In this paper I investigate whether higher returns to education for women lead to a reduction in teen birth rates. I first estimate the impact of the growth in the female college wage premium on teen birth rates in the U.S. An increase in the college wage premium is a proxy for higher expected earnings after completing college. Higher future earnings create incentives to pursue further education and they decrease the relative returns to having a birth as a teen. Using state variation, I find that an increase in the female college wage premium does lead to a reduction in teen birth rates. To address endogeneity and measurement error issues, I use a shift-share instrumental variable for womens wages to construct the female college wage premium. Results from three supplemental analyses support the main results. First, teen birth rates do respond to the growth in the female high school wage premium but the results are not conclusive. Second, the estimates suggest that growth in the male college wage premium has a lower impact on teen birth rates. Third, the elasticity of fertility with respect to the female college wage premium decreases as women grow older. This research can explain approximately 30% of the fall in teen birth rates that has occurred from the early 1990s up to the present.

For most of the past half-century, the share of prime-age men-those ages 25 to 54-in the labor force has been declining slowly but steadily. In the first quarter of 2017, 88.8 percent of civilian prime-age men were in the labor force on average, compared with 96.6 percent in 1967. A number of conservatives argue that Social Security-specifically Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which pays benefits to those who cannot work due to a serious medical condition-bears a large portion of the blame. For instance, Nicholas Eberstadt, a political scientist with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), claims that “collecting disability is an increasingly important profession in America these [d]ays.” Media outlets have elevated claims such as these, often in sensationalist and one-sided ways. It has even been suggested that benefits for disabled veterans and compensation for workers injured on the job are also contributing to the decline in labor force participation.

I document that employment share change and wage growth of occupations tend to increase monotonically with various measures of skill intensity since 1980 in the US, in contrast to the existing interpretation of labor market polarization along occupational wages. The observation is not particularly driven by a specific decade, gender, age group, or occupation classification. The evidence suggests that polarization by wages does not imply polarization of skills that have cross-occupation comparability. Skill-biased and polarizing occupation demand coexist as a result of the weak connection of wage and observable skill structure particularly among the low-wage jobs in the 1980. The empirical findings of the paper can be reconciled in an extended version of the canonical skill-biased technical change model which incorporates many occupations and within-occupation heterogeneity of skill types.

Major natural disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy cause numerous fatalities, and destroy property and infrastructure. In any year, the U.S experiences dozens of smaller natural disasters as well. We construct a 90 year panel data set that includes the universe of natural disasters in the United States from 1920 to 2010. By exploiting spatial and temporal variation, we study how these shocks affected migration rates, home prices and local poverty rates. The most severe disasters increase out migration rates and lower housing prices, especially in areas at particular risk of disaster activity, but milder disasters have little effect.

This report aims to broadly document trends affecting the middle class in Illinois with a focus on employment. The notion of “class” defies straightforward measurement with conventional data sources and encompasses more than employment status. In lieu of a clear way to define and measure class per se, this report follows previous national analyses in focusing on “middle income” households and their changing composition over time.

In 2011, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York signed into law NY Senate Bill S5855 establishing the NY-SUNY 2020 Challenge Grant Program Act. Thislegislation limited year-overyear resident undergraduate tuition increases in the City University of New York (CUNY) and State University of New York (SUNY) systems to a maximum of three hundred dollars ($300) per year from the 2011/2012 school year to 2015/2016. It also mandated that increases in nonresident undergraduate tuition not exceed 10 percent over the previous year. In addition to the tuition cap, a tuition credit is provided to students whose annual resident undergraduate rate of tuition exceeds five thousand dollars. In order to evaluate the impact of this State led policy on undergraduate enrollment in New York State, the IPUMS-CPS data set for New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts for the period of 2007 to 2014 was used. This study found that state imposed tuition cap and discount in New York State resulted in an increase in overall undergraduate enrollment, with a marked increase in enrollment in Private Colleges.

