Raising children and taking care of family members, while maintaining a job, and without compromising on economic security, career progression or one’s health and wellbeing, is a difficult task anywhere. In the United States, it comes with a set of additional challenges because of a complete absence or limited reach of supporting work-family policies – policies that are designed specifically to help people manage and reconcile their roles as workers and parents or caregivers – such as paid and job-protected parental leave, publicly provided or subsidized child care, rights to request workplace flexibility or part time work and paid leave to attend to ill or disabled family members. Consequently, workers in the US rely heavily on employer generosity, informal family support, and a patchwork of provisions available from various levels of government and with varying degrees of restrictive eligibility criteria. Researchers have repeatedly pointed to the important role of this duality – major changes in women’s work and family roles against a system of unresponsive social policies – in explaining important markers of women’s progress or paradoxes therein, such as a plateauing of labor force participation rates even as they continued to grow in comparable labor markets, existence of a comparatively higher wage penalty for having children compared to other high income countries and declining subjective wellbeing over a period that saw increasing economic empowerment for women as well as a shift in women’s relationship with employment, with more and more of them considering work to be a fundamental aspect of life satisfaction. In my dissertation, I build on these lines of enquiry to study how such substantial changes in work and family lives, juxtaposed against a comparatively stagnant system of supportive work-family policies, translate into mothers’ performance in the US labor market as well as their subjective wellbeing by family and employment status and what, if any, is the effect of small but important state level policy shifts. The dissertation consists of three related empirical papers. In Paper 1 (co-authored with Prof. Jane Waldfogel), we examine changes in the family wage gap –the difference in hourly wages between women with children and women without children –over 1977-2007. We use data from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplements and adjust for selection into motherhood, by estimating ordinary least square models and employing augmented inverse probability of treatment weighting, and adjust for employment using Heckman selection correction. We find evidence of a significant decline in the motherhood wage penalty but only for married mothers. Overall however, there is a persistent 5-8% significant penalty to motherhood in both 1977 and 2007. While Paper 1 sheds light on mothers’ relative economic well-being compared to non- mothers, the results may not provide much information on their overall quality of life, particularly when the policy environment offers few choices for combining work and family. In Paper 2 therefore, I examine patterns in women’s subjective wellbeing by family and employment status. I replicate least squares regression models from key prior studies using new data – the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System annual surveys from 2005 to 2010 and the American Time Use Survey’s Well Being modules, 2012 and 2013 – and additionally estimate inverse probability of treatment weighted models, to adjust for selection. I find evidence of a positive association of being a parent with subjective wellbeing as well as a positive association of being employed with subjective wellbeing. Confirming prior research, I also find no evidence of the combination of these relationships translating into a “double bonus” for wellbeing and instead find a penalty to being an employed parent. In more detailed analysis of specific work and family categories, I further find that women who are working but not raising families and women who are raising families but not working, tend to report higher levels of life satisfaction on average than women who are doing both. These results further point to the challenges of negotiating work and family responsibilities in the present policy environment. While work-family reconciliation policies overall have not caught up to the changing demands of the family and the workplace in the US, a handful of states (California in 2004, New Jersey in 2009, Rhode Island in 2014 and New York, expected from 2018) have made important strides in that regard by implementing paid family leave insurance programs (PFL) – provisions that ensure benefit payments when parents take leave from work on account of childbirth, thereby making the leave more accessible. These policy changes motivate the focus of paper 3 where I examine the effects of New Jersey’s 2009 policy change on women’s subjective wellbeing. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) annual surveys and random child selection modules from 2005 to 2012, I identify potentially eligible mothers from individual level variation in month-year of child’s birth and state level variation in parental leave policies, and employ a difference in difference research design. Along with overall life evaluation, I also look at multiple self-reported indicators of wellbeing, such as self-rated general health, physical health, stress, depression and emotional wellbeing and whether adequate social and emotional support is available. I find no evidence of a significant effect of the 2009 policy change in New Jersey on women’s subjective wellbeing overall, but strong evidence of improvements in women’s physical health. I further find variation in effects in subgroup analyses, with significant positive effects on the life satisfaction of employed single mothers and women from lower-middle income families, as well as significant improvements in the experience of stress, depression and emotional wellbeing for groups with such relative socio- economic disadvantages. The dissertation thus explores how the changing nature of work and family lives, juxtaposed against a comparatively stagnant system of supportive work-family policies, affect the quality of women’s lives in the United States, using both standard measures such as wages and newer measures such as subjective wellbeing, and by directly examining how small but important state level policy shifts affect women’s wellbeing. Results highlight the importance of work-family reconciliation in women’s wellbeing in every socio-economic and demographic subgroup, but indicate that the nature of the problem may not be the same everywhere, drawing attention to the need for tailored interventions and policies and cautioning against exclusive reliance on either objective or subjective measures of wellbeing to monitor social progress and evaluate social policies.

This research was conducted to assist in transportation safety planning at both a macro (statewide) and micro (neighborhood) level of geography. Addressing safety issues at high crash incidence locations through crash countermeasures or better geometric design helps to make our roadways safer; however, the most influential and ever-present factor in most crashes, the human factor, is not directly addressed. Therefore, the primary goal of this research was to identify and analyze phenomena about the residences of drivers involved in crashes using spatial and statistical methods. These phenomena include socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of neighborhoods where these drivers live and the proximity of crashes to driver residences. Understanding the correlation between the densities of drivers involved in crashes and characteristics of neighborhoods where they live may help to optimize expenditure of scarce safety funds on safety programs that better target current and future high risk drivers. To add to this goal, a more focused probe into young driver behavior was done through an investigation into teen . . .

Does the lack of wealth constrain parents investments in the human capital of their descendants? We conduct a nearly 50-year follow-up of an episode in which such constraints would have been plausibly relaxed by a random allocation of substantial wealth to families. We track descendants of participants in Georgias Cherokee Land Lottery of 1832, in which nearly every adult white male in the state took part. Winners received close to the median level of wealtha large financial windfall orthogonal to participants underlying characteristics that might have also affected their childrens human capital. Although winners had slightly more children than did nonwinners, they did not send them to school more. Sons of winners have no better adult outcomes (wealth, income, literacy) than the sons of nonwinners, and winners grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than nonwinners grandchildren. We can reject effects implied by the cross-sectional gradient of child outcomes by paternal wealth. This suggests only a limited role for family financial resources in the formation of human capital in the next generations in this environment and a potentially more important role for other factors that persist through family lines.

We study the determinants of season of birth, for white married women aged 20-45 in the US, using birth certificate and Census data. We also elicit the willingness to pay for season of birth through discrete choice experiments implemented on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. We document that the probability of a spring first birth is significantly related to mothers age, education, smoking status during pregnancy, and the mother working in education, training, and library occupations, whereas a summer first birth does not depend on socio-demographic characteristics. We find consistent but stronger correlates when focusing on second births, while all our findings are muted among unmarried women. We estimate the average willingness to pay for a spring birth to be 600 USD, which is about 18% of the most valued birth in our Amazon Mechanical Turk experimental sample or 15% of the mean charges for a normal birth in 2013 according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

The actual effectiveness of employment promotion policies depends on the ability of the intervention at creating new jobs in the targeted sector, but also, to a large extent, on the impact they have on other parts of the local economy. Estimating the latter effect is therefore quite important for regional economic development policies. Along the lines of Moretti (Am Econ Rev Pap Proc 100:373377, 2010), we present an empirical analysis of local employment multipliers using data on 123 US Metropolitan Statistical Areas over the period 19802010. From the methodological point of view, in this work not only endogeneity (via instrumental variables estimates), but also spatial spillovers are taken into account. According to the results, the magnitude of the multiplier could be rather limited. On the other hand, there is clear indication that the impact of these interventions is not fully contained within the local economy and they have a positive effect on closely surrounding ones.

