The concept of brain drain contends that the migration of highly skilled individuals benefits receiving countries at the expense of sending countries. Though research supports this concept, several cases have been documented whereby a mutually beneficial relationship evolved through the formation of transnational communities and return migration. The research presented herein seeks to understand the extent of the relationship between the sector of a service, transnational communities, and return migration through a case study of high-skill migration scenarios including the information technology, medical services, and post-secondary education (academic) sectors. The study focuses on the migration relationship between India and the USA one of the world's largest high-skill flows. To gain a rich understanding of the migration relationships, the field research is based on 50 personal interviews and 512 survey responses of high-skilled immigrants and subject matter experts across the USA in the three sectors.

We provide a novel framework based on a systematic treatment of data inconsistency and the related concept of data reliability in integrated databases. Our main contribution is the formalization of reliability assessment for historical data where redundancy and inconsistency are common. We discover data inconsistency through the analysis of relationships between existing reports in the integrated database. We present a new approach by defining properties (rules) that a good measure of reliability should satisfy. We then propose such measures and show which properties they satisfy. We also report on a simulation-based study of the introduced framework.

Since 1970, housing's relative price, share of expenditure, and ``unaffordability'' have all grown. We estimate housing demand using a novel compensated framework over space and an uncompensated framework over time. Our specifications pass tests imposed by rationality and household mobility. Housing demand is income and price inelastic, and appears to fall with household size. We provide a numerical non-homothetic constant elasticity of substitution utility function for improved quantitative modeling. An ideal cost-of-living index demonstrates that the poor have been disproportionately impacted by rising relative rents, which have greatly amplified increases in real income inequality.

We create a national-level longitudinal data set to analyze how children’s participation in public and voucher-assisted housing affects age 26 earnings and adult incarceration. Naïve OLS estimates suggest that returns to subsidized housing participation are negative, but that relationship is driven by household selection into assisted housing. Household fixed-effects estimates indicate that additional years of public housing and voucher-assisted housing increase adult earnings by 4.9% and 4.7% for females and 5.1% and 2.6% for males, respectively. Childhood participation in assisted housing also reduces the likelihood of adult incarceration for males and females from all household race/ethnicity groups.

Marriage patterns can be well understood only if researchers employ measures of marriage rates that are appropriate for the question asked. In this paper, we consider different measures of marriage rates and provide evidence that the two classes of measures typically used in the literature, the number of new marriages per population and the share of individuals currently or ever married within an age range, generally lead to misleading inference when used to study the probability that someone marries during his or her life or fertile lifetime, its evolution, and differences across populations. An alternative measure, the share of individuals ever married in a given cohort by a given age, is better suited for such studies. We also document that, in cases when researchers are interested in year-on-year changes in marriage probabilities of singles rather than the share that ever marry, the data indicates that age-specific marriage hazards are more reliable than population-based measures. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of our findings for studies of the drivers and consequences of marriage formation.

We test for whether political parties can exert precise control over the outcomes of high-stakes elections. We study state elections that determine control of Congressional redistricting, which allows a party to construct districts that favor its own Congressional candidates. There is a discontinuous change in a partys control of redistricting when the share of seats won in the state legislature exceeds 50 percent. We test for whether the party that previously held a majority can precisely choose an outcome on the winning side of the threshold. We find that its control is precise enough to create large discontinuities in both the probability density of the seats won and in pre-determined outcomes. It manages this by concentrating its electioneering in a few states while losing the rest. Parties choose to control redistricting in states where they recently lost U.S. House elections. These losses are temporarily reversed by redistricting.

The present thesis is a study of the immigration phenomenon and its repercussions in both the economic wellbeing of individuals who migrate (or not) and the regions that receive or lose population. More specifically, the first chapter, using the SESTAT database analyzes the impact of interstate migration of U.S. citizens from birth state to employment state on their career outcomes. This essay contributes to the economic literature by specifically studying the case of U.S.A and by empirically correcting possible selection bias that rises from the duality between migration propensity and human capital endowment. The results indicate that repeat migration is associated with higher average salaries, while late migration with salary penalty. The second chapter tries to shed light in the relationship between the migration of highly-skilled economic agents and the productivity differences among different regions. The model predicts that people will be attracted by relatively more productive and more innovative areas. Eventually, this will affect both the destination and origin. To check the predictability of the model, I use U.S. data in state level. My empirical approach is based on a simultaneous equation iii model. The empirical results are in accordance with the core expectations of the model: more educated people are more likely to move to more productive areas and regions that receive highly-skilled migrants tend to become more innovative. Furthermore, highly-skilled people are less likely to migrate to places where inequality, taxes, and housing prices are relatively higher. Finally, individuals sort themselves to regions where the average inhabitant has similar abilities with them. In recent decades immigration in the European continent has been a hot debate topic among people and scientists alike. The last chapter of my thesis aspires to provide empirical evidence of how economic, social, and geographical characteristics shape natives beliefs about immigrants. To answer this question I combine information from the European Values Study, Eurostat and OECD. In accordance with theory, my results suggest that economic phenomena, such as unemployment, income, or educational level play a vital role in shaping peoples stance towards immigrants. In addition non-economic variables show strong correlation with immigration attitudes. Geography and historical facts about a country seem to also affect the minds of Europeans towards immigrants.

A sizable number of localities have in recent years limited the use of criminal background checks in hiring decisions, or "banned the box." Using LEHD Origin-Destination Employment and American Community Survey data, we show that these bans increased employment of residents in high-crime neighborhoods by as much as 4%. These increases are particularly large in the public sector. At the same time, we establish using job postings data that employers respond to ban-the-box measures by raising experience requirements. A perhaps unintended consequence of this is that women, who are less likely to be convicted of crimes, see their employment opportunities reduced.

Despite major demographic changes over the past 50 years and strong evidence that time spent with a spouse is important for marriages, we know very little about how time with a spouse has changedor notin the United States. Using time diary data from 19652012, we examine trends in couples shared time in the United States during a period of major changes in American marriages and families. We find that couples without children spent more total time together and time alone together in 2012 than they did in 1965, with total time and time alone together both peaking in 1975. For parents, time spent together increased between 1965 and 2012, most dramatically for time spent with a spouse and children. Decomposition analyses show that changes in behavior rather than changing demographics explain these trends, and we find that the increases in couples shared time are primarily concentrated in leisure activities.

We test for whether political parties can exert precise control over the outcomes of high-stakes elections. We study elections that determine which party controls Congressional redistricting, which allows a party to construct districts that favor its own Congressional candidates. There is a discontinuous change in a partys control of redistricting when the share of seats won in the state legislature exceeds 50 percent. We show that a states incumbent party can precisely sort onto the winning side of the discontinuity. Parties sort to control redistricting in states where they have suffered recent Congressional losses. These declines are reversed by redistricting.

With the concentration of poverty increasing throughout the United States (Kneebone, 2014) there has been a recent emphasis on mixed-income housing as a means to alleviate this issue. By creating housing in one area with pricing for different income levels it is assumed that the burden imposed by concentrated poverty will be lowered. Many years and many dollars later however, the results of mixed-income housing projects on low-income residents seem to be mixed while some projects have found success, others seem to suggest that it has little to no effect. The federal program HOPE VI is one example of efforts to increase the availability of mixed-income housing. It is the purpose of this study to decipher whether the administration of HOPE VI federal grant money has had an effect on certain economic outcomes within the selected metropolitan areas.

This chapter captures the impact of monumental events (Mariel Boatlift 1980; US intervention in Central America) on the demographic make-up and economic relations in South Florida, with focus on the racialization of Cuban immigrants. No longer viewed as political “exiles” like their 1960s’ predecessors, many of this decade’s arrivals not only primarily emigrated for the same economic reasons as other Latin American immigrants but also begin to represent the diverse “phenotypes” of the island nation. Using Census data, I underscore the now more vivid racial and economic disparities among Cubans in the region and frame this within the backdrop of racial tensions that occurred between established Cuban exiles and other groups in South Florida (African Americans, Haitians). Like Chap. 3, I complement data with testimonies and personal narratives from Afro-Cuban informants, and find that Cubans, looking engaged in black self-assertion, are repeatedly pressured by local white Cubans that they should engage in “de-racialization,” given that in a racially democratic ideology, racial identities are viewed as divisive.

This dissertation provides novel tests of two recent theories that relate human capital variation among and within cities to differences in the price of interior space. The tests are novel in that they rely on measures of human capital that are typically unmeasured in previous research. In particular, the application to obesity as an alternative measure of human capital is entirely new. In a separate chapter, the dissertation tests the implications of these two theories on a small subset of the labor force (medical doctors), disaggregated by specialty, and distinguished by quality of the medical school that they attended. The empirical results of both novel tests are consistent with implications of the two theories tested; that both among and within cities, differences in human capital and real estate prices are positively related.

Research on sex differences in humans documents gender differences in sensory, motor and spatial aptitudes. These aptitudes, as captured by Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) codes, predict the occupational choices of men and women in the directions indicated by this research. We simulate that eliminating selection on these skills reduces the Duncan index of gender based occupational segregation by 20-23 percent in 1970 and 2012. Eliminating selection on DOT variables capturing other accounts of this segregation has a smaller impact.

Marital health advantages and the increase of interracial marriage (intermarriage) are well documented, but few studies investigate the health of intermarried people. We address this issue using aggregated data from the 20002013 Current Population Survey (CPS) and find that people with racial/ethnic minority spouses report lower self-rated health than those married to whites. Spousal race significantly moderated the association between respondents race and self-rated health such that minorities in same-race marriages had lower odds of reporting better health than those intermarried to whites. However, we found no differences in self-rated health among minorities intermarried to other minorities. There was also limited evidence that gender and socioeconomic status (SES) moderated the interaction between respondents race and spousal race. Our findings highlight the effects of marriage on the self-rated health of respondents and their spouse as well as the importance of examining differences in couples racial composition when investigating racial disparities in spousal health.

This paper analyzes age and cohort changes in the occupational attainment of Blacks and Whites born in successive decades from 1910 to 1979. Occupational attainment is operationalized as occupational returns to education and earnings returns to occupation. The primary objective is to determine whether the relative occupational attainment of Blacks of the baby-boom generation and Generation X improved over that of their great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents. The results indicate that Blacks and Whites, and men and women improved their occupational attainment levels over those of previous birth cohorts. However, neither Black men of the baby-boom generation nor those of Generation X improved their occupational attainment relative to White men of the same age and born in the same decade. Moreover, on a per capita basis, Black mens occupational status declined for the most recent birth cohorts. On the other hand, Black women seem to have improved their occupational status relative to White women, but the improvements fluctuated over the decades. These findings are discussed in relation to possible causes and limitations of this analysis

An extensive literature examines minority access to suburban residence as an indicator of spatial assimilation. However, much of this research either lacks analysis of the latest data or focuses on broad categories of race and ethnicity such as Asians and Latinos, overlooking variations within these groups. In this paper, I analyze the suburbanization patterns of two racial and eight national ancestry groups as of 2010, as well as trends from 1980 to 2010. I measure the effects of both household- and metropolitan area-level characteristics in these ten groups’ suburbanization levels. The findings suggest that spatial assimilation theory is not applicable to the same degree for all groups. In other words, language proficiency, high educational attainment, and socioeconomic advantages do not necessarily guarantee spatial upward mobility for certain groups; rather, other characteristics of groups and metropolitan areas play a role in the broader process of suburban residence.

In this paper, we document spatial persistence at a micro scale and explore its causes. The streetcar dominated urban transit in Los Angeles County from the 1890s to the early 1910s, and was off the road entirely by 1963. However, we find that its influence remains readily visible in the current pattern of urban density. Further, we show that this pattern has reinforced, not muted, over the nearly 60 year since the streetcars removal. Our evidence is most consistent with the defunct streetcar influencing modern behavior by serving as a focal point, coordinating both land use regulation and agglomerative clustering.

Analyzing microdata covering more than 30 million U.S. households, I document that families with a financially sophisticated husband are more likely to participate in the stock market than those with a wife of equal financial sophistication. This pattern is not driven by gender differences in risk preference or selection effects, but can be explained by gender norms. The baseline effect is attenuated among individuals brought up by working mothers, but becomes stronger among descendants of pre-industrial societies in which women specialized in activities within the home and households with a husband born and raised in a southern state. In a controlled experiment, I show that gender identity has a causal impact by constraining womens influence over intra-household financial decision making. These findings suggest that gender identity norms can have real consequences for household financial well-being.

This study investigates how veteran status influences earnings for working-age American women. Recent increases in womens participation in the U.S. military mean that the proportion of female veterans is rising and is forecast to increase over the next 30 years. Yet we still know relatively little about the relationship between womens military experience and later labor-market outcomes. Drawing on American Community Survey data from 2008 to 2010 and employing a new set of occupational categories better suited to veterans, we investigate how occupation and race/ethnicity influence the effect of veteran status on womens earnings. Findings corroborate previous support for the bridging hypothesis in two ways. First, veterans are overrepresented in higher paying occupations and underrepresented in the lowest paying ones, partially accounting for their higher earnings. Second, military experience particularly enhances the earnings of disadvantaged race/ethnic minority women.