The present dissertation contains three chapters: the first two chapters are associated with incomplete market models and the last chapter is concerned with optimal monetary policy in the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) framework. The first chapter is concerned with structurally estimating the difference between idiosyncratic income risk estimated by an econometrician and what is actually perceived by households. Using the US micro-data to inform the consumption risk sharing model, I estimate that the perceived income risk is at least 12 percent lower than the risk estimated by an econometrician. Accounting for this gap, the model jointly explains three distinct risk sharing measures that are not captured in the standard model without a gap: (i) the cross-sectional variance of consumption, (ii) the covariance of consumption with income growth, and (iii) the income conditional-mean of household consumption. In the second chapter, using the March Current Population Survey, I show that over the last two decades, married households in the United States received increasingly more public insurance against labor income risk, whereas the opposite was true for single households. To evaluate the welfare consequences of this trend, I perform a quantitative analysis. As a novel contribution, I expand the standard incomplete markets model à la Aiyagari (1994) to include two groups of households: married and single. The model allows for changes in the marital status of households and accounts for transition dynamics between steady states. I show that the divergent trends in public insurance have a significant detrimental effect on the welfare of both married and single households. Higher public insurance crowds out the private savings of married households, thus decreasing their mean wealth. In the long run, lower wealth decreases mean consumption for married households, driving the decline in their welfare. For singles, transition dynamics play a major role. Although in response to lower public insurance they save more and can afford higher mean consumption in the new steady state, the welfare loss from lower initial consumption after the policy change offsets this welfare gain. v In the third chapter, I study the role of factor demand linkages in the design of optimal monetary policy. A two-sector New-Keynesian model is developed in which sectors are connected through factor demand linkages and differ in price stickiness. I find two important results: first, the presence of factor demand linkage induces amplification effects in resource mis-allocation and, hence, the concern for price stability becomes more important. Second, the optimal price index is not the same as the aggregate price index, although it does not depend upon factor demand linkages. Furthermore, based on the micro-founded loss function we derive a policy rule that implements the optimal allocation.

Using American Community Survey data from 2001, 2005, and 2010, this paper assesses the relationships between employment, race, and poverty for households headed by single women across different economic periods. While poverty rates rose dramatically among single-mother families between 2001 and 2010, surprisingly many racial disparities in poverty narrowed by the end of the decade. This was due to a greater increase in poverty among whites, although gaps between whites and Blacks, whites and Hispanics, and whites and American Indians remained quite large in 2010. All employment statuses were at higher risk of poverty in 2010 than 2001 and the risk increased most sharply for those employed part-time, the unemployed, and those not in the labor force. Given the concurrent increase in part-time employment and unemployment between 2000 and 2010, findings paint a bleak picture of the toll the last decade has had on the well being of single-mother families.

Scientific collaborations shape novel ideas and new discoveries and help scientists to advance their scientific career through publishing high impact publications and grant proposals. Recent studies however show that gender inequality is still present in many scientific practices ranging from hiring to peer review processes and grant applications. While empirical findings highlight that collaborations impact success and gender inequality is present in science, we know little about gender-specific differences in collaboration patterns, how they change over time and how they impact scientific success. In this paper we close this gap by studying gender-differences in dropout rates, productivity and collaboration patterns of more than one million computer scientists over the course of 47 years. We investigate which collaboration patterns are related with scientific success and if these patterns are similar for male and female scientists. Our results highlight that while subtle gender disparities in dropout rates, productivity and collaboration patterns exist, successful male and female scientists reveal the same collaboration patterns: compared with scientists in the same career age, they tend to collaborate with more colleagues than other scientists, establish longer lasting and repetitive collaborations, bring people together that have not been collaborating before and collaborate with successful scientists.

Accordingly, this article focuses first on a comparison of the native and the foreignborn U.S. population in terms of economic characteristics at the national level. Then, we will present the comparisons at the state level for the top-five and the bottom-five states ranked by their immigrant population.

Immigration has been in the news a lot recently, along with many strong claims about how it harms workers. This article reviews what research by economists says about how immigration affects workers. This requires first getting past common misconceptions that pervade press accounts and public policy debates about immigration, some of which even claim to come from economics. Unfortunately, these misconceptions usually lead to exactly the wrong policy conclusions about immigration—policies that tend to make the United States worse off. This is why it is important have the right economic model of immigration. This article first covers two common “wrong” models of immigration, before explaining the “right” model. The right model is confirmed by a large body of empirical evidence, which will be described here as well.

