The effect of generous welfare benefits on unemployment is highly contested. The dominant perspective contends that benefits provide disincentive to work, whereas others portray benefits as job-search subsidies that facilitate better job matches. Despite many studies of welfare benefits and unemployment, the literature has neglected how this relationship might vary across institutional contexts. This article investigates how unemployment benefits and minimum income benefits affect unemployment across levels of the institutional insider/outsider divide. I analyze the moderating role of the disparity in employment protection for holders of permanent and temporary contracts and of the configuration of wage bargaining. The analysis combines data from 20 European countries and the United States using the European Union Labour Force Survey and the Current Population Survey 1992–2009. I use a pseudo-panel approach, including fixed effects for sociodemographic groups within countries and interactions between benefits and institutions. The results indicate that unemployment benefits and minimum income benefits successfully subsidize job search and reduce unemployment in labor markets with a moderate institutional insider/outsider divide. However, when there is greater disparity in employment protection and when bargaining either combines low unionization with high centralization or high unionization with low centralization, generous benefits create a disincentive to work, plausibly because attractive job opportunities are scarce.

We proxy for board members’ differences of opinions and values using directors’ ancestral origins and show that diversity has costs and benefits, which lead to high performance volatility. Consistent with the idea that diverse groups experiment more, firms with diverse boards have more and more cited patents and their strategies conform less to those of the industry peers. However, firms with greater ancestral diversity also have more board meetings, higher director turnover unrelated to performance, and make less predictable decisions. These findings suggest that diversity may lead to inefficiencies in the decisionmaking process and conflicts in the boardroom. Our results do not appear to be driven by firms’ risk-taking or complexity.

In reality matching is not purely random nor perfectly assortative. We propose a parsimonious way to model the choice of whom to meet that endogenizes the degree of randomness in matching, and show that this allows for better identification of preferences. The model features an interaction between a productive and a strategic motive. For some preference specifications, there is a tension between these two motives that drives an endogenous wedge between the shape of sorting patterns and the shape of the underlying match payoff function, allowing for better empirical identification. We show the empirical relevance of our theoretical results by applying it to the U.S. marriage market. JEL: E24, J64, C78, D83.

Small area health estimates are important for studying environmental exposure, disease transmission, and health outcomes at the local scale. Yet, to protect privacy, the majority of publicly available health data are aggregated within larger spatial units such as states or counties. This article describes a method to generate small area mortality estimates from individual microdata that are available only for larger geographic entities. The mortality estimates are based on the probabilistic reweighting and spatial allocation of a population constructed by combining the individual-level microdata with census tract–level summary data. The generated mortality counts can be used to explore local mortality patterns and identify clusters of mortality from various causes. Validation of the allocated death counts against actual restricted-use census tract–level death counts suggests that the estimated counts reliably duplicate the total mortality patterns found in the actual data. The allocations of cause-specific mortality outcomes are less accurate, however.

We describe 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. 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.

We estimated rates of “absolute income mobility”-the fraction of children who earn more than their parents-by combining data from U.S. Census and Current Population Survey cross sections with panel data from de-identified tax records. We found that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. Increasing GDP growth rates alone cannot restore absolute mobility to the rates experienced by children born in the 1940s. However, distributing current GDP growth more equally across income groups as in the 1940 birth cohort would reverse more than 70% of the decline in mobility. These results imply that reviving the “American dream” of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is shared more broadly across the income distribution.

Although seemingly identical in their circumstances, research has found single fathers to engage less in child care than single mothers. Guided by both a structuralist and a “doing gender” perspective, we examine gender differences in single parents’ child care time and whether the presence and gender of coresident adult kin moderate this association. Our sample drawn from the 2003–2013 American Time Use Survey (N = 10,985) consists of non-cohabiting single parents aged 18 to 64 who live with at least one own child under age 18. We first found that single fathers spent slightly less time in all types of child care except play than single mothers. Either coresident adult female kin or adult male kin, or both predicted single parents’ spending less time in child care activities, particularly management. Living only with adult male kin also predicted single parents’ lower time spent in teaching. Lastly, gender differences in single parents’ child care time were larger in any child care, play, and teaching when living with both adult female kin and male kin than when living without any kin. The presence of both female kin and male kin may relieve the parent of tasks gender-appropriate to the related household members. Additional research about the contexts of gender differences in single parents’ child care enriches our understanding of parenting by men and women.

