Does the end of racial integration affect the racial demographics of school districts and the test scores of students? I analyze the impact of the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, which struck down Seattle Public Schools racial integration plan. The court rulings sudden and unexpected nature allows for a quasi-experimental interpretation of demographic changes and student outcomes after the court ruling. Using a variety of difference-in-differences models and placebo testing, I find the court ruling had two main effects: (1) white families were 20 percent more likely to live in Seattle after 2007 and (2) the test scores of black students increased at a significantly higher rate than those of white students causing the racial test score gap in math to decrease by 10 percent. These findings indicate the court ruling both mitigated the historical trend of white flight and reduced the racial test score gap. This paper emphasizes the unintended consequences of racial integration policies and the tradeoffs policymakers face when aiming to improve educational equity.

In this paper, we show that labor-market adjustment to immigration differs across tradable and nontradable occupations. Theoretically, we derive a simple condition under which the arrival of foreign-born labor crowds native-born workers out of (or into) immigrant-intensive jobs, thus lowering (or raising) relative wages in these occupations, and explain why this process differs within tradable versus within nontradable activities. Using data for U.S. commuting zones over the period 1980 to 2012, we find that consistent with our theory a local influx of immigrants crowds out employment of native-born workers in more relative to less immigrant-intensive nontradable jobs, but has no such effect within tradable occupations. Further analysis of occupation labor payments is consistent with adjustment to immigration within tradables occurring more through changes in output (versus changes in prices) when compared to adjustment within nontradables, thus confirming our model’s theoretical mechanism. Our empirical results are robust to alternative specifications, including using industry rather than occupation variation. We then build on these insights to construct a quantitative framework to evaluate the consequences of counterfactual changes in U.S. immigration.

The Prather family is one of the oldest African American families in Montgomery County, Maryland. Like many African American families with surnames long associated with the county—like Riggs, Griffith, and Snowden—their roots trace back to enslaved ancestors. The Prathers descend from an enslaved couple, Harriet and Rezin Prather. This examination of their family illustrates the history of African Americans in Montgomery County. It also demonstrates a methodology for researching the lives of enslaved people.

Risk adjustment is a common policy for mitigating the effects of adverse selection when government regulation limits insurer ability to rate consumers according to their expected risks. I study the social welfare implications of risk adjustment. I first show theoretically that risk adjustment may reduce social welfare because it can increase the expected risk of consumers who select into the insurance pool. I then assess how risk adjustment affects social welfare in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) insurance exchanges. Using consumer-level data from the California exchange, I estimate demand for insurance and obtain estimates of marginal cost that I relate to premiums to account for adverse selection. I compute equi- librium premiums under alternative scenarios and find risk adjustment raises premiums for less costly exchange plans. However, there is minimal net effect on social welfare because the ACA’s price-linked subsidies shield consumers from premium increases. I conduct policy simulations using the estimated model and find the impact of risk adjustment is sensitive to the subsidy design. If ACA price-linked subsidies were converted to fixed subsidies as proposed in some legislative alternatives to the ACA, risk adjustment would decrease annual per-capita consumer surplus by $200 and social welfare by $400.

This paper considers the effects of public health insurance expansions for low-income childless adults in the early 2000s in a causal framework, prior to passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Using the 1998 through 2007 March Current Population Surveys, my estimates suggest the expansions increased low-educated childless women's public health insurance coverage by 1.6 to 2.5 percentage points, but the results do not provide evidence of a change in public health insurance coverage for low-educated childless men. I do not find any statistically significant negative effects on the labor supply of low-educated childless men or women, despite an increase in take-up for women. While the estimates are imprecise, confidence intervals rule out the possibility of large negative labor supply effects. These results are also supported by event study analyses.

The Americas presents a unique case study in which the historical experiences of its ancestral populations and the link to development can be examined, with migrants originating from different parts of the world both voluntarily and involuntarily from Europe, Africa an Asia. In particular, the historical event of slavery, and later events post abolition particularly in the United States (U.S.) such as the infringement of civil rights (example, prohibition of interracial marriages), resulted in heterogeneous effects across ancestral generations, regions and countries. In this dissertation, I contribute to the literature in the following ways; (1) I examine slavery's impact on trust as a plausible transmission mechanism that can explain comparative economic development across American countries, and (2) I examine interracial marriages as a mechanism affecting intergenerational and social mobility, and explore its association to the persistence of inequality in the United States. To conduct my study, I collect historical data on slave populations as well as other essential data on the historical demographic and social characteristics of American populations. Since a large part of my study links historical factors to present-day outcomes, I also collect contemporary data on several social and demographic indicators.

