focusing on commuting zone outcomes and analyzing a period of high immigration and off- shoring exposure growth, between 1990 and 2000, we find that wages of low-skilled natives increase in response to offshoring, decrease in response to low-skilled immigration, and that the wage effect of immigration becomes more negative with more offshoring. We present a theoretical model to demonstrate how this interactive effect of immigration and offshoring can come about. Specifically, we show that offshoring increases native wage elasticity in response to immigration if it increases immigrant wage share; this happens if a relatively larger share of native jobs than immigrant jobs is offshored, causing natives to shift to performing tasks in which they have lower comparative advantage and immigrants to concentrate in tasks for which they have greater comparative advantage.

This paper finds that U.S. employment changed differently relative to output in the Great Recession and recovery than in most other advanced countries or in the United States in earlier recessions. Instead of hoarding labor, U.S. firms reduced employment proportionately more than output in the Great Recession, with establishments that survived the downturn contracting jobs massively. Diverging from the aggregate pattern, U.S. manufacturers reduced employment less than output while the elasticity of employment to gross output varied widely among establishments. In the recovery, growth of employment was dominated by job creation in new establishments. The variegated responses of employment to output challenges extant models of how enterprises adjust employment over the business cycle.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes several provisions designed to expand insurance coverage that also alter the tie between employment and health insurance. In this paper, we exploit variation across geographic areas in the potential impact of the ACA to estimate its effect on health insurance coverage and labor market outcomes in the first two years after the implementation of its main features. Our measures of potential ACA impact come from pre-existing population shares of uninsured individuals within income groups that were targeted by Medicaid expansions and federal subsidies for private health insurance, interacted with each state’s Medicaid expansion status. Our findings indicate that the majority of the increase in health insurance coverage since 2013 is due to the ACA and that areas in which the potential Medicaid and exchange enrollments were higher saw substantially larger increases in coverage. While labor market outcomes in the aggregate were not significantly affected, our results indicate that labor force participation reductions in areas with higher potential exchange enrollment were offset by increases in labor force participation in areas with higher potential Medicaid enrollment . . .

This paper provides new estimates of the short-run impacts of immigration on the employment opportunities of US-born workers. We focus on the constructor sector, a primary employer of immigrant workers in the US and one of the economic sectors with the highest share of immigrants, about 29% in 2016 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Using panel data at the metropolitan area-year level of aggregation constructed from US Census and American Community Survey data, we find that a 10 percentage point increase in the share of immigrant workers reduces annual earnings of US-born construction workers by at least 4.1%, with workers in immigrant-prone trades experiencing earnings reductions in excess of 7.2%. These bounds are derived using a so-called “imperfect instrument approach” (Nevo and Rosen, 2012), whereby the share of immigrant workers is instrumented by the share of immigrants across all sectors of the economy. Our partial identification strategy relies on the assumptions that the share of immigrants across all economic sectors in a market is positively correlated with construction-specific labor demand shocks about location and year effects, but less so than the share of immigrants in construction. Our results further indicate that US-born workers experience lower annual wages through reduced employment (fewer weeks worked per year) rather than lower weekly wages.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. institutions of higher education began to address long-standing patterns of exclusion. Initial efforts to improve the access of black students to engineering education focused on six historically black engineering colleges, and evolved into a truly nationwide movement. Later, a larger group of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) expanded educational opportunities in engineering, computer science and other technical fields, "to prepare their students for expanded career choices." Geographic and institutional features of the higher education infrastructure led to differential impacts of these policies on students born in different states. A data panel assembled for the project links changes in educational opportunities to current outcomes. The panel includes more than 30 years of complete counts of the number of bachelor's degrees conferred in each field by each U.S. institution of higher education (collected by the U.S. Department of Education and the Engineering Manpower Commission), merged to current labor force data. These data facilitate description of the geography and timing of changes in opportunities for black college students to choose engineering or computer science college majors, and current labor market outcomes among those born in the right place and time to pursue careers in these fields.

