This paper provides new insights on the link between structural change and the fertility transition. In the early 1890s agricultural production in the American South was severely impaired by the spread of an agricultural pest, the boll weevil. We use this plausibly exogenous variation in agricultural production to establish a causal link between changes in earnings opportunities in agriculture and fertility. Our estimates show that lower earnings opportunities in agriculture lead to fewer children. We identify two channels: households staying in agriculture reduced fertility because children are a normal good, and households switching to manufacturing faced higher opportunity costs of raising children. The rather bleak outlook for unskilled agricultural workers also increased the demand for human capital, which reinforced the fertility decline that occurred in the American South during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the context of interactive query sessions, it is common to issue a succession of queries, transforming a dataset to the desired result. It is often difficult to comprehend a succession of transformations, especially for complex queries. Thus, to facilitate understanding of each data transformation and to provide continuous feedback, we introduce the concept of data tweening, i.e., interpolating between resultsets, presenting to the user a series of incremental visual representations of a resultset transformation. We present tweening methods that consider not just the changes in the result, but also the changes in the query. Through user studies, we show that data tweening allows users to efficiently comprehend data transforms, and also enables them to gain a better understanding of the underlying query operations

Ample evidence shows that mothers earn less than non-mothers, yet recent studies show that the motherhood earnings penalty diverges by occupation. Women in professional occupations have greater access to workplace benefits which help reconcile work-family responsibilities and reduce non-employment spells. However, because of their higher earnings, women in professional occupations who re-enter after a break may experience significant earnings penalties. One strategy women employ to mitigate the earnings penalty is to delay childbearing. Here, I examine whether delayed fertility is positively associated with a reduced motherhood wage gap across 20 occupations. Using multilevel models and 2011-2015 American Community Survey data, I show that mothers in professional occupations experienced the largest earnings penalty with early motherhood, but also the largest premium with delayed childbearing. While delaying a first birth mitigates the earnings penalty in high-wage occupations requiring extensive career preparation, women in low-wage occupations experienced little economic benefit from older motherhood.

We begin our report on Cuyahoga County, home to the city of Cleveland, with a broad look at application and origination activity over the past 25 years (1990–2015), and then focus on the 12-year period from 2004 to 2015.

Differential privacy has emerged as a de facto standard of privacy notion. It is widely adopted in various domains, including data publishing, data mining, and interactive database queries. However, applying differential privacy on complex data still remains challenging due to the huge change of sensitivity. In this dissertation, we introduce three major topics about publishing information with high-dimensional and graph data under differential privacy. The first topic discusses the possibility of publishing column counts from high-dimensional data under differential privacy, with a proposed technique called sensitivity control. The idea is to limit the contribution of data records such that sensitivity can be limited. We solve the challenge of balancing the sensitivity level and remaining data utility. The second topic aims at solving the problem of high-dimensional data classification with differential privacy. We propose PrivWalk, a greedily walking algorithm that iteratively searches the optimal model and also automatically determines the number of steps given a privacy budget. In the third topic, we advance the technique to publish degree distribution from a graph under node-differential privacy. We develop a projection technique that preserves that most utility and also limits the sensitivity. Based on the projection method, we propose two approaches for publishing degree histograms. The experiments of the three topics demonstrate that our proposed techniques significantly improve the existing . . .

Recent asset pricing studies have suggested that demand for stocks since 1980 has driven expected returns below their historical average. The current yield of risk-free assets in the U.S. is also well below historical bond yields. This decrease in bond yields coupled with increases in longevity has doubled the cost of funding a real dollar of income in retirement since 1980 for a 65-year-old retiree. • Many common financial planning practices are sensitive to asset returns, and advisers need to understand the challenges clients will face if high asset prices persist. • Results from a life cycle planning model showed that savings rates would need to rise sharply for households hoping to maintain the same standard of living in retirement if real asset returns are low. • An important finding from this study is that a low-return environment would have a negative impact on client spending throughout their life cycle. • Advisers may need to modify expected returns in planning software to provide clients with more realistic projections on meeting long-term spending goals. This study provides the numbers needed to re-adjust the retirement expectations.