This study extends the occupational choice model to explore age effects for eight different types of boomer entrepreneurs. The empirical study relies on monthly Current Population Survey data across 11 years (2006-2016). Multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression models are estimated to incorporate individual- and metropolitan-level effects. Among boomer entrepreneurs, we find that novice, opportunity novice, part-time, and unincorporated entrepreneur rates rise at higher ages (55 and above), with a slightly n-shaped age effect for non-novice/switcher (versus novice/switcher), necessity novice (versus opportunity), full-time (versus part-time), and incorporated (versus unincorporated) boomer entrepreneurs. We also identify determinants such as race, health, marital status, education, and work history, with opposite effects for each pair of entrepreneur types, and end by comparing the driving forces for boomer and non-boomer entrepreneurs

This paper offers the first systematic historical evidence on the role of a central actor in modern growth theory - the engineer. It collects cross-country and state level data on the labor share of engineers for the Americas, and county level data on engineering and patenting for the US during the Second Industrial Revolution. These are robustly correlated with income today after controlling for literacy, other types of higher order human capital (e.g. lawyers, physicians), demand side factors, and after instrumenting engineering using the Land Grant Colleges program. A one standard deviation increase in engineers in 1880 accounts for a 16% increase in US county income today, and patenting capacity contributes another 10%. We further show engineering density supported technological adoption and structural transformation across intermediate time periods. Our estimates help explain why countries with similar levels of income in 1900, but tenfold differences in engineers diverged in their growth trajectories over the next century. The results are supported by historical case studies from the US and Latin America.

We study the effects of European immigration to the United States during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1920) on economic prosperity today. We exploit variation in the extent of immigration across counties arising from the interaction of fluctuations in aggregate immigrant flows and the gradual expansion of the railway network across the United States. We find that locations with more historical immigration today have higher incomes, less poverty, less unemployment, higher rates of urbanization, and greater educational attainment. The long-run effects appear to arise from the persistence of sizeable short-run benefits, including greater industrialization, increased agricultural productivity, and more innovation.

This paper studies how education choices and labor market frictions interact in shaping wage inequality. The wage premium of college graduates relative to high school graduates (between-group inequality) has tripled since 1980 in the U.S., and the variance of log wages conditional on educational attainments (within-group inequality) has become about 50% larger across the board. To understand the source of this change, we construct a model with schooling investments and labor market frictions that generates supply and demand of skills and frictional wage differentials as equilibrium objects. The model features a two-sided sorting: education sorting of skilled workers into college education and labor market sorting of productive firms into the labor market for college graduates − together implying an assortative matching of high skilled workers to productive firms. A novel model-based wage decomposition of both the between-and within-group inequalities is obtained. Calibrating the model to the U.S. data, we find that the inequality trend is accounted for by worker composition and labor market friction. If there were no skill-biased technological change, the variance of log wages would be smaller, mainly due to lower within-group inequality.

Two concerns central to the debate over skilled guest worker programs in the USA are that (1) guest workers are restricted from inter-firm mobility and are effectively tied to their firms, and (2) guest workers provide cheap and immobile labor that crowds out natives, especially during times of heightened unemployment. We address these concerns by using a unique dataset of employee records from six large Indian IT firms operating in the USA. We find that the guest workers in our sample exhibit a significant amount of inter-firm mobility that varies over both the earnings distribution and the business cycle. We also find that these workers exit the USA during periods of heightened unemployment. These findings provide new evidence on the implications of the institutional features and debate surrounding guest worker programs.

Several recent contributions to the literature have suggested that the strength of family ties is related to various economic and social outcomes. For example, Alesina and Giuliano (2014) highlight that the strength of family ties is strongly correlated with lower GDP and lower quality of institutions. However, the forces shaping family ties remain relatively unexplored in the literature. This paper proposes and tests the hypothesis that the agricultural legacy of a country matters for shaping the strength of its family ties. Using data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, the results show that societies with a legacy of cultivating wheat tend to have weaker family ties. Analysis at the sub-national level (US data) and the country level corroborate these findings. The estimations allow for alternative hypotheses which propose that pathogen stress and climatic variation can potentially also give rise to the formation of family ties. The results suggest that the suitability of land for wheat production is the most influential factor in explaining the variation in the strength of family ties across societies and countries.

The status exchange hypothesis suggests that partners in black/white marriages in the United States trade racial for educational status, indicating strong hierarchical barriers between racial groups. The authors examine trends in status exchange in black/white marriages and cohabitations between 1980 and 2010, a period during which these unions increased from 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent of all young couples. The authors find that status exchange between black men and white women did not decline among either marriages or cohabitations, even as interracial unions became more prevalent. The authors also distinguish two factors driving exchange: (1) the growing probability of marrying a white person as educational attainment increases for both blacks and whites (educational boundaries) and (2) a direct trade of race-by-education between partners (dyadic exchange). Although the theoretical interpretation of exchange has focused on the latter factor, the authors show that status exchange largely emerges from the former.