Corporations are retaining ever-larger corpuses of personal data; the frequency of breaches and corresponding privacy impact has been rising accordingly. One way to mitigate this risk is through use of anonymized data, limiting the exposure of individual data to only where it is absolutely needed. This would seem particularly appropriate for data mining, where the goal is generalizable knowledge rather than data on specific individuals. In practice, corporate data miners often insist on original data, for fear that they might miss something with anonymized or differentially private approaches. This dissertation provides both empirical and theoretical justifications for the use of anonymized data, in particular for a specific scheme of anonymization called anatomization (or anatomized data). Anatomized data preserves all attribute values, but introduces uncertainty in the mapping between identifying and sensitive values, thus satisfying l-diversity. We first propose a promising decision tree learning algorithm. Empirical results show that this algorithm produces decision trees approaching the accuracy of non-private decision trees. We then show that a k-nearest neighbor classifier and a support vector classifier trained on anatomized data are theoretically expected to do as well as on the original data under certain conditions. The theoretical effectiveness of the latter approaches are validated using several publicly available datasets, showing that we outperform the state of the art for nearest neighbor and support vector . . .

A data revolution is transforming scientific research. Just a few decades ago, investigators had to make do with snippets of information; now we are awash in data. Growth in the quantity and quality of data has opened new research opportunities and stimulated the development of new methods, resulting in a startling acceleration of the pace of discovery.

Emotional well-being has become an important societal goal given the rising evidence from psychology research that positive emotions have long-lasting benefits for human development. Although daily travel behavior has been found to influence emotional well-being, existing research in the field has focused on limited travel behavior dimensions such as travel mode and/or travel duration. Other dimensions such as travel purpose and travel companionship have received limited attention. Using data from the 2012-2013 American Time Use Survey, this paper offers a comprehensive assessment of how various trip- and personal-level factors relates to various positive and negative emotions. Results show that both positive and negative emotions are shaped in various ways by the mode, duration, purpose, and companionship characteristics of a trip. Of the modes examined, biking is the happiest mode; public transit is the least happy, least meaningful, and most tiresome mode; and utilitarian walking for transportation is strongly associated with negative motions. Long travel (>45 Mins) is the least happy and most tiresome and stressful. While short travel (<15 mins) is the least tiresome and stressful, it is also the least meaningful. Travel purpose shows strong associations with both positive and negative emotions. Travel for discretionary purposes such as leisure, exercise, and community activities is associated with higher levels of positive emotions and lower levels of negative emotions than travel for work or household maintenance. Travel companionship shows significant associations with positive emotions but limited associations with negative emotions. Travel with family members (except parents) and/or friends is the happiest. Besides trip-level factors, personal demographics, health conditions, and residential locations play significant roles in predicting travel-related emotions. During trips, immigrants and low-income people tend to experience more intensive emotions regardless of positive or negative. Implications of these findings for transportation policy and future research directions are discussed.

In 2009, at the end of the 12-month Great Recession in the United States, the U.S. government established a college degree attainment goal for 60% of 25- to 34-year-olds to earn an associate's or bachelor's degree by the year 2020. In the same year, Lumina Foundation set a similar goal for 60% of 25- to 64-year-olds to earn a high-quality certificate, associate's degree, or bachelor's degree by the year 2025. Both the U.S. government's and Lumina Foundation's goals intend to place the United States in a leadership position in the global massification of postsecondary education that has evolved over the past few decades and to address the growing labor market demands for postsecondary education and training. This report provides a view of current progress and forecasts of the nation's long-term progress toward achieving the goals. The analyses in this report represent college degree attainment performance of the U.S. population by race/ethnicity and gender and project through 2060. The projections reveal that neither goal is expected to be reached by target dates for the targeted adult populations, but the associate's and bachelor's degree attainment rates of the Asian American population are already beyond the 60% target and the White population, overall, is approaching at a pace to arrive a few years beyond the target year 2020 established by the U.S. government and 2025 set by Lumina Foundation. The projections for the African American, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Hispanic populations are not promising. Unless aggressive actions are taken to address the inequalities in each level and type of degree, and especially bachelor's and higher degrees, not only will the three underserved population groups (African American, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Hispanic) fail to reach the goals in the foreseeable future, but also the progress that they make could be overrepresented by lower status degrees and certificates and in turn lower status occupations. Each of these three underrepresented population groups may require targeted and tailored initiatives to make substantive progress toward a larger share being college and career ready and ultimately persisting toward and attaining college degrees. The report includes data and analyses that could be useful in designing interventions.

