Filipinos in the US are 3.4 million, yet the main causes of death among this primarily immigrant population have not been well characterized nor compared with the mortality experience of their counterparts in the Philippines. Age-adjusted mortality rates were computed for the main causes of death for three populations: Filipinos living in the Philippines (FPHs), Filipinos living in California (FCAs), and non-Hispanic whites in California (WCAs). Regression- derived mortality rate ratios stratified by sex were used to compare the populations, using WCA as the referent population. Included causes of death were ischemic heart disease, stroke, cancer and chronic lower respiratory disease, as well as two common causes of death in the Philippines, pneumonia and tuberculosis. For cancer, the four most common cancer mortality sites and cervical cancer were examined. A total of 858,388 FPH, 256,395 WCA, and 9,280 FCA decedents were analyzed. In the US, cancer was the leading cause of death for Filipinos of both sexes, while in the Philippines, it was fourth after ischemic heart disease, pneumonia and stroke. For all cancers combined, no significant differences in mortality were recorded between Filipinos in CA and in the Philippines (p>0.05); however, patterns varied by cancer site. For liver, prostate and cervical cancers, FPHs fared considerably worse than FCAs, while for lung cancer among women, FCA had a 56% (95%CI 1.20-2.02) higher risk of death than FPH. Overall, mortality rates from the major causes of death are much lower among FCAs than FPHs, suggesting that Filipinos in CA benefit substantially from living in the US in terms of health outcomes and life expectancy. Access to a more developed health care infrastructure, effective prevention programs, and better treatment opportunities likely explain the lower mortality rates in the US for ischemic heart disease, stroke and infectious diseases. However, the differences in cancer between the two populations are not as striking as for other causes of death, with differences in the prevalence of risk factors, including obesity, smoking, fertility patterns, and Hepatitis B impacting cancer rates. Risk factor interventions in the US and enhancing the health infrastructure in the Philippines should result in health gains for Filipinos on both sides of the Pacific.

Our research hypothesis within this paper is: the policy of paid maternity leave does lead to higher birth rates. For reviewing our hypothesis we made use of the statespecific differences in the US-American maternity leave policies. We used California, which is endowed with the PFL, which was introduced in 2002 with contributions granted from January 2004 on (State of California Employment Department, 2016) and Nevada, a Californian neighboring state without any protections beyond FMLA. We chose those two states, because of several reasons. Firstly, as they are neighbors we can assume that they are similar with regard to climate, mentality of the people, history and culture. During our research we did not find any facts, which contradict this assumption. Secondly, they possess a similar population percentage with around, a similar age structure, a similar gender structure, a similar education level and a similar median income per household (Index Mundi). These equalities with regard to the states preconditions and yet the inequality with regard to the maternity leave policy creates an ideal environment for a difference-in-difference analysis.

Early care and education (ECE) can have a positive effect on many aspects of children’s development, including the language, literacy, mathematics, executive functioning, and socialemotional competencies needed for a smooth transition into kindergarten and later life success. But for many families, high-quality ECE is out of reach. For a family of three earning $40,000 a year, child care costs roughly 20% of household income; for a single parent earning the minimum wage, that number is 50%. California has established a range of programs to support the development of children from birth to age 5, but these programs are uncoordinated, insufficient in scope, and of variable quality. This report provides California policymakers with a comprehensive overview of the state’s ECE system, describing its administration and funding, access to care, program quality, and data limitations.

Several country-level studies, including a prominent one for the United States, have identified long-term effects of in-utero exposure to the 1918 influenza pandemic (also known as the Spanish Flu) on economic outcomes in adulthood. In-utero conditions are theoretically linked to adult health and socioeconomic status through the fetal origins or Barker hypothesis. Historical exposure to the Spanish Flu provides a natural experiment to test this hypothesis. Although the Spanish Flu was a global phenomenon, with around 500 million people infected worldwide, there exists no comprehensive global study on its long-term economic effects. We attempt to close this gap by systematically analyzing 117 Census data sets provided by IPUMS International. We do not find consistent global long-term effects of influenza exposure on education, employment and disability outcomes. A series of robustness checks does not alter this conclusion. Our findings indicate that the existing evidence on long-term economic effects of the Spanish Flu is likely a consequence of publication bias.

In these essays, I study the causes and implications of differences in household wealth, income, and consumption using quantitative general equilibrium settings that are consistent with household-level data. I explore frictions that are necessary to reconcile differences in household behavior, over age, income and wealth, with micro data. Moreover, within these environments, I evaluate the aggregate implications of differences across households for the long-run and recessions. In the first chapter, “Inequality, Portfolio Choice, and the Great Recession”, I study the effect of heterogeneity, in both the level and composition of wealth, in a dynamic stochastic overlapping-generations economy where households face uninsurable unemployment, earnings, and liquidity risk. Households pay transactions costs when they adjust savings held in high expected return assets, which make such savings illiquid. They also hold liquid, lower return assets. I show that household-level disparities in liquidity are important for understanding differences in their behavior, as well as aggregate changes in consumption and investment, over the Great Recession. When I allow for a rise in both unemployment and disaster risk, reducing households’ expected income and the expected return on their illiquid savings, aggregate consumption and investment fall to levels seen in the recession. The response of aggregate consumption is sensitive to the behavior of wealth poor households with a high marginal utility of consumption. Facing a large possible fall in earnings, they build precautionary savings in liquid assets. However, in a typical incomplete markets model with a single asset, all households would respond to the fall in the expected return on savings following a rise in disaster risk. The resulting substitution effect would offset much of the negative wealth effect on aggregate consumption. In contrast, when much of wealth is illiquid, many households do not respond to a fall in its expected return, substantially dampening the substitution effect. Moreover, wealthier households, more likely to adjust their portfolios, increase their shares of liquid assets. This results in a large fall in aggregate investment. In the second chapter, “Skill Premia, Wage Risk, and the Distribution of Wealth”, I challenge the conventional assumption of i.i.d wage shocks in a standard heterogeneous household economy with uninsurable idiosyncratic risk and studies the implications of unobserved heterogeneity, both in the mean and variance of wage processes, on aggregate wealth and income inequality and life-cycle profiles of earnings, income, and wealth by education groups. I document strong evidence of conditional means and variances of wage processes that rise with skills from the PSID using minimum distance estimation. The implications of these estimated skill-specific wage processes are studied in an incomplete-markets quantitative general equilibrium OLG model wherein households choose their education level. A discrete skill choice partly endogenizes earnings risk across households and introduces a channel through which households’ schooling decision affects their earnings as well as wealth. I show that, in contrast to a model with a common wage shock, the model with empirically consistent wage processes that differ by skills successfully explains much of aggregate inequality as well as life-cycle earnings, income, and wealth of skilled and unskilled households. Furthermore, I find that college education subsidies directed at the poor decrease wealth inequality. However, these subsidies reduce the quality of college graduates and increase the quality of those left behind. In the third chapter, “Segmented Asset Market and the Distribution of Wealth”, with Aubhik Khan, we study the effects of segmented asset markets on wealth distribution in a quantitative OLG model. Using the 2004 SCF data, we find significant heterogeneity in household portfolio choice across ages and wealth levels. First, 30 percent of the U.S. households hold high-yield assets defined as stocks, bonds, and mutual and hedge funds. Second, the probability of a household participating in highyield asset markets is rising with age and wealth level. Lastly, wealthy households tend to hold more of their financial assets as high-yield assets. Solving for stationary equilibrium, we find that asset market segmentation is an important source of wealth inequality. Segmented asset markets lead to a substantial increase in wealth dispersion across households. Specifically, an alternative model without market segmentation generates a Gini coefficient for wealth that is approximately 7 to 10 percent lower. Second, we reproduce the empirical findings that households are more likely to hold high-yield assets if they are older and wealthier.

On June 2015, the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs lost a case in the U.S. Supreme Court due to their failure to provide equitable affordable housing under the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program. The U.S. Supreme Court decision has shaken the affordable housing definition by highlighting the importance of location in housing affordability. To best assist low-income families, what should ‘high-opportunity areas’ concretely provide? First and foremost is transportation affordability. Transportation is more than a sheer convenience for Americans. Looking solely at housing costs is a misleading measure of affordability and a disservice to low-income families. A recent study by the PI, found that, households in 44% of all Multifamily Section 8 properties in the nation, spend on average more than 15 percent of their income on transportation costs, making these properties effectively unaffordable. According to this methodology, more than 73% of Section 8 Multifamily properties in Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) are unaffordable. This study has . . .

We find that oil supply shocks decrease average real wages, particularly skilled wages, and increase wage dispersion across regions, particularly unskilled wage dispersion. In a model with spatial energy intensity differences and nontradables, labor demand shifts, while explaining the response of average wages to oil supply shocks, have counterfactual implications for the response of wage dispersion. Only an additional response in labor supply can explain this latter fact, highlighting the importance of general equilibrium effects in a spatial context. We provide additional empirical evidence of regionally directed worker reallocation and housing prices consistent with our spatial model. Finally, we show that a calibrated version of our model can quantitatively match the estimated effects of oil supply shocks. (JEL E24, J22, J23, J24, J31, Q35, R23)

Despite the major breakthrough for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists on marriage equality, the fight against employment discrimination remains elusive. Whether one is protected from discrimination in employment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity depends on where one lives and is contingent on a patchwork of state and local policies. In this article, we investigate the adoption of state nondiscrimination laws that are inclusive of sexual orientation between 1980 and 2009. Findings from our event history analysis of policy adoption contribute to the study of social movements and LGBT politics in three ways. First, and consistent with social movement theory, we find countermovement opposition to gay rights as well as pro-LGBT political opportunities to be critical. Second, we find organization and opportunity to fluctuate in importance over time, underscoring the need for historically informed analyses that seriously consider when key actors should matter for social movement outcomes. Third, we produce new state-level estimates of public opinion of nondiscrimination laws. We show that while very high levels of public support are common for states that adopt nondiscrimination laws, they are not enough on their own, particularly in the face of opposition.

This paper studies the secular behavior of worker reallocation across occupations in the U.S. labor market. In the empirical analysis, we use microdata to construct consistent time series over a forty-five year period, and document that the fraction of employment reallocated annually across occupations is highly stable in the long run. We go beyond description and use an equilibrium model to identify potential changes in the productivity shocks and mobility costs that govern worker reallocation across occupations. We uncover the joint evolution of these factors by deriving a simple mapping between data and the model. Our analysis shows that constant reallocation rates across occupations mask slow-moving increases in the volatility of productivity shocks since the mid-1980s, and a pronounced upward shift in the cost of switching occupations in the period surrounding the Great Recession.

A frequently cited model of why segregation contributes to inequality is that segregation increases the level of contextual advantage of advantaged segregated groups and the level of contextual disadvantage of disadvantaged segregated groups. This paper provides a formal demographic model of this process. The model begins with two groups that differ along a dimension of average advantage and disadvantage, for instance, two racial groups that differ in their poverty rates. The model illustrates how the contextual advantages and disadvantages from segregation are affected by a series of demographic conditions: group relative size, group advantage-disadvantage rates, group effects on advantage-disadvantage rates of nongroup neighbors, and advantage-disadvantage effects on group contact. The paper outlines a series of eleven conclusions from the theoretical model and applies the theoretical model to understanding racial segregation effects on racial group neighborhood poverty contact in American cities.

A novel hypothesis posits that levels of genetic diversity in a population may partially explain variation in the development and success of countries. Our paper extends evidence on this novel question by subjecting the hypothesis to an alternative context that eliminates many alternative hypotheses by aggregating representative data to the high school level from a single state (Wisconsin) in 1957, when the population was composed nearly entirely of individuals of European ancestry. Using this sample of high school aggregations, we too find a strong effect of genetic diversity on socioeconomic outcomes. Additionally, we check an existing mechanism and propose a new potential mechanism of the results for innovation: personality traits associated with creativity and divergent thinking.

The African American Great Migration refers to the sixty-year period, between 1910 and 1970, during which an estimated six million black Americans voted with their feet and left the South. It started off as a trickle, but the outpour of black migrants from the South to the North increased with rapid intensity each census year for the next six decades. There is a body of research within the social sciences, largely comprised of studies conducted by sociologists and economists, which focuses on the consequences of the African American Great Migration and the mechanisms that sustained the mass movement (Crowder, Tolnay, & Adelman, 2001; Stewart E. Tolnay, Adelman, & Crowder, 2002; Stewart E. Tolnay et al., 2005; Stewart E. Tolnay & Crowder, 1999; White, Crowder, Tolnay, & Adelman, 2005). The majority of these studies rely on data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), a quantitative data source that aggregates person-level social and economic microdata from various U.S Censuses, and recent American Community Study (ACS) surveys. IPUMS data has made possible the empirical study of U.S. migration outcomes: How did those who migrated from the South during the Great Migration fare vis-à-vis their Northern counterparts (Stewart E. Tolnay, 2001)? What were the variations along dimensions of race and gender (Crowder et al., 2001)? How did marital status impact migrant’s destination decision (White et al., 2005)? These and other outcomes-driven studies have had a tremendous impact on our understanding of the macro level social and economic consequences that the African American Great Migration has had on migrants, “natives”1 , and receiving areas. However, the questions that have been asked to date are strictly limited by the data available to researchers. Further, the extant public use data sources have nearly been exhausted in terms of the reaching the limits of what more it can tell us about this phenomenon. As sociologist and demographer Stewart Tolnay aptly points out, “researchers have thoroughly mined existing data sources in their efforts to better understand which black southerners were more likely to pack up and head north during the Great Migration” and that “future progress on this issue will likely come from the innovative use of unanticipated data sources” (Tolnay, 2003, p. 213). This study takes up Tolnay’s call by relying on oral history and archive data soures to examine a lesser studied facet of the Great Migration; its’ antecedents.

In-kind transfer programs aim to provide valuable resources to beneficiaries while targeting those who most need assistance. This problem is particularly challenging for public housing authorities (PHAs), which allocate apartments to applicants who may differ in their outside options as well as their preferred apartment types. PHAs in the U.S. differ widely in the priority systems they use and how much choice they afford potential tenants. This paper evaluates how choice and priority systems used in public housing allocation affect two competing objectives: efficiency and redistribution. I use data on the submitted choices of public housing applicants to estimate a structural model of demand for public housing in Cambridge, MA. I find substantial heterogeneity in applicants’ preferred housing developments and in their overall values of obtaining assistance, much of which cannot be predicted using observed applicant characteristics. In counterfactual simulations, I show that the range of choice and priority systems used by other PHAs would generate large changes in total welfare and tenant characteristics if implemented in Cambridge. When applicants choose where they are assigned, tenants enjoy welfare gains relative to their outside options equivalent to cash transfers of $7,000 per year. Removing choice would house applicants with worse outside options but provide low match quality, causing cost-adjusted welfare gains to fall by 30 percent. Prioritizing low-income applicants while allowing choice improves targeting without lowering match quality. As a result, some mechanisms used by PHAs are strictly dominated for a broad class of social welfare functions.

Human capital is an important mechanism that influences both the migration decisions of immigrants and the rate at which immigrants assimilate in the host country. Returns to human capital could be correlated with difficult-to-observe factors such as self-selection, and legal status, and these unobservables can affect the economic assimilation of immigrants into the host country differently. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate the returns to human capital for refugees and other immigrants during the first two decades after they come to the U.S. Refugees are a subset of immigrants who have different characteristics and face different constraints than other immigrants. For example, while refugees have greater legal access to the labor market, non-refugees benefit from greater ability to self-select into both migration and (pre-migration) human capital, and those relative advantages change during the years after individuals migrate. The empirical results show that non-refugees receive a much larger crude wage return for human capital both at arrival and over time. Although the refugees’ return grows over time, they do not catch up with that of non-refugees. These findings confirm that non-refugees are not only selected on observable characteristics (as already documented in the literature) but on unobservables as well, and that the initial selection on unobservables will matter for their differential returns to human capital even after they remain a long time in the U.S. In other words, many refugees might not be well-suited for the U.S. labor market for some permanent but unobservable reasons, whereas this may not be the case for non-refugees because they would less likely move to a country for which they are poorly-suited.

We explore how immigrant legal status affects safety net transfers using variation from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which authorized the largest U.S. amnesty to date. Exploiting the timing and geographic unevenness in intensity of IRCA’s legalization programs, we estimate a sizable effect of permanent residency on Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) transfers. By contrast, we find null but imprecise effects of legal status on food stamp transfers. Fiscal costs are partially offset by increased state income tax revenues due to increased rates of income tax filing. These findings suggest that previous studies have understated the relationship between legal status and total family resources, particularly for families with children, and that legalization redistributes resources toward areas more affected by immigration.

We theoretically and empirically analyze whether the rise in globalization and trade integration of product markets have contributed to the observed decline in US entrepreneurship. Using a unique panel dataset of US households and a difference-in-differences identification strategy, our study is unique in theoretically predicting and empirically documenting asymmetric inter-industry shifts in entrepreneurial activity across different sectors in response to increased competition from lower-cost imports. Greater import competition reduces entry in exposed industries by individuals with low occupational skills (those in routine task-intensive service occupations or exhibiting high occupational mobility), but it increases entry by highly educated individuals in high-skill non-exposed industries. The results are robust to secular trends, labor market specialization, local collateral and credit shocks, and long-run bank distress.

Despite broad progress in closing many dimensions of the gender gap around the globe, recent research has shown that traditional gender roles can still exert a large influence on female labor force participation, even in developed economies. This paper empirically analyzes the role of culture in determining the labor market engagement of women within the context of collective models of household decision making. In particular, we use the epidemiological approach to study the relationship between gender in language and labor market participation among married female immigrants to the U.S. We show that the presence of gender in language can act as a marker for culturally acquired gender roles and that these roles are important determinants of household labor allocations. Female immigrants who speak a language with sex-based grammatical rules exhibit lower labor force participation, hours worked, and weeks worked. Our strategy of isolating one component of culture allows us to shed light on several important mechanisms influencing womens economic engagement, including the role of bargaining power in the household and the impact of ethnic enclaves. Our results further suggest that language may influence behavior in both of these contexts.

This study examines the impact of hospitals on local labor markets in rural and urban counties. We measure the ability of hospitals, particularly in rural communities, to attract nonhealth-related employment and provide higher wage jobs to residents based on their education level. Results find hospital employees with an associates degree can expect a 21.4% wage premium, when compared with alternative opportunities, and those with a bachelors degree can earn 12.2% more working in a hospital. Hospitals are shown to be positively related to overall employment as well as exhibit positive employment spillover. For rural counties, a short-term general hospital is associated with 559 jobs in the county, 60 of which are hospital based and 499 are nonhealth care related. With the positive benefits on wages and nonhealth care job growth, hospitals have measurable positive labor market outcomes above their primary objective of providing health care access, particularly in rural counties.

One consequence of demographic change is substantial shifts in the age distribution of the workingage population. As the baby boom generation ages, the usual historical pattern of a high ratio of younger workers relative to older workers has been replaced by a pattern of 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

In this paper we examine the impact of nineteenth-century abortion legislation on couples’ ability to control fertility. We rely on newly available complete-count census microdata of the 1850 census (Ruggles et al. 2010), the timing of state anti-abortion laws, and difference-indifference methods to estimate the impact of anti-abortion legislation on fertility rates. In contrast to prior research based on published child-woman ratios (Lahey 2014a, 2014b), we find no significant impact of nineteenth-century abortion legislation on fertility.