Low-income adults without dependent children have historically had few paths to obtain public health insurance unless they qualified for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) cash benefits because of a disability. However, in states that expand their Medicaid programs, childless adults may obtain Medicaid without undergoing an intensive SSI disability review process and with substantially higher income and assets than the SSI program allows. This expanded availability of Medicaid coverage, independent of SSI participation, creates an opportunity to increase earnings and savings without jeopardizing health insurance coverage. In this paper, we use the natural experiments created by state decisions to expand Medicaid to nondisabled, nonelderly adults without dependent children to study the effect of decoupling Medicaid eligibility and cash assistance using a difference-in-differences study design. We collected data on the income eligibility limits, enrollment caps, and coverage characteristics of state Medicaid expansions to childless adults from 2001-2013. We combine these data with the nationally representative American Community Survey to estimate the effects of state expansion on SSI participation. We find relative declines in SSI participation of 0.17 percentage points on average after the introduction of Medicaid coverage for childless adults, a 7% relative decrease. This finding suggests the potential for small but important efficiency gains from separating SSI and Medicaid eligibility.

The dominant approach to studying historical race-related fertility differences has been to limit samples to first-married and younger women. We argue that studying historical race-related fertility differences in the context of remarriage is also important: remarriage and fertility patterns are both rooted in the biosocial conditions that produce racial disparities in health. We employ a multiple causes framework that attributes variation in fertility patterns to voluntary limitation and involuntary factors (infecundity/subfecundity). We use data from the 1910 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series and estimate zero-inflated negative binomial models that simultaneously distinguish those who are infecund (vs. fecund) and estimate the number of remarital births among the fecund. Our approach allows us to evaluate historical remarital (in)fertility differences, accounting for marital, socioeconomic, and geographic influences on fecundity and fertility, while empirically accounting for the influence of children “missing” from the household due to mortality and fostering/aging out. Consistent with past studies that emphasized poorer African American health as a major influence on involuntary infertility, we find that African American women were more likely than white women to be in the always-zero (infecund) group and to have fewer remarital births. Supplemental analyses nuance these findings but indicate that these results are robust. Overall, we find support for a multiple-causes perspective: while the findings are consistent with the adoption of deliberate fertility control among urban and higher-status women at higher parities, remarital fertility differences in 1910 also reflected greater infecundity/subfecundity among subgroups of women, especially African American women.

Most public school teachers in the United States are covered by traditional defined benefit (DB) pensions designed to reward long service. Numerous recent studies, including several focused on California, use high attrition rates among new hires to argue that teachers would be better off with a defined contribution (DC) plan or a cash balance (CB) plan. These studies fail to address tenure patterns in the teaching workforce—for example, how long the average teacher currently working in the profession can expect to stay. In this study, we ask whether most teachers currently working in California public schools can expect to stay long enough to accrue higher benefits under their pension than under alternative retirement plans with the same expected cost and the same capital market assumptions. Based on an analysis of CalSTRS membership and actuarial data and our counterfactual benefit modeling, we find that 73% of teachers currently working in California can expect to work at least 20 years, and 46% can expect to work at least 30 years. At least 82% of the California teacher population will stay until age 55, the early retirement age. On an entering-cohort basis, nearly half of current new-hire teachers in California (50%) are better off with the DB pension than the idealized DC plan. Critically, 85% of California’s teaching population will accrue higher benefits under the CalSTRS DB pension than through an idealized 401(k), and 76% will accrue higher benefits than through a generous CB plan.

This paper adds to the growing body of research on the overlap between work and family by investigating the relationship between attributes of work schedules for parents and the amount of time they spend with their children. Nationally representative time diary data from the American Time Use Survey is used to calculate the amount of time parents spend with children on a random day, and these data are merged with the CPS Work Schedules Supplement which provides information on the respondent’s usual work schedule, such as having a flexible schedule, variable start and stop times, working from home, or a day schedule. The results show that though some work schedule attributes have little influence on the amount of time parents spend with children, certain aspects of the timing of work are related to the total time parents spend with their children. The attributes of work schedules are also found to be associated with the amount of time spent in specific activities with children.

Despite the importance of understanding the fundamental determinants of Hispanic health, few studies have investigated how metropolitan segregation shapes the health of the fastest-growing population in the United States. Using 2006-2013 data from the National Health Interview Survey, we 1) examined the relationship between Hispanic metropolitan segregation and respondent-rated health for US-born and foreign-born Hispanics and 2) assessed whether neighborhood poverty mediated this relationship. Results indicated that segregation has a consistent, detrimental effect on the health of US-born Hispanics, comparable to findings for blacks and black-white segregation. In contrast, segregation was salutary (though not always significant) for foreign-born Hispanics. We also found that neighborhood poverty mediates some, but not all, of the associations between segregation and poor health. Our finding of divergent associations between health and segregation by nativity points to the wide range of experienceswithin the diverseHispanic population and suggests that socioeconomic status and structural factors, such as residential segregation, come into play in determining Hispanic health for the US-born in a way that does not occur among the foreign-born.