In this thesis I study immigrants and immigration policies in the historical and modern United States. This thesis is composed of three chapters concerning the impact of immigrants on the US economy and the labor market performance of immigrants. In the first two chapters, I study the effects of the historical immigration quota system on manufacturing wages, the internal migration of the black population, and industrial development of the manufacturing sector. In Chapter 3, I turn to high-skilled immigrants in the modern US and study the ability of high-skilled immigrants to transfer their foreign human capital to the US and what affects immigrants’ human capital transferability. In Chapter 1, I recount the immigration quota system established in the 1920s US and use it as a natural experiment to identify the effects of immigration on the manufacturing wages between 1920 and 1930. The immigration quota system was established in 1921 and permanently in 1924 that severely restricted immigrant inflow from Southern and Eastern Europe while imposing a modest restriction on Western and Northern European immigrants. Hence US regions that historically had received more Eastern and Southern European immigrants experienced a greater decline in the supply of immigrants caused by the quotas. I estimate the number of immigrants excluded from each US region by the quotas as the instrumental variable for the change in the regional immigrant share in this decade. I find that the more immigrants excluded from a US region by the quota system led to a greater decrease in the foreign-born population share and significantly increased the regional manufacturing wage level. In Chapter 2, I use the immigration quota system to examine the effect of immigrants on the labor mobility of the native black population and the adjustments of industrial production in the manufacturing sector. I show a causal relationship between immigration restriction and the Great Migration of the southern black population: a greater decline in the supply of immigrants resulted in a greater inflow of black migrants. Regarding industrial development, I find that a region that experienced a greater decline in immigrant supply had a slower growth of the scale of production and electrification in the manufacturing sector. In Chapter 3, I study the return to human capital of US high-skilled immigrants using the National Survey of College Graduates. I find that high-skilled immigrants can not fully transfer their foreign human capital and have a low return to foreign human capital. STEM immigrants overall have a higher return to foreign experience and to foreign bachelor than non-STEM immigrants. I show that better mastery of English helps non-STEM immigrants transfer more foreign human capital and enjoy a higher return. STEM immigrants transfer more foreign human capital in general than non-STEM immigrants and their transferability of foreign human capital is not significantly affected by English skills probably because STEM-related human capital is less language-specific. I also find that immigrants who originally entered the US with temporary work visas have a slightly higher return to foreign human capital but a lower return to US human capital than immigrants with other entry visas.

Railroads have played a critical role in economic growth and development, and they exert a tremendous impact on the distribution and redistribution of the population. However, the impacts of railroads, especially freight rails, on population change and socioeconomic development are not well understood. This study fills the gap in the literature by examining the demographic and socioeconomic impacts of freight rails using county-level data in the continental United States from 1970 to 2010. The demographic and socioeconomic changes are measured by eleven dependent variables. Of those eleven, six are demographic (population, young, old, White, Black, Hispanic) and five are socioeconomic (high school, bachelors degree, graduate degree, employment, and income). The railroad is the explanatory variable, and it is measured by freight rail terminal density. This study utilizes data from various sources including the National Transportation Atlas Database, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS), cartographic boundary shapefiles, the land developability index, and decennial censuses of 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. This study utilizes exploratory spatial data analysis, standard regression, and spatial regression models. The application of spatial lag model, spatial error model, and spatial error model with lag dependence systematically considers the spatial effects and produces more robust results. There are four broad major findings of this research. First, freight rail is a distributive force. Second, freight rail contributes to the urbanization and suburbanization process. Third, freight rail facilitates demographic and socioeconomic change. Fourth, freight rail has differential demographic and socioeconomic impacts at the regional level. The findings of this study are the outcomes of the multiple dependent and independent variables tested for many decades using robust statistical methods that measure direct and indirect impacts. Not only does this study apply the most advanced statistical methods in the railroad research, but it also addresses the social impact, which are less-researched topics in transportation literature. This study contributes uniquely to the transportation, demographic and social equity literature and extends the transportation discussion from the development perspective, and it could be useful helping shape a just society, which is the ultimate goal of transportation policy.

Slave property rights yielded a source of collateral as well as a coerced labor force. Using data from Dun and Bradstreet linked to the 1860 census and slave schedules in Maryland, we find that slaveowners were more likely to start businesses prior to the uncompensated 1864 emancipation, even conditional on total wealth and human capital, and this advantage disappears after emancipation. We assess a number of potential explanations, and find suggestive evidence that this is due to the superiority of slave wealth as a source of collateral for credit rather than any advantage in production. The collateral dimension of slave property magnifies its importance to historical American economic development.

In this brief, we draw on publicly available information from several data sources to estimate the proportion of U.S. Latino children who have at least one parent who is an unauthorized immigrant. Our conclusion: about one quarter—25 to 28 percent—of all Latino children in the United States have an unauthorized immigrant parent. This translates to more than 4 million Hispanic children—a finding consistent across each data source and the three different approaches we used to create the estimate. In short, about 1 in 4 of America’s Hispanic children are at risk for experiencing the stresses associated with having a parent who is an unauthorized immigrant. (Throughout this brief, we use the term unauthorized immigrant parents to describe parents who lack legal status to live in the country.)

The first chapter provides an introduction to my investigation of the impact of statelevel educational investments in public K-12 education on future labor markets, specifically earnings and employment. In Chapter 2, the current literature supporting this investigation is examined while I offer a hole in the literature that I intend to fill. Then, in Chapter 3 I present a two-period, balanced-budget theoretical model in which I relate educational investments, mobility, and future earnings. This theoretical model is then implemented in Chapter 4 using state-level data and again in Chapter 5 using individual-level data. Chapter 4 examines the impact of state-level educational investments in public education on aggregate state labor markets, specifically earnings and employment. Using data on K-12 educational spending, 8th grade cognitive test scores, and educational demographics of a state’s labor force, I observe the impact these state-level investments have on employment and earnings growth. Taking interstate migration into account, I separate the benefits from educational investment into benefits due to in-state investment and benefits due to out-of-state investment. By doing so I am able to identify whether or not educational investment spillovers exist between states. Results indicate that the earnings benefits associated with public K-12 educational spending spill over into other states, 8th grade NAEP test scores do not spill over into other states, and neither has a significant impact on other states’ employment growth. Chapter 5 examines the impact of educational investments in public education on earnings of individuals. I extend my analysis from Chapter 4 by employing micro-data (on individuals) from the American Community Survey (ACS) instead of using statelevel data. Using micro-data allows me to more accurately measure the investments used in the education of an area and to incorporate where education was attained and where it was employed. Using individual-level data also allows me to narrow my focus to younger participants in the labor force, providing a stronger link between lagged educational spending and earnings. Results indicate that K-12 educational spending does spill over in the form of positive earnings benefits, which helps to support the results of Chapter 4.

Did the World War II (WWII) GI Bill increase the probability of completing high school and further affect the probability of poverty and employment for the cohorts for whom it benefited? This paper studies whether the GI Bill, one of the largest public financial aid policies for education, affected low education levels in addition to its documented effects on college education, and whether it increased economic well-being for its beneficiaries. I use the 1970 Census and the variation in WWII military participation rate across birth cohorts and states of birth for men. I find that the WWII GI Bill significantly increased the probability of completing high school by 13 percentage points and reduced the probability of being below the poverty line by 4 percentage points for black and white men. It also increased the probability of being employed by 3 percentage points and the number of weeks worked by two weeks.

There is much in the news about employers struggling to find skilled workers. And there are many workers and students uncertain about what skills and educational requirements they should focus on. Labor market researchers throughout government work hard to convey that information through a variety of tools and resources from federal and state agencies and regional workforce boards based on occupation (job title) and the requirements for that occupation. This article will focus on the determination of education requirements for those occupations. Saying “this job requires a certificate in welding” or a . . .

The central goal of my dissertation is to answer important questions about market design in health care when consumers have inertia, using modern industrial organization tools. The presence of consumer inertia in several markets has been well established in the literature, although we still know very little about how inertia affects the way markets work. In my dissertation, I shed light on these issues in the context of different institutional settings of health care sectors in different countries. Health care markets are extremely relevant because of their huge impacts on the quality of life and on mortality of individuals. In times when the expenditure on health care is increasingly high in modern economies, a better understanding of how these markets work is needed in order to decrease costs and improve their performance. The first chapter disentangles the effects of reductions in switching costs and in the length of contracts (lock-in) on consumer welfare, using quasiexperimental variation in the length of contracts in the Uruguayan health care system. In the second chapter, I study the effect of supply-side firm responses in terms of pricing and offering of new products, on consumer welfare in Medicare Part D in the U.S. Finally, the third chapter studies the effects of increased competition induced by reductions of consumer inertia, on quality and returns to skills for physicians, using uniquely detailed data from the Uruguayan health care sector. The use of tools from the field of industrial organization allows me to combine a solid theoretical background with clearly identified reduced-form and structural models, to analyze the welfare implications of equilibrium behavior in these markets, and to evaluate policy interventions and regulations aimed at improving welfare.

I study the effect of taste-based discrimination on the assimilation decisions of immigrant minorities. Do discriminated minority groups increase their assimilation efforts in order to avoid discrimination and public harassment or do they become alienated and retreat in their own communities? I exploit an exogenous shock to native attitudes, anti-Germanism in the US during World War I, to empirically identify the reactions of German immigrants to increased native hostility using two measures of assimilation efforts: naming patterns and petitions for naturalization. In the face of increased discrimination, Germans increase their assimilation investments by Americanizing their own and their childrens names and filing more petitions for US citizenship. Heterogeneity results suggest that these responses are stronger for immigrants who are initially more invested in the host society.

Card’s (1990) study of the Mariel supply shock remains an important cornerstone of both the literature that measures the labor market impact of immigration, and of the “stylized fact” that immigration might not have much impact on the wage of workers in a receiving country. My recent reappraisal of the Mariel evidence (Borjas, 2017) revealed that the wage of low-skill workers in Miami declined substantially in the years after Mariel, and has already encouraged a number of re-reexaminations. Most recently, Clemens and Hunt (2017) argue that a data quirk in the CPS implies that wage trends in the sample of non-Hispanic prime-age men examined in my paper does not correctly represent what happened to wages in post-Mariel Miami. Specifically, there was a substantial increase in the black share of Miami’s low-skill workforce in the relevant period (particularly between the 1979 and 1980 survey years of the March CPS). Because African-American men earn less than white men, this increase in the black share would spuriously produce a drop in the average low-skill wage in Miami. This paper examines the robustness of the evidence presented in my original paper to statistical adjustments that control for the increasing number of black men in Miami’s low-skill workforce. The evidence consistently indicates that the race-adjusted low-skill wage in Miami fell significantly relative to the wage in other labor markets shortly after 1980 before fully recovering by 1990.

The relationship between economic performance and wealth inequality at a regional level is examined using county-level wealth for Ontario in 1892 and 1902. The results find that after controlling for confounding factors, declining wealth inequality was generally accompanied by slower economic performance as measured by changes in wealth levels and manufacturing output over time. This suggests that a more egalitarian wealth distribution came perhaps at the price of less robust economic performance.

Improvement in living standards over time is not inevitable or automatic. Rather, it is made possible by increases in physical and human capital, technological progress that itself might require large investments, and well-designed institutions. In this set of eleven economic facts, we explore central features of the innovation system, including patents, research and development (R&D) investments, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Following this analysis, we highlight opportunities to enhance the effectiveness of the innovation system, thereby contributing to faster technological progress and economic growth.

There are huge volumes of raw data generated every day. The question is how to store these data in order to provide faster data access. The research direction in Big Data projects using Hadoop Technology, MapReduce kind of framework and compact data formats shows that two data formats (Avro and Parquet) support schema evolution and compression in order to utilize less storage space. In this paper, a systematic review of SQL-on-Hadoop by using Avro and Parquet has been performed over the past seven years (2010–2016) using publications of conference proceedings and journals of IEEEXplore, ACM Digital Library, ScienceDirect. With the help of search strategy followed, 152 research papers have been identified out of which 27 (from year 2013-2016) have been analyzed deeply as relevant papers. At the end, the conclusion has been made that direct comparison by compactness and fastness between Avro and Parquet do not exist in analyzed scientific articles.

We exploit the timing of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the geographical variation in mortality risks individuals faced across states to analyse reproduction decisions during the crisis. The results of a difference-in-differences approach show evidence that fertility decreased in states that are farther from Cuba and increased in states with more military installations. Our findings suggest that individuals are more likely to engage in reproductive activities when facing high mortality risks, but reduce fertility when facing a high probability of enduring the aftermath of a catastrophe.

Everyone agrees that American tort law expanded significantly in the late nineteenth century. But the story of that change, as usually told, is radically incomplete. One important precondition of tort law, as we now know it, was a major change in evidence law, one that only began to emerge after 1850. Before then, plaintiffs, defendants, and other "interested" parties were almost universally prohibited from testifying in civil trials. With this prohibition on party testimony, what the jury knew about the facts underlying a tort action was derivative and incomplete. Far fewer tort actions were brought because often the only evidence available to the plaintiff was his or her own account of what had happened, and that was inadmissible. But with the change, victims of personal injury were now able to describe before juries the circumstances in which they had been injured. They were able to talk about what they had done, what the entities they were suing had done or not done, and how they had suffered. They no longer needed the fortuitous presence of third-party witnesses to elicit testimony about how they had been injured. The abolition of the prohibition on party testimony, in short, made it much easier to succeed in personal injury lawsuits. At stake in this transformation was the very epistemology of the civil trial. With the admission of party testimony, civil trials went from being premodern efforts to resolve disputes whose outcomes were affected by the spiritual weight assigned to oaths taken by third-party witnesses, to the modern searches for factual truth that we now (incorrectly) assume they always have been. Without this transformation, other factors that later brought about modern tort liability could not have exercised the influence that they did. The transformation created the very conditions under which modern tort law could, and then did, emerge. Yet, the transformation and its significance for tort law have gone largely unrecognized. Modern tort scholars appear to be completely unaware of the prohibition on party testimony and have therefore failed for more than a century to take it into account in the way they have written and taught about the development of the law of torts. Because the rules and practices that preceded the transformation have now completely disappeared from modern torts cases, what the transformation accomplished may appear, incorrectly, to have always been the case. But it is lack of visibility, rather than lack of responsibility, that has actually been at work in hiding the significance of the transformation for the emergence of modern tort law. In order to appreciate the causal significance of the abolition of the prohibition on party testimony for the emergence of tort law in America, we need to recover a "lost" epistemology of civil trials.

The causes and consequences of deindustrialization in the United States are myriad and have created a dire situation for millions of working class people as bluecollar jobs have mostly vanished. This reality has been particularly hard in places like Appalachia, where manufacturing and extraction were the largest, and often only, employers for most of the 20th Century. Especially for rural areas with little appeal for new markets, tourism often appears to be one way to attract people to the area to spend money, but it is unclear whether or not this strategy is helpful to local economies. In this study, I use three different levels of data to better understand the effects of uneven development in and across Appalachia and to interrogate the effects of deindustrialization and the rise of leisure and retail in the early 21st Century. First, I analyze county level data to consider differences in industry pay and employment in three Appalachian subregions, at three different county population levels, at three points in time. Next, I analyze individual level data to see if new residents to Appalachia have higher economic and occupational statuses than residents who moved within the region in the same time period while also considering economic differences by subregion. Finally, I analyzed individual survey data from rock climbers at the Red River Gorge to find out whether they spend money during their visits. Overall, I found that subregional differences associated with differences in rural and urban county concentrations within the Appalachian region were starker than the differences between the region as a whole versus the rest of the United States. I suggest that recreational tourism, though fine, is not an economic solution to the problems of Eastern Kentucky, but that rather support for innovative development strategies in those towns that investing in infrastructure may be the only way to help alleviate the long history of uneven development in the region.

Organizations belonging to the government, commercial, and non-profit industries collect and store large amounts of sensitive data, which include medical, financial, and personal information. They use data mining methods to formulate business strategies that yield high long-term and short-term financial benefits. While analyzing such data, the private information of the individuals present in the data must be protected for moral and legal reasons. Current practices such as redacting sensitive attributes, releasing only the aggregate values, and query auditing do not provide sufficient protection against an adversary armed with auxiliary information. In the presence of additional background information, the privacy protection framework, differential privacy, provides mathematical guarantees against adversarial attacks. Existing platforms for differential privacy employ specific mechanisms for limited applications of data mining. Additionally, widely used data mining tools do not contain differentially private data mining algorithms. As a result, for analyzing sensitive data, the cognizance of differentially private methods is currently limited outside the research community. This thesis examines various mechanisms to realize differential privacy in practice and investigates methods to integrate them with a popular machine learning toolkit, WEKA. We present DPWeka, a package that provides differential privacy capabilities to WEKA, for practical data mining. DPWeka includes a suite of differential privacy preserving algorithms which support a variety of data mining tasks including attribute selection and regression analysis. It has provisions for users to control privacy and model parameters, such as privacy mechanism, privacy budget, and other algorithm specific variables. We evaluate private algorithms on real-world datasets, such as genetic data and census data, to demonstrate the practical applicability of DPWeka.

Using data from the 2010-2014 American Community Survey, we use a procedure suggested by Capps et al. (2015) to identify refugees from the larger group of immigrants to examine the outcomes of refugees relocated to the U.S. Among young adults, we show that refugees that enter the U.S. before age 14 graduate high school and enter college at the same rate as natives. Refugees that enter as older teenagers have lower attainment with much of the difference attributable to language barriers and because many in this group are not accompanied by a parent to the U.S. Among refugees that entered the U.S. at ages 18-45, we follow respondents’ outcomes over a 20-year period in a synthetic cohort. Refugees have much lower levels of education and poorer language skills than natives and outcomes are initially poor with low employment, high welfare use and low earnings. Outcomes improve considerably as refugees age. After 6 years in the country, these refugees work at higher rates than natives but they never attain the earning levels of U.S.-born respondents. Using the NBER TAXSIM program, we estimate that refugees pay $21,000 more in taxes than they receive in benefits over their first 20 years in the U.S.

Replication, while not traditionally a focus of empirical economic research, preserves the scientific integrity of and often identifies errors in published studies. Using data from the Current Population Survey, I replicate and extend a 2013 study by Colin Campbell and Jessica Pearlman that finds that cohort effects—factors affecting the gender wage gap that change with time and differentially affect women of different ages—played a central role in the narrowing of the gender wage gap since 1975. While my replication of Campbell and Pearlman’s study yields similar results, the authors’ description of their sample is flawed, leaving me unable to match the sample used by Campbell and Pearlman. I extend Campbell and Pearlman’s study by examining state-level differences in period effects on the gender wage gap. My extension is informed by the observation that public opinion and public policies that likely affect the gender wage gap vary among states. My results indicate that cohort effects explain more of period effects on the gender wage gap than does state-level variation, implying that cohort effects have had a larger effect on the declining gender wage gap than state-level differences—such as differences in laws and attitudes—have had.