This dissertation examines how the expansion of formal education, so often hailed as a road to opportunity, gave rise to a new form of social inequality in the modern United States. Using quantitative data analysis and qualitative archival sources, it traces the transformation from workplace-based training for employment in the nineteenth century to school-based training in the twentieth century. This dissertation examines the city of Boston, a city that pioneered many developments in American education and was home to a heterogeneous population and diversified economy. Prior interpreters have applied competing frameworks to the relationship between education and work: “human capital” by economists, “credentialism” by sociologists, and “skill-formation regimes” by political scientists. By delving deeply into the history of this transformation, I show how an expanding landscape of schools facilitated social mobility for some, especially women and second-generation immigrants, but also encouraged “professional” strategies of job control based on exclusionary educational credentials that overwhelmingly benefited an educated, white, male, elite. My dissertation reorients the focus of contemporary inequality scholarship from the “turning point” of the 1970s to the profound transformation of paths to work a century earlier.

Background: Obesity and physical inactivity have been reported as the major contributing factors to non-communicable diseases and a public health problem worldwide. According to World health organization the global prevalence of obesity has increased more than doubled between 1980 and 2014. Many healthcare professionals fail to achieve sufficient levels of physical activity and most of them display poor dietary habits. The study conducted in South Africa among health care professionals in urban hospital in Gauteng province confirmed that 20% of them developed at least one NCD of which the contributing factors are obesity and physical inactivity. The aim of the study was to determine the prevalence of obesity and level of physical activity among health care professional in rural hospitals in Sekhukhune district, Limpopo province, South Africa. Methods: A quantitative descriptive study was conducted on 400 HCPs. The global questionnaire was closed ended. GPAQ was used for physical activity and anthropometric measurements were taken for BMI. A stratified random sampling method was used to sample HCPs. Data was analysed using SPSS version 23.0. Results: Most participants were females (71%), majority were between 30-39 years of age (46.3%), the highest category were nurses (77.8%), most of them their job title were assistants (44.5) and blacks (99.3%). The results revealed that 40.8% of HCPs were obese and 30.3% were overweight. Majority of (79.3%) were not engaging on work vigorous PA, however were engaging on work moderate PA. Also (60.5%) were not engaging on leisure vigorous PA, though 55.5% were engaging on leisure moderate PA. Majority (88.3%) had high sedentary (sitting) time. (35.50%) engaged in high activity of walking from one place to the other. In conclusion: There is a need for regular health promotion programmes among health care professionals with regard to obesity and importance of physical activity. The hospitals need to be equipped with onsite fitness centre that will be accessible to all HCPs. Physical activities support groups need to be established such as aerobics classes and fun run. Policies that guide participation in physical activities need to be drawn and be implemented accordingly in health sector, so as to promote healthy living habits.

In this paper, we measure the evolution of the task and skill content of occupations in the US between 1960 and 2000, and quantify its implications for earnings inequality. We construct a new dataset, drawing on a rich and largely untapped source of data: the text content of newspaper job ads. A previous literature has found that over this 40 year period, the employment share of occupations intensive in offshorable and routine tasks (especially routine manual tasks) has declined, while the employment share of jobs with non-routine interactive tasks has increased. We document that the evolution of the skill and task content of occupations themselves is at least as important as the employment shifts across occupations in accounting for aggregate changes in skill and task use. Motivated by these patterns, we decompose changes in the earnings distribution. We find that our new measures, which allow the task and skill content of occupations to vary through time, can help explain a substantially greater proportion of inequality than previous research has found. Changes in the task and skill content of jobs account for a 17 percentage point increase in 90-10 male earnings inequality.

There are many federal, state, and local laws governing the landlordtenant relationship. Yet scholars know little about their variety and what impact differences among jurisdictions have on renters and rental housing markets. This article examines state-level landlordtenant policy approaches to determine whether there is significant policy variation and whether states illustrate identifiable policy types. Using cluster and discriminant analysis, this research creates a typology of landlordtenant policy approaches, finding three distinctive approaches: protectionist, probusiness, and contradictory. This research indicates there is significant variation among state landlordtenant statutory policies, although states laws generally reflect one of three philosophies. These results are important for future studies on rental housing because treating all state rental environments the same masks important differences in rental experiences across states. As an illustration, this article finds that renters in protectionist and contradictory states move significantly more than renters in probusiness states do. Furthermore, understanding where renters have more or less legal protection allows policymakers and advocates to focus their efforts on areas where assistance is most needed.