The U.S. labor force participation rate has declined since 2007, primarily because of population aging and ongoing trends that preceded the Great Recession. The labor force participation rate has evolved differently, and for different reasons, across demographic groups. A rise in school enrollment has largely offset declining labor force participation for young workers since the 1990s. Labor force participation has been declining for prime age men for decades, and about half of prime age men who are not in the labor force may have a serious health condition that is a barrier to working. Nearly half of prime age men who are not in the labor force take pain medication on any given day; and in nearly two-thirds of these cases, they take prescription pain medication. Labor force participation has fallen more in U.S. counties where relatively more opioid pain medication is prescribed, causing the problem of depressed labor force participation and the opioid crisis to become intertwined. The labor force participation rate has stopped rising for cohorts of women born after 1960. Prime age men who are out of the labor force report that they experience notably low levels of emotional well-being throughout their days, and that they derive relatively little meaning from their daily activities. Employed women and women not in the labor force, by contrast, report similar levels of subjective well-being; but women not in the labor force who cite a reason other than “home responsibilities” as their main reason report notably low levels of emotional well-being. During the past decade, retirements have increased by about the same amount as aggregate labor force participation has declined, and the retirement rate is expected to continue to rise. A meaningful rise in labor force participation will require a reversal in the secular trends affecting various demographic groups, and perhaps immigration reform.

Este estudo, dividido em três artigos, tem por objetivo analisar as contribuições da demografia, educação e mercado de trabalho no desenvolvimento brasileiro ao longo do século XX. Os três artigos estão encadeados em uma sequência temporal tal que o primeiro artigo concentra-se na transição demográfica brasileira para as coortes nascidas entre 1890 e 1960. O segundo artigo preocupa-se em entender como os efeitos da transição demográfica são absorvidos pelas novas coortes e seu efeito na taxa de matrícula. O terceiro artigo investiga como as coortes mais jovens, com mais capital humano, mudam a oferta relativa da economia e este processo impacta os salários relativos por grupos de qualificação. No primeiro artigo, os microdados dos Censos demográficos foram utilizados na investigação usando variáveis de educação, localidade e coorte de nascimento. Uma vez controlando por coorte e localidade, assumindo a hipótese que na localidade municipal as coortes são mais homogêneas quanto à exposição da oferta escolar, educação explicou aproximadamente 30% da queda da fecundidade. A simulação contrafactual evidenciou que caso não tivesse ocorrido o aumento da escolaridade das coortes, a transição demográfica seria mais lenta e gradual. No segundo artigo, dados da PNAD foram construídos para investigar a probabilidade de matrícula assumindo que a transição demográfica gera uma variação exógena no tamanho absoluto e no tamanho relativo das coortes. Os resultados evidenciaram que para as séries com maiores avanços na taxa de matrícula, diminuição do tamanho da coorte apresentou-se negativamente relacionada com a probabilidade de matrícula. Porém, a magnitude deste efeito não gerou mudanças significativas na simulação contrafactual e, para a primeira série do ensino fundamental, o avanço da escolaridade dos pais mostrou-se significativo. No terceiro artigo, dados da PNAD são utilizados para se investigar mudanças relativas no mercado de trabalho ocasionadas pela entrada de novas coortes com melhores indicadores educacionais. Os resultados apontam que mudanças na oferta relativa de grupos etários mais jovens conduziram a mudanças em seus salários relativos e as mudanças nos salários relativos de grupos etários mais velhos são explicadas por mudanças na oferta relativa agregada da economia. A simulação contrafactual demostrou que, caso não houvesse mudança na oferta relativa da economia, os salários de qualificados em relação a não qualificados apresentaria tendência crescente entre 1981 e 2013.

