From the early 1960s through the early 1970s, a new idea drew the interest of local leaders and national networks of educators seeking to further desegregation but concerned about how to do so within the bounds of white resistance. Huge single- or multischool campuses, called education parks, would draw students from broad geographical areas and facilitate desegregation. But in the design and location choices for these imagined (but often not realized) education parks, desegregation advocates revealed a spatial ideology of schooling that reflected both a rejection of racialized black spaces and an antiurban, modernist aesthetic. Beyond recognizing the place of spatial ideology in desegregation advocacy, this article suggests that historians of education listen for ideas about space and their impact in other areas of educational history.

In this paper, we study self-employment in a theoretical setting derived from wage-efficiency spatial models, where leisure and effort at work are complementary. We develop a spatial model of self-employment in which effort at work and commuting are negatively related, and thus the probability of self-employment decreases with expected commuting time. We use time-use data from the American Time Use Survey 2003-2014 to analyze the spatial distribution of self-employment across metropolitan areas in the US, focusing on the relationship between commuting time and the probability of self-employment. Our empirical results show that the probability of self-employment is negatively related to the expected commuting time, giving empirical support to our theoretical model. Furthermore, we propose a GIS model to show that commuting and self-employment rates are, in relation to unemployment rates, negatively related.

Downward nominal wage rigidity is often hypothesized to amplify unemployment fluctuations by constraining the responsiveness of wages to negative shocks. There is considerable evidence that the wages of incumbent workers are downwardly rigid, but the wages of new hires appear to be significantly more flexible. Because entry wages determine job creation over the business cycle, a substantial literature argues that downward nominal wage rigidity (hereafter, wage rigidity) is unlikely to explain unemployment dynamics. In this paper we argue that the apparent flexibility of entry wages is an artifact of selection bias. If unemployed workers are heterogeneous in their ability or willingness to reduce their reservation wages, those with more flