Housework is one of the last bastions of gender inequality. The persistence of the cultural association of housework with women's work and its significance in reflecting societal power differentials between women and men makes research on the division of household labour important. My work explores the division of domestic work in Canada, paying special attention to changes over time and to the economic and cultural explanations of womens and mens differential participation in routine and non-routine domestic tasks. First, I decompose the gender gap in time allotted to housework tasks using five time use cycles of the Canadian General Social Survey. Then, using OLS regression with the Heckman correction, I investigate whether and to what extent economic or cultural factors play a role in the division of individual domestic tasks. The gender gap analysis shows that tasks, like shopping, which is culturally understood as a more gender-neutral activity, are best explained by the time availability framework, whereas the economic factors, in general, can explain a sizeable share of the participation in tasks traditionally associated with women such as household cleaning. For instance, the latter account for around 39% of the gender gap in time spent on cleaning among all married and cohabiting Canadians. However, the economic and gender-centred factors are least likely to explain the gender gap in tasks where there is a clear cultural change in attitudes and participation. For example, they can explain only 31% of the gender gap in cooking. Additionally, the findings suggest that pressures for breadwinning Canadian women to compensate for gender deviance in paid work are more severe than those faced by men. Thus breadwinning women continue to reproduce traditional gender patterns in cooking, cleaning, and shopping tasks. On the other hand, Canadian men perform a new behavioural pattern in cooking tasks: breadwinning men break traditional gender patterns and spend more time on cooking than can be predicted by economic exchange theory. In total these patterns reveal the processes through which cultural changes around a domestic task propel the changes toward gender equality in the division of housework.

This paper examines the long-run effects of the 1980-1982 recession on educational attainment and income. Using confidential Census data linked to county of birth, I relate cross-county variation in the severity of the recession to differences in long-run outcomes between individuals who were younger versus older when the recession began. Individuals who were born in counties with a more severe recession and were children or adolescents during the recession are less likely to obtain a college degree and, as adults, earn less income. My estimates, combined with the large number of potentially affected individuals, suggest that the 1980-1982 recession could depress economic output today. Every U.S. recession since 1973 resembles the 1980-1982 recession in persistently decreasing earnings per capita in negatively affected counties, which suggests that other recessions might also have significant long-run effects.

One of the most important questions in the study of democratic representation is whether elected ocials are responsive to the preferences of their constituents, and whether responsiveness varies across institutional conditions. However, previous work on this question has been hampered by the unavailability of time-varying data on public opinion in each constituency. In this paper, I use new estimates of public opinion in each state-year from 1950-2012 to examine whether Senators are responsive to changes in public opinion and whether their behavior shifts over the course of the electoral cycle. I find that Senators are modestly responsive to changes in public opinion. They are particularly responsive to public opinion in the last two years of their term. But the impact of public opinion on Senators' roll call behavior is still small relative to the impact of electoral selection. This analysis resolves earlier ambiguities in the literature on election proximity in the Senate, and opens up new research paths in the study of representation.

While only 6.3 percent of Idahos population in 2014 was foreign-born, Idaho is one of several states in the Mountain West that in recent years has become an increasingly popular destination for immigrants. Between 2010 and 2014, the foreign-born population in the state grew by more than 13,500 people, or by 15.1 percent. In percentage terms, that jump in the size of the foreign-born population was three times greater than the increase in immigrants living in the United States as a whole. Only seven other states, including nearby North Dakota and Wyoming, saw their immigrant populations increase in size faster.

In this paper, I address the question whether a male-biased shock may trigger U-shaped dynamics in the age at first marriage. First, I compile the twentieth century time series of 160 countries, presenting U-shaped dynamics in all advanced economies. Second, I show in time series that the age of marriage is negatively correlated with production in male dominated industries, but positively with production in the ex-post female dominated industries. Third, using the 1970s oil boom in the U.S. as a natural experiment, I establish the causal effect of male-biased shocks as a trigger for the U-shaped dynamics.