Despite the theoretical importance of intragenerational mobility and its connection to intergenerational mobility, no study since the 1970s has documented trends in intragenerational occupational mobility. The present article fills this intellectual gap by presenting evidence of an increasing trend in intragenerational mobility in the United States from 1969 to 2011. We decompose the trend using a nested occupational classification scheme that distinguishes between disaggregated micro-classes and progressively more aggregated meso-classes, macro-classes, and manual and nonmanual sectors. Log-linear analysis reveals that mobility increased across the occupational structure at nearly all levels of aggregation, especially after the early 1990s. Controlling for structural changes in occupational distributions modifies, but does not substantially alter, these findings. Trends are qualitatively similar for men and women. We connect increasing mobility to other macro-economic trends dating back to the 1970s, including changing labor force composition, technologies, employment relations, and industrial structures. We reassert the sociological significance of intragenerational mobility and discuss how increasing variability in occupational transitions within careers may counteract or mask trends in intergenerational mobility, across occupations and across more broadly construed social classes.

Industries differ in the extent to which they can offshore their production. I document that industries with low offshoring potential have 7.31% higher stock returns per year compared to industries with high offshoring potential, suggesting that the possibility to offshore affects industry risk. This risk premium is concentrated in manufacturing industries that are exposed to foreign import competition. Put differently, the option to offshore effectively serves as insurance against import competition. A two-country general equilibrium dynamic trade model in which firms have the option to offshore rationalizes the return patterns uncovered in the data: industries with low offshoring potential carry a risk premium that is increasing in foreign import penetration. Within the model, the offshoring channel is economically important and lowers industry risk up to one-third. I find that an increase in trade barriers is associated with a drop in asset prices of model firms. The model thus suggests that the loss in benefits from offshoring outweighs the benefits from lower import competition. Importantly, the model prediction that offshorability is negatively correlated with profit volatility is strongly supported by the data.

Sexual orientation wage gap has been an emerging topic in economic analysis. In United States, most of the research is focused on national level. However, given the deeply divided political ideologies on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) rights issues such as same-sex marriage legislation among different states, one might wonder whether the wage gap would be also different. In this paper, we take the first step to present a systematical comparison of the sexual orientation wage gap from the past 15 years between Massachusetts and Alabama, who are opposite sides on almost every issue regarding LGBT rights. We employed Ordinary Least Squared regression and Oaxaca decomposition to analyze the wage gap and found that there is a smaller sexual orientation wage gap in Massachusetts than in Alabama, and the wage is also closing faster in Massachusetts.

The United States has a considerable talent gap in Information Technology (IT) as there are not enough qualified candidates to fill open IT jobs. This workforce shortage is addressed locally, regionally, and nationally by non-profit organizations, government initiatives, and educators. One non-profit organization, INTERalliance of Greater Cincinnati, grows the regional IT talent pipeline in Cincinnati by executing experiential programs for local high school students. INTERalliance connects the students with IT career pathways at companies and universities in the region, facilitating early connections with IT managers who can hire them for college internships and full-time jobs. This thesis analyzes data about the college and career decisions of past program participants. Compared to national averages, the results show INTERalliance participants are 12 times more likely to study IT in college and 13 times more likely to work full-time in IT. A regression analysis determined the significance of certain variables like gender and school type towards predicting student decisions. The results demonstrate the value of the organization and suggest opportunities to improve its programs in the future. The INTERalliance model could be deployed in other regions to develop their IT talent pipelines.

Although parents are typically a child's first source of human connection, sibling relationships are also an important factor in development. As of 2010, 82.22% of youth lived with at least one sibling. Sibling bonds are unique in that they often last a lifetime and are typically peoples longest relationships in life. Sibling relationships are influential in many ways.