In the early 1890s, cotton fields in the American South were ravaged by the boll weevil. Using a model that controls for differences in the intensity of cotton production at the county level, we show how the boll weevil significantly changed southern agricultural labor arrangements and labor market outcomes. The boll weevil significantly reduced the number of tenant farms, decreased farm wages, and female labor force participation, particularly in counties with a higher intensity of cotton production.

I examine lynchings of African Americans in the US South from 1882 to 1930, more than twenty years after Tolnay and Beck’s (1995) seminal work. The authors claim that lynchings were due to economic competition between African American and white cotton workers. I confirm much of their original hypothesis with new data and techniques, and expand upon it, finding that another explanation, Williamson’s (1997) psychosexual one, might complement the economic one. I also discover that, in line with an economic competition framework, lynchings predict more black out-migration from 1920 to 1930, and higher state-level wages.

A revealing assessment of the policies, practices, and impact of immigration to Canada and the United States. Human migration has reached an unprecedented level, and the numbers are expected to continue growing into the foreseeable future. Host societies and migrants face challenges in ensuring that the benefits of migration accrue to both parties, and that economic and socio-cultural costs are minimized. An insightful comparative examination of the policies and practices that manage and support immigrants to Canada and the United States, Twenty-First-Century Immigration to North America identifies and addresses issues that arose in the early years of the twenty-first century and considers what to expect in the years ahead. The volume begins with an overview of immigration policies and practices in Canada and the United States, then moves to an investigation of the economic and socio-cultural aspects, and concludes with a dialogue on precarious migration. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the editors include research from the areas of psychology, political science, economics, sociology, and public policy. Underscoring the complicated nature of immigration, this collection aims to foster further discussion and inspire future research in Canada and the United States.

We investigate whether interracial contact in childhood impacts adult ro- mantic relationships. In particular, we estimate the impact of quasi-random variation in the share of black students across cohorts within schools on the probability that a white student goes on to have a black partner. We find that more black peers of the same gender lead whites to have more relationships with blacks later in life. These effects cannot be explained by an increase in meeting opportunities since they are persistent across time, space and so- cial networks. Our findings therefore strongly suggest that interracial contact permanently improves attitudes towards blacks in a way that has important economic consequences.

Outside of the United States, few studies have estimated the effects of World War II service. In Australia, general war-time conscription and minimal involvement in the Korean War led to large cohort differences in military service rates, which we use for identification. We find a small, temporary negative effect on employment and a substantial positive effect on post-school qualifications, but not at the university level. While service increased home ownership slightly, it greatly reduced outright home ownership, consistent with the incentives provided by veterans' housing benefits. We also find a positive effect on marriage, but only from 1971.

The absence of repeated direct measures of job skill requirements, such as a fully updated edition of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT), creates problems for anyone interested in understanding whether, how much, and how fast the demand for cognitive skills in the workplace has grown over time. Many studies have merged cross-sectional skill scores for detailed occupations from the DOT or O*NET with time series of occupational employment shares, but this fails to capture any within-occupation changes in job requirements. This paper considers the utility of using workers’ personal education as a time-varying measure of occupational skill requirements. Trends in educational composition within detailed occupations for 1990-2001 are examined using very large sample data. Shift-share analyses decompose the total change in workforce education into components attributable to changes in occupational employment shares and in education levels within occupations. Because occupations are often characterized in terms of modal education, the extent of educational heterogeneity within occupations is examined. Limitations of workers’ personal education as a measure of job complexity, the need for repeated direct measures of job requirements, and implications for BLS data programs are discussed.

A growing literature reveals that the adverse effect of children on career advancement falls disproportion- ately on women. This raises the possibility that women respond to career concerns by delaying family formation more than men. Using a panel dataset on lawyers, we find females are less likely to have their first-child before the promotion decision. This fertility gap is not explained away by gender-based sorting or gender differences in marriage-timing and spousal occupation. Two channels drive our results: women bear child-rearing costs and gender-specific promotion thresholds. This implies the focus on the gender wage gap understates gender inequality in the labor market.

One consequence of demographic change is substantial shifts in the age distribution of the working-age population. As the baby boom generation ages, the usual historical pattern of there being a high ratio of younger workers relative to older workers has been replaced by a pattern of there being roughly equal percentages of workers of different ages. One might expect that the increasing relative supply of older workers would lower the wage premium paid for older, more experienced workers. This paper provides strong empirical support for this hypothesis. Econometric estimates imply that the size of one's birth cohort affects wages throughout one's working life, with members of relatively large cohorts (at all stages of their careers) earning a significantly lower wage than members of smaller cohorts. Estimated elasticities of wages with respect to the relative size of one's own cohort are generally between -0.05 and -0.10, and are of similar magnitude for men and for women. Our results suggest that cohort size effects are quantitatively important and should be incorporated into public policy analyses.

Immigration policy was at the forefront of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. There were rallying cries to build that wall, calls for a deportation force to remove all illegal immigrants currently residing within U.S. borders, and discussions of various other immigration reforms. One of the major assumptions underlying these discussions was that many blue-collar workers have been left behind, and immigrants are commonly believed to be the ones who have taken their jobs. This article tackles the validity of this assumption by examining the issue through a previously unexplored economic lens.

Using 2013–2015 National Health Interview Survey data, we reproduce a well-documented finding that self-identified lesbians earn significantly more than comparable heterosexual women. These data also show—for the first time in the literature—that self-identified gay men also earn significantly more than comparable heterosexual men, a difference on the order of 10% of annual earnings. We discuss several possible explanations for the new finding of a gay male earnings premium and suggest that reduced discrimination and changing patterns of household specialization are unlikely to be the primary mechanisms.

Since the mid-20th century, elite political behavior has increasingly nationalized. In Congress, for example, within-party geographic cleavages have declined, roll-call vot- ing has become increasingly one-dimensional, and Democrats and Republicans have diverged along this main dimension of national partisan conflict. The existing liter- ature finds that citizens have displayed only a delayed and attenuated echo of elite trends. We show, however, that a different picture emerges if we focus not on individ- ual citizens but on the aggregate characteristics of geographic constituencies. Using estimates of the economic, racial, and social policy liberalism of the average Democrat and Republican in each state-year 1946–2014, we demonstrate a surprisingly close cor- respondence between mass and elite trends. Specifically, we find that: (1) ideological divergence between Democrats and Republicans has increased dramatically within each domain, just as it has in Congress; (2) ideological variation across state-party publics is now almost completely explained by party rather than state, closely tracking trends in the Senate, and finally, (3) economic, racial, and social liberalism have become highly correlated across state-party publics, just as they have across members of Congress.

This study examines the impact of state imposed, marriage equality laws on interstate migration prior to the 26 June 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling to legalize same-sex marriage in all states. Results of the estimation of a series of probit models suggest that all head of households are more likely to leave states without marriage equality. This estimated impact is significantly larger for household heads in same-sex relationships. When examining the migration choices separately by both sex and relationship type, this result remains significant for female heads of households in different-sex relationships and male heads of households in same-sex relationships. Simulations, using the results of the probit estimations, the analysis of regional trends, and recent rebellions against the Supreme Court ruling indicate that state level, marriage equality laws may be aggravating the imbalanced distribution of same- and different-sex couple households across the country.

Identifying a causal relationship between education and marital status poses methodological challenges. Using regression discontinuity analyses of U.S. Census data from 1910 and 1930, I estimate effects of early U.S. compulsory schooling laws on marital patterns by gender and race. Results from 1910 suggest that compulsory laws had heterogeneous effects by race and gender, reducing the likelihood of being married only among nonwhite men. Results from 1930 suggest that compulsory schooling decreased the racial gap in likelihood of being married and in age at first marriage by at least 24 percent. Contemporary implications include potential benefits of extended compulsory schooling for racial equality.

Occupational and sectoral labor market patterns display a significant overlap. This implies that economic models can explain these patterns to a large degree through either sector- or occupation-specific technological change, but stay silent about the level of specificity. We propose a model where technologies evolve at the sector-occupation level, allowing us to extract sector-only and occupation-only components and to quantify their importance. We find that most of productivity changes are occupation-specific, but that there is also a sizable sector component. We contrast the data and our baseline model against implications of models where technological change is restricted to be either at the sector or at the occupation level, or both. All three restricted models can replicate both sectoral and occupational outcomes very well, but occupation-specific changes are crucial for within-sector changes of occupational employment and income shares.