Adoption of data outsourcing to cloud servers is hindered by data integrity issues due to the lack of trust to the servers. Existing solutions to deal with the problem often require costly verification processes to build a verification object (VO) at the server side and to verify it at the client side, especially when the verification is to be performed at a low-level of granularity. This paper proposes an efficient and privacy-preserving solution, which verifies both the integrity and completeness of query results at the finest level of granularity an individual attribute value. Outsourced data confidentiality is also preserved by securely dividing attribute values into several pieces. As a key novelty, our solution does not require building VOs at the server side for query results. Consequently, 1) no computation overhead is imposed on the server to construct VOs, 2) no change is required to the existing DBMS engines due to calculating VOs and accompanying them with the results, and 3) no information leakage occurs due to building or observing VOs by the server. Our theoretical and empirical analyses indicate the effectiveness of our solution compared to the existing solutions in terms of communication, query execution, and verification overheads.

In this paper, I present estimates of the effect of local labor demand shocks on birth rates. To identify exogenous variation in male and female labor demand, I create indices that exploit cross- sectional variation in industry composition, changes in gender- education composition within industries, and growth in national industry employment. Consistent with economic theory, I fi nd that improvements in mens labor market conditions are associated with increases in fertility while improvements in womens labor market conditions have smaller negative effects. I separately find that increases in unemployment rates are associated with small decreases in birth rates at the state level.

The gap between native and immigrant wages in the U.S. has increased significantly since the 1980s. While part of this may be attributable to declines in the relative quality of immigrant labor, this paper explores whether skill price changes induced by skill biased technological progress also played a role. Using historical routine employment share to measure cities likely technology adoption, I show that local labor markets that specialized in routine tasks experienced differential increases in native-immigrant wage gaps. This is consistent with the hypothesis that native workers have better labor market outcomes because they have a comparative advantage in U.S.-specific social skills, and the returns to these skills have increased as a result of technological development. Results do not seem to be driven by selective migration between cities but are strongly related to immigrants English language abilities as well as other measures of their social assimilation.

In Florida and across the country, women are making great strides. More women are earning bachelor’s degrees and women’s entrepreneurship is growing rapidly. Yet, too many women and girls live in poverty with limited access to education, health care, and other important supports that would allow them to achieve economic stability. Wide disparities also persist among Florida’s women by geographic locations and across racial and ethnic groups. Improving the status of women from all backgrounds and walks of life is key to Florida’s future. The Status of Women in Florida by County: Poverty & Opportunity provides data and analysis of several aspects of Florida women’s economic security and access to opportunity. It calculates a Composite Index based on four indicators—health insurance coverage, educational attainment, business ownership, and poverty rates—and ranks all 50 states and the District of Columbia on the composite score and component indicators. The report also examines additional data for Florida on topics such as poverty by household type, home ownership, the number of public assistance recipients, and English proficiency. Data are analyzed by counties in Florida (when available) and disaggregated by racial and ethnic groups. This report is the first in a series of four publications on the status of women across Florida’s counties. Future reports will examine women’s Health & Well-Being and Employment & Earnings. This report is released in tandem with a briefing paper, “The Status of Women in Florida by County: Population & Diversity,” which provides data on different populations within Florida and examines the implications of these data for policies to improve women’s status. These publications aim to provide critical data that can . . .

This paper studies the long-term effects of redlining policies that restricted access to credit in urban communities. For empirical identification, we use a regression discontinuity design that exploits boundaries from maps created by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) in 1940. We find that “redlined” neighborhoods have 4.8% lower home prices in 1990 relative to adjacent areas. This finding is robust to the exclusion of boundaries that coincide with the physical features of cities (e.g., rivers, landmarks). Moreover, we show that housing characteristics varied smoothly at the boundaries when the maps were created. Evidence suggests lower property values may be driven by negative externalities associated with fewer owner-occupied homes and more vacant structures. Overall, our results indicate the effects of . . .