This study investigates gender-specific changes in the total financial return to education among prime working-age (i.e., 35 to 44) persons using U.S. Census data from 1990 and 2000, and the 2009-2011 American Community Survey. We define the total financial return to education as the family standard-of-living as measured by family income adjusted for family size. Our results indicate that women experienced significant progress in educational attainment and labor market outcomes over this time period. Ironically, married womens progress in education and personal earnings has led to greater improvement in the family standard-of-living for married men than for women themselves. Gender-specific changes in assortative mating are mostly responsible for this paradoxical trend. Because the number of women who are highly educated exceeds the number of highly educated men in the marriage market, the likelihood of educational marryingup has substantially increased for men over time while womens likelihood has decreased. Sensitivity analyses show that the greater improvement in the family standard-of-living for men than for women is not limited to prime working-age persons, but is also evident in the general population. Consequently, womens return to education through marriage declined while mens financial gain through marriage increased considerably.

Fresno is the nations top agricultural county, yet it struggles with slow growth, high unemployment, and an economy dominated by low-wage jobs and few pathways into the middle class. While communities of color account for 68 percent of the population-up from 38 percent in 1980 - the countys racial inequities persist across all indicators of community health and well-being. To build a stronger Fresno, stakeholders must start with equity-just and fair inclusion into a society in which all, including every racial and ethnic group, can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential. Equity seeks to counteract the barriers and systemic exclusions (historic and current) that prevent people from realizing their potential. Leaders in the private, public, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors must commit to putting all residents on the path to economic security through equity-focused strategies and policies to grow good jobs, invest in human capital, remove barriers, and expand opportunities for communities of color currently being left behind.

This paper assesses the potential influence of intrinsic motivation on individuals’ performance in the context of Jewish-American soldiers in World War II. In particular, it analyzes whether these soldiers performed differently when combating Germans as opposed to Japanese. Using medals, length of service, and medals per length of service as measures of performance and exploiting a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, it finds that Jewish soldiers, on average, received fewer medals in Europe than in the Pacific when compared to their non-Jewish counterparts. This effect is driven by the length of service, as Jewish soldiers, unlike non-Jewish ones, perished three months sooner in Europe than in the Pacific. As a consequence, there is no differential effect on the number of medals received per month of service among Jewish soldiers.

The purpose of this note is to explain what is “analytical history”, a modular and testable analysis of historical events introduced in a book published in 2002 (Roehner and Syme 2002). Broadly speaking, it is a comparative methodology for the analysis of historical events. Comparison is the keystone and hallmark of science. For instance, the extrasolar planets are crucial for understanding our own solar system. Until their discovery, astronomers could observe only one instance. Single instances can be described but they cannot be understood in a testable way. In other words, if one accepts that, as many historians say, “historical events are unique”, then no testable understanding can be developed.

Using data from the Consumer Population Survey (CPS) for March 2013, this study examines the potential effects of a negative income tax on federal government welfare expenditure, household income, and certain variable parameters. The negative income tax is defined as money credited as allowances to a taxed income, and paid as a benefit when it exceeds debited tax. This study concludes that a negative income tax makes welfare more expensive to citizens, but should better society. These results shed some light on a non-conventional approach to addressing income distribution and achieving some socially desirable outcomes.

This dissertation examines the collapse of southern Unionism between October 1859 and April 1861. This study argues that a series of events of violent antislavery and southern perceptions of northern support for them caused white southerners to rethink the value of the Union and their place in it. John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and northern expressions of personal support for Brown brought the Union into question in white southern eyes. White southerners were shocked when Republican governors in northern states acted to protect members of John Brown’s organization from prosecution in Virginia. Southern states invested large sums of money in their militia forces, and explored laws to control potentially dangerous populations such as northern travelling salesmen, whites “tampering” with slaves, and free African-Americans. Many Republicans endorsed a book by Hinton Rowan Helper which southerners believed encouraged antislavery violence and a Senate committee investigated whether an antislavery conspiracy had existed before Harpers Ferry. In the summer of 1860, a series of unexplained fires in Texas exacerbated white southern fear. As the presidential election approached in 1860, white southerners hoped for northern voters to repudiate the Republicans. When northern voters did not, white southerners generally rejected the Union. This study relies on primary sources of white southerners where available and devotes considerable attention to southern newspapers, especially as they described the working of county-level government.

Job polarization accelerated during the Great recession in Europe. Because of higher levels of occupational segregation by gender in Europe, and larger shocks to middling occupations that employ mostly male workers, it generated labour demand shocks much more asymmetric between men and women than in the US. We find that the labour force participation and employment rates of women increased considerably in response to the large decline in employment opportunities of men in regions most affected by the destruction of middle-skill jobs, particularly so for married women with less than highschool education. For male, the decline in demand in middling occupation explains some of the recent decline in their participation. Both for men and women, the Great recession mostly accelerated pre-existing trends. This suggests that a large share of the recent increases in women’s participation in Europe is a response to job polarization.