In 1996, Congress expanded the federal Gun Control Act (GCA) to prohibit defendants convicted of a qualifying domestic violence misdemeanor from possessing or purchasing a firearm. Using the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports along with homicide data collected from selected state law enforcement agencies, I investigate if this expansion was successful in reducing homicides among the target groups. I use variation from a legal loophole and a series of circuit court decisions to generate difference-in-differences estimates. I find evidence that the GCA expansion led to 17 percent fewer gun-related homicides among female intimate partner victims and 31 percent fewer gun homicides among male domestic child victims. The law also has protective benefits for those that were not targeted by the legislation. Other family members (parents and siblings) also experience a 24 percent reduction in gun homicides. I find no evidence that reductions in gun homicides were offset by an increase in nongun homicides. While most falsification and robustness tests support the above conclusions, some tests suggest caution when interpreting the results and a need for further research.

States and around the world. Though research identifies diverse factors associated with foodborne outbreaks, one of the most common is poor worker health and improper hygiene practice. Research on social determinants of health indicates that living and working conditions play a role in shaping these risks. To start addressing these issues, we must first understand how we currently account for the role of workers in food safety. This qualitative study describes the role of workers in the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) proposed regulations to implement the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act, an unprecedented federal action to improve food safety. The analysis is guided by fundamental causes of disease theory, which provides a useful framework for exploring regulations within the context of the socio-structural factors that impact health and hygiene behavior. Findings reveal that proposed regulations primarily treat contamination by workers as an individual-level problem, including the result of workers' lack of food safety knowledge and need for education and training. With few exceptions, broader social and structural factors shaping workers' health and hygiene are overlooked. Study results may begin to change the food safety conversation by connecting the impact of macrosocial inequality on food workers to food safety and public health.

Esta tesis está compuesta por tres capítulos independientes. En el primero de ellos, propongo un modelo teórico que muestra que la confianza en desconocidos es uno de los canales mediante el cual las instituciones determinan resultados económicos positivos, como el emprendimiento, pero también otros negativos, como la corrupción. El modelo predice que la relación que se establece a nivel individual entre honestidad y confianza varía en función de la calidad institucional. Presento evidencia empírica que apoya esta predicción. En el segundo capítulo, estudio hasta qué punto la existencia de "spillovers" que operan a nivel de industria-localización entre inmigrantes que provienen del mismo país de origen determina los enclaves étnicos en los EE.UU. Con este objetivo, propongo un modelo que permite estimar la intensidad de estos "spillovers". Estimo este índice utilizando el censo de los EE.UU. y concluyo que los inmigrantes que pueden tener más dificultades para interaccionar con no-compatriotas se benefician más de este tipo de "spillovers". En el tercer capítulo, documento empíricamente que las principales relaciones que se dan en las decisiones de internacionalización halladas en la literatura de comercio internacional de las empresas multinacionales también se extienden a la industria hotelera española.

While less than 4 percent of Kentuckys population is foreign-born today, the state is one of several across the country that in recent years have become increasingly attractive to immigrants. While in 1990, less than 1 percent of Kentuckys population was foreign-born, by 2010 that share had more than tripled, reaching 3.4 percent. Such patterns have only continued in more recent years. Between 2010 and 2014, Kentuckys immigrant population grew by almost 9 percent-or at a greater rate than the number of foreign-born residents increased in the United States more broadly. Today, Kentucky is home to roughly 160,000 immigrants. Such new Americans serve as everything from livestock workers to software developers, making them critical contributors to Kentuckys economic success overall.

As additional motivation for our empirical setup, we provide a model of how prior beliefs, experience with the medical profession and proximity to the Tuskegee study subjects interact to determine health-seeking behavior. In this regard, our model relates both to work by Bronnenberg et al. (2012) and Bronnenberg et al. (2015) on how prior experience can influence beliefs and behavior and to belief formation models by Guiso et al. (2008) and Bnabou and Tirole (2006).1 The models equilibrium provides testable predictions which inform our empirical analysis.

In the late 2000s, several U.S. states and local governments enacted legislation to make work and life difficult for unauthorized immigrants within their jurisdictions. We investigate how these devolved immigration enforcement laws affected the migration of Latinos to these states. We find that after these hostile policies came into effect, noncitizen and naturalized Latinos from states without such policies were much less likely to move to states with them than in the 1990s. U.S.-born Latinos exhibit migration aversion to hostile states, albeit at a weaker level. Fear of discrimination and the blending of Latinos with different legal status within families might account for this broad Latino group migration response. Hostile policies produced no significant change in the interstate migration patterns of a control group of U.S.-born whites. A counterfactual analysis indicates that absent these enforcement regimes, the migratory redistribution of Latinos to hostile states from other states in the late 2000s would have continued the dispersive pattern of the late 1990s. We draw parallels between our research and state policy effects on U.S. internal migration for other groups.

Using Demographic and Health Survey data drawn from IPUMS-DHS for four countries, we study whether particular types of female empowerment are associated with the discontinuation of the female genital cutting (FGC). We employ logistic regression analyses to determine the association of two dimensions of gender empowermenthousehold decision-making and level of educationon whether or not women had their youngest daughter cut. In addition, to capture the normative framework surrounding FGC in different communities, we measure the percentage of women who believe FGC is necessary for marriage within each of 27 DHS geographic units. While women's education was associated with a decrease in the probability of FGC for daughters in all countries, the effects of the other measures of women's empowerment were more mixed. In a pooled analysis, regional beliefs that FGC is necessary for marriage were positively associated with the decision to have one's youngest daughter cut.

This capstone project analyses Texas vital statistics data through visual and tabular presentation of county-level age-adjusted mortality rates for all-cause and cause-specific mortality (including heart, cancer, and stroke) and through multilevel regression analyses of deaths at the census tract level, adjusting for individual and tract and demographic and socioeconomic factors. County-level, mortality rates were developed for three racial/ethnic groups in Texas, non-Hispanic Whites, non-Hispanic Blacks, and Hispanics. The rates were age-standardized based on the age structure of the total population of Texas. Rates are presented in tabular and visual formats using Texas Department of State Health Services Public Health Regions to allow for finer discussion of geographic areas within the state. For the tract data, deaths are analyzed using hierarchical Poisson regression model. This model used demographic factors including age, racial/ethnic category, and gender to identify correlates of deaths on the individual level. For the tract-level demographic factors (i.e. percent Hispanic (quartiles)), socioeconomic factors (percent in poverty (quartile)), and geographic identifiers (e.g. tracts in border counties and urban/rural tracts) were used to identify are-level effects that influence the number of deaths in a tract. These models used population size within each tract as a variable exposure to account for larger population areas having more deaths. The visual and tabular analyses of counties showed that non-Hispanic Blacks, overall, had the worst mortality rates of all groups across the state. Hispanics showed lower rates than non-Hispanic Blacks, overall, and non-Hispanic Whites usually had the better rates of all groups. For all groups, within regions, and across the state, there was considerable variability though non-Hispanic Blacks, again, showed the worst patterns of mortality. Hispanics varied greatly across the state, doing very poorly along the eastern border of Texas but much better in the South, along the border. From the tract analyses, Hispanics, overall, did better than non-Hispanic Whites and non-Hispanic Blacks. This was especially true in areas of higher poverty and higher Hispanic populations.

Telephones have changed dramatically from their introduction to their current form, and done so most significantly since the introduction of cell phones in the 1980s. This has impacted competition in the telephony market. I study this competitive impact of cell phones on the landline market through demand analysis in the first two essays; I turn my attention to the smartphone market in the final essay. In the first essay, I examine the effect of cell phones on telephony demand using the Consumer Expenditure Survey. I develop and estimate a model of household choice using a mixed logit as a function of consumer characteristics, unobserved alternative-specific attributes, and prices. My focus is on the evolution through time. I construct market segments and track adoptions. Evidence suggests that the move to cell phones is driven by young and and large housholds. I develop and apply a decomposition of substitutability and find that substitutability differs through time. Cell phone technologies and consumer culture have changed dramatically since 1983, affecting the level of competition in the regulated telephony market. In the second essay, I develop an empirical strategy to estimate changing demand that addresses changing technologies and preferences. I develop a flexible methodology that allows for likelihood-based estimation of a broad class of latent-dependent-variable models with time-varying parameters. Applying my methodology with a logit model and Bayesian methods, I study the evolution of preferences. Consumers have become more price-sensitive, indicating that improvements to cell phones have provided an increasing competitive constraint on landline pricing. In the third essay, I develop a model of the US smartphone industry; consumers demand products according to a random utility model; firms compete in a dynamic oligopoly model; I incorporate supply-side learning. Firms learn demand through time inspired by recursive least squares adaptive learning. Firms choose whether to release new devices and when to remove devices from the market according to expected future profits. I estimate fixed costs in this market, finding a competitive environment with significant fixed costs. Results show large entry costs and scrap values driven by substantial intellectual property related to technology products.

More skin cancer awareness and education, as well as improved access to medical care, is needed for the Hispanic population. This demographic needs to become more informed on their skin cancer risk and also become knowledgeable of improved protective behavior while outdoors and especially when in the sun.

Social Explorer created custom data maps to tell the story of America's immigrant heritage for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival On the Move: Migration and Immigration Today. Visit our banner display to trace immigrant journeys across the nation and through time.

This paper examines the effects of migration from eastern slave states in the 19th century on the subsequent development of counties in the US west of the Mississippi River. Using birthplace data from the 1880 Census to measure the extent of migration from slave states, I find that increased migration from slave states has a large, statistically significant negative effect on 2010 income, and no significant effect on racial inequality or overall income inequality. These findings are robust to a variety of specifications, including controls for geographic factors, state fixed effects, and various county level social and economic conditions. Data on individual migrants suggest that the cause of the negative income effect is the lower average human capital endowment of migrants from slave states.

Levels of partisanship and polarization within Congress are at high levels. However, this development defies the expectation of Downsian models. My dissertation attributes polarization to the activity of political donors. Using a database of over 13.5 million individual donors, I use advanced time series models to show that donors have been increasingly rewarding Republicans who toe the party line. In the second section of my dissertation, I explore how incumbent politicians may be using these campaign contributions to offset any potential electoral penalties for excessive partisanship. My examination of survey evidence shows that incumbents may be using campaign spending to reduce the ideological distance that voters perceive between themselves and incumbent politicians. The final section of my dissertation explores whether campaign contributions are decreasing the democratic responsiveness of legislators. I use polling data to generate state-level estimates of presidential approval. I then use these estimates to determine whether campaign contributions lower the responsiveness of legislators to public opinion. Overall, my dissertation shows that political donors are a key driver of congressional polarization. This development may have significant implications for the functioning of American democracy, as political donors may be making the political system less responsive the public.

In this project we seek to fill a gap in empirically supported knowledge linking the survival and economic success of business establishments to local land use and access to the transportation system that serves these establishments. We investigate this relationship for the entire State of California over the last two decades while controlling in a statistically robust way for a variety of factors influencing business life cycle events, such as closures, formation/birth, and relocation. We accomplish this by combining longitudinal business establishment population event data, various transportation access and level of service indicators, and geographical market size from available US Census data. In additional, we narrow our analysis to a specific year and region in order to investigate a broader ranger of industries and utilize a detailed accessibility dataset for Southern California.

Little sociological attention over the last two decades has focused on the deprivation experienced by indigenous people. Fusing insights from American Indian history and the race and labor market inequality literatures, we address this gap in this article through a historically informed labor market analysis of povertyan analysis that considers the pervasiveness of contemporary Native poverty, its potential basis in labor market opportunities, and the extent to which it has been patterned by two major demographic and economic shifts: (1) the rapid urbanization of the American Indian population and (2) the proliferation of tribally owned casinos. Findings reveal, most notably, the incredibly rigid and durable character of poverty for this population, historically and currently and across geographic space, and with little overall impact of local labor market opportunity. The presence of tribal casinos reduces such poverty, but only to a small degree and not nearly enough to compensate for sizable American Indian and white poverty differentials. Group history is key, we conclude, to shaping how space, labor markets, and economic development reduce or buttress relations of inequality.