Based on a treasure trove of more than two hundred personal letters written in the 1860s, Hopes and Expectations tells the story of three young African Americans in the North. Living on Marylands eastern shore, schoolteacher Rebecca Primus sent home weeklies to her parents in Hartford and also corresponded with friend Addie Brown, a domestic worker back home. Addie wrote voluminously to Rebecca, lamenting their separation and describing her struggle to achieve a semblance of security and stability. Around the same time, Rebeccas brother, Nelson, began writing home about his new life in Boston, as he set out to make a name and a career for himself as an artist. The letters describe their daily lives and touch on race, class, gender, religion, and politics, offering rare entry into individual black lives at that time. Through extensive archival research, Barbara J. Beeching also shows how the story of the Primus family intersects with changes over time in Hartfords black community and the country. Newspapers and census tracts, as well as probate, land, court, and vital records help her trace an arc of local black fortunes between 1830 and 1880. Seeking full equality, blacks sought refinement and respectability through home ownership, literacy, and social gains. One of the many paradoxes Beeching uncovers is that just as the Civil War was tearing the nation apart, a recognizable black middle class was emerging in Hartford. It is a story of individuals, family, and community, of expectation and disappointment, loss and endurance, change and continuity.

Employment among 16-19 year-olds declined from about 41% in 2000 to 28% in 2013. Research regarding the possible negative effects of this is mixed: there is a significant literature on how working as a teenager affects later employment outcomes, but it is far from definitive. This dissertation builds a teenage labor market model and presents evidence regarding five different hypotheses for this decline in employment. These are: a reduction in the supply of teenage labor stemming from increased returns to education; decreased demand for teenage labor due to increased competition from immigrants; decreased demand for teenage labor due to increased competition from less-skilled workers; decreased demand for teenage labor due to increased competition from adult workers in general; and minimum wages that are increasingly binding. I find mixed evidence, with the strongest evidence in favor of lower supply due to higher returns to education. There is also evidence that demand for teenage labor has fallen, with a small amount of evidence specifically supporting the hypothesis that adult immigrants are increasingly competing with teenagers. Because the evidence for the importance of working as a teenager on later employment outcomes and contribution to family finances is weak, public policy should not focus on getting teenagers in general to work. Instead, youth employment programs should focus specifically on the subset of teenagers who are disengaged from work and school. These teenagers differ in a variety of ways from their more-engaged peers. Among existing programs, there is significant variance in both degree of targeting and the extent to which program evaluation is occurring. The low-hanging fruit in terms of policy improvement is better evaluation of existing youth employment programs, with results informing funding.

In this paper I use three different approaches to estimate the long-run impact of variation in labor market entry conditions, driven by the Great Depression, on income and other labor outcomes in the 1940 Census. I find a strong relationship between income and state level wage worker employment and wages (from the Census of Manufacturers) measured in the year an individual became working aged, using a birth state and birth cohort fixed effects model. In the second approach I use a regression discontinuity and find that 10 years after entry, less educated men entering the labor market at the beginning of the Great Depression in 1930 earned 8.1 percent less than entrants just one year prior. Lastly, I combine the first and second approaches to estimate the regression discontinuity for two samples stratified by severity of the Great Depression in the observations birth state (data from Wallis, 1989). I find that the effect is larger (14.6 percent) for those born in states more negatively affected by the Great Depression and close to zero for those born in states relatively less affected

The purpose of this paper is to study the recent trend of the gender wage gap in United States and underlying reasons that cause the change. The data I use is from 2000 to 2014. I use OLS method to estimate the coefficients of variables and Oaxaca and Blinder decomposition method to study the gender wage gap. The research result shows that the gender wage gap in United States has a clear downward trend in this period. Also, I find that occupational segregation benefits women and reduces the gender wage gap. The sticky floor effect and glass ceiling effect both exist, but the latter one is more significant. The findings suggest that the government should encourage women to invest more in education, especially in fields of study that require high skills.

Interstate migration in the U.S. has decreased steadily since the 1980s, but little is known about the causes of this decline. We show that declining migration is related to a concurrent secular decline in job changing. Neither of these trends are primarily due to observable demographic or socioeconomic factors. Rather, we argue that the decline in job changing has caused the decline in migration. After establishing a role for the labor market in declining migration, we turn to the question of why job changing has become less frequent over the past several decades. We find little support for several explanations including the rise of dual-career households, the decline in middle-skill jobs, occupational licensing, and the need for employees to retain health insurance. Thus, the reasons for these dual trends remain opaque and should be explored further.