The paper tests evidence of customer discrimination against African-Americans in the US using a two-sector matching model with racial sector-specific preferences or abilities, employer discrimination, and customer discrimination. The test strategy makes it possible to disentangle customer from pure employer discrimination. This paper proves the existence of discrimination against African-Americans at job entry from both employers and consumers in the US. It also reports that racial prejudice has a quantitative effect on the relative employment and contact probabilities of African-Americans. A decrease in the intensity of discrimination by one standard deviation would raise the raw employment rate of African-Americans by 10% and would increase the proportion of African-Americans in jobs in contact with customers by 25%.

I construct an optimal growth model with overlapping dynasties to investigate how much the rate at which an economy absorbs new immigrant dynasties could motivate current voters to favour greater reliance on deficit finance of government expenditures through intertemporal shifts in factor taxation. The model demonstrates that even if voters are altruistically linked to their descendants, rising immigration, coupled with declining birth rates may explain the growth in public debt and unfunded liabilities in the United States since the early 1980s, as well as the large increases in debt projected by the Congressional Budget Office over the next few decades.

This paper discusses recent trends in state (and local) taxation, examines the prospects for reform of state tax systems, and analyzes a wide range of issues that relate to ongoing state efforts to reform their tax systems.

Research evaluating the relation of workplace psychosocial factors to mental health among U.S. women of different racial/ethnic backgrounds is limited. This study investigated the relationship between work-related psychosocial factors and mental health among non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic White women using data from the 2010 National Health Interview Survey. Independent variables of interest included job insecurity, workplace harassment, and work-family conflict (WFC). Multiple Poisson regression models were used to examine the associations between the outcome and independent variables. The prevalence of unfavorable mental health was highest among non-Hispanic Black women (36%) compared to Hispanic (34%) and non-Hispanic White (30%) women. A higher proportion of non-Hispanic Black women reported WFC compared to Hispanics and non-Hispanic Whites (χ2 = 15.50, p < .01), while more Hispanics reported job insecurity (χ2 = 116.81, p < .01). Prevalence of workplace harassment did not differ significantly by race/ethnicity. Odds of unfavorable mental health were significantly higher for women reporting psychosocial work factors. Unexpectedly, a greater association between psychosocial work factors and unfavorable mental health was observed among non-Hispanic White women compared to non-White women; however, caution should be taken in interpreting these cross-sectional results. Future studies should investigate temporal associations and additional psychosocial variables that were not available for use in the current study.

In this paper, we show that labor-market adjustment to immigration differs across tradable and nontradable occupations. Theoretically, we derive a simple condition under which the arrival of foreign-born labor crowds native-born workers out of (or into) immigrant-intensive jobs, thus lowering (or raising) relative wages in these occupations, and explain why this process differs within tradable versus within nontradable activities. Using data for U.S. commuting zones over the period 1980 to 2012, we find that consistent with our theory a local influx of immigrants crowds out employment of native-born workers in more relative to less immigrant-intensive nontradable jobs, but has no such effect within tradable occupations. Further analysis of occupation wage bills is consistent with adjustment to immigration within tradables occurring more through changes in output (versus changes in prices) when compared to adjustment within nontradables, thus confirming the theoretical mechanism behind differential crowding out between the two sets of jobs. We then build on these insights to construct a quantitative framework to evaluate the consequences of counterfactual changes in U.S. immigration. Reducing inflows from Latin America, which tends to send low-skilled immigrants to specific U.S. regions, raises local wages for native-born workers in more relative to less-exposed nontradable occupations by much more than for similarly differentially exposed tradable jobs. By contrast, increasing the inflow of high-skilled immigrants, who are not so concentrated geographically, causes tradables and nontradables to adjust in a more similar fashion. For the nontradable-tradable distinction in labor-market adjustment to be manifest, as we find to be the case in our empirical analysis, regional economies must vary in their exposure to an immigration shock.

Chinese is one of the largest immigrant groups and one of the fastest growing immigrant groups in U.S, making it essential to study the occupational attainment of Chinese Americans. On the one hand, the recent immigrants from China have lower education achievement than earlier Chinese immigrants; glass ceiling also remains an obstacle for Chinese Americans to achieve leadership. On the other hand, the globalization enabled Chinese Americans to benefit from China’s development; the clustering in STEM fields also provides Chinese Americans with a more fair stage to challenge the whites. In this paper, I plan to use 2004 and 2014 IPUMS ACS data to examine how occupational attainment of Chinese Americans changes overtime, and how globalization and occupational clustering contribute to this change