This paper examines the long-term impacts of early childhood exposure to air pollution on adult outcomes using US administrative data. We exploit changes in air pollution driven by the 1970 Clean Air Act to analyze the difference in outcomes between cohorts born in counties before and after large improvements in air pollution relative to those same cohorts born in counties that had no improvements. We find a significant relationship between pollution exposure in the year of birth and later-life outcomes. A higher pollution level in the year of birth is associated with lower labor force participation and lower earnings at age 30.

Falling fertility rates have often been linked to rising female wages. However, over the last 40 years the US total fertility rate has been rather stable while female wages have continued to grow. Over the same period, women's hours spent on housework have declined, but men's have increased. I propose a model in which households are not perfectly specialized, but both men and women contribute to home production. As the gender wage gap narrows, the time allocations of men and women converge, and while fertility falls at first, the decline stops when female wages are close to male's. Rising relative wages increase women's labor supply and due to higher opportunity cost lower fertility at first, but they also lead to a reallocation of home production and child care from women to men, and a marketization. I find that both are important in understanding why fertility did not decline further. In a further quantitative exercise I show that the model performs well in matching fertility over the entire 20th century, including the overall decline, the baby boom, and the recent stabilization.

This book paints an intimate portrait of an overlooked kind of city that neither grows nor declines drastically. In fact, New Bedford, Massachusetts represents an entire category of cities that escape mainstream urban studies’ more customary attention to global cities (New York), booming cities (Atlanta), and shrinking cities (Flint). New Bedford-style ordinary cities are none of these, they neither grow nor decline drastically, but in their inconspicuousness, they account for a vast majority of all cities. Given the complexities of growth and decline, both temporarily and spatially, how does a city manage change and physically adapt to growth and decline? This book offers an answer through a detailed analysis of the politics, environment, planning strategies, and history of New Bedford.

I study the effect of progressive taxation on internal migration and welfare using a new dynamic Roy model. The model features an arbitrary number of labor markets and finitely-lived agents, yet is analytically tractable. It predicts that a more progressive tax-transfer scheme reduces internal migration rates. The magnitude of this relation- ship is consistent with evidence from the OECD countries. The optimal time-varying sequence of tax progressivity features relatively high degree of tax progressivity early on, and lower tax progressivity at later dates. There are substantial welfare gains from letting the optimal degree of tax progressivity vary over the transition.

This paper looks at the fertility and mortality experience of racial and ethnic groups in the United States from the early 20th century to the present. The first part consist of a description and critique of the racial and ethnic categories used in the federal census and in the published vital statistics. The second part looks at these two dimensions of demographic behavior. There has been both absolute and relative convergence of fertility across groups. It has been of relatively recent origin and has been due, in large part, to stable birth rates for the majority white population combined with declining birth rates for blacks and the Asian-origin, Hispanic-origin, and American Indian populations. This has not been true for mortality. The black population has experienced absolute convergence but relative deterioration in mortality (neonatal and infant mortality, maternal mortality, expectation of life at birth, and age-adjusted death rates), in contrast to the American Indian and Asian-origin populations. The Asian-origin population actually now has age-adjusted death rates significantly lower than those for the white population. The disadvantaged condition of the black population and the deteriorating social safety net are the likely origins of this outcome. This is a clear indication of relative inequality, as the black population is not sharing as much in the mortality improvements in recent decades.