This thesis is focused on the responses of workers through labor supply adjustment, transfer program participation and human capital investment to a changing labor market. Specifically, the papers that comprise this dissertation use state and metropolitan area-level variation to analyze the effects of changes in employment growth, income growth and income dispersion on participation in disability insurance, first time enrollments in community college and four-year universities, and residential sorting. The first paper employs a shift-share design to establish a causal link between declining labor demand in low wage, highly automated (“routine”) occupations and rising disability participation. From 2000 to 2011, moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of the predicted decline in routine employment corresponded to a 0.82 percentage point increase in disability. The model explains 78.6% of the increase in disability for all prime-age workers from 2000 to 2011. This accounts for 10.3% of the employment decline over the 2000s. Notably, this paper presents the first causal evidence that the effects are stronger for those with harder-to-verify diagnostic claims. The second paper, coauthored with Lancelot Henry de Frahan, fills the gap in the existing literature on the causal effects of rising inequality on human capital investment. First, we propose an instrumentation strategy that yields a vector of instruments from a predicted local wage distribution by interacting initial industry employment shares at the metropolitan level with changes to the within-industry distribution of wages at the national level. With this instrumentation strategy, we are able to separately analyze the causal impact of changing inequality from changes in mean income on postsecondary enrollments. This paper establishes an empirical fact: predicted increases in local wage inequality depress rates of enrollment in postsecondary schooling. In our main analysis on community college enrollments, we find that moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of changes in wage inequality corresponds to a 2.05 percentage point decrease in first-year, full-time aggregate community college enrollments. Further, we find evidence of a causal relationship between rising local inequality and residential sorting on an income basis which sheds light on a possible mechanism driving our main result. The instrumentation strategy introduced in this paper could allow researchers to assess the causal relationship between inequality and other economic phenomena.

This paper provides new evidence on the family gap in pay - the differential in hourly wages between women with children and women without children - between 1967 and 2013, five decades that include important changes in women's employment, especially mothers employment, policy reforms as well as contrasting economic cycles. We use data from the Current Population Survey and adjust for selection into motherhood, by estimating ordinary least square models and (as a robustness check) applying augmented inverse probability of treatment weighting, using the standard doubly robust estimator. For women overall, we find a decline in the family gap over this period from 6 percent in 1967 and 1968 to about 1 percent in 2011 through 2013. However, results vary by marital status, education, race-ethnicity, immigration status, temporal flexibility, and occupation. The most striking difference we find is between mothers who are married and those who are not. The family gap declined for married mothers and was replaced by a positive wage differential in the most recent period, whereas for unmarried mothers, a wage gap persisted throughout the two decades, rising to a notable high of 10 percent in 1996 through 1998.

Do compulsory schooling laws reduce crime? Previous evidence for the US from the 1960s and 1970s suggests they do, primarily working through their effect on educational attainment to generate a causal impact on crime. In this paper, we consider whether more recent experience replicates this. There are two key findings. First, there is a strong and consistent negative effect on crime from stricter compulsory schooling laws. Second, there is a weaker and sometimes non-existent link between such laws and educational attainment. As a result, credible causal estimates of the education–crime relationship cannot in general be identified for the more recent period, though they can for some groups with lower education levels (in particular, for blacks).

Self-employment is increasing among seniors. The percentage of individuals age 62 and over who were self-employed increased from 4.2 percent in 1988 to 5.4 percent in 2015. In contrast, the percentage of individuals under age 62 who were self-employed decreased from 7.2 percent in 1988 to 6.0 percent in 2015. This report explains the increase in self-employment among individuals age 62 and over and the difference in self-employment trends by age group.

For a number of decades, Appalachia has been a region that has lacked the growth and development that neighboring regions have experienced. Interestingly, in the past thirty years, as investment relocated during the Rust Belt-Sun Belt Transition, evidence of Appalachian integration into the national economy has begun to emerge. This inclusion, however, is generally confined to Northern and Southern Appalachia, and is not fully understood. To explore the nature of this integration, this paper uses geographic visualization and a two-way ANOVA on capital, labor, and technology measures. Results indicate that Appalachian counties continued to lag in these neoclassical factors of growth when compared to non-Appalachian, Rust Belt, or Sun Belt counties, though the Appalachian lag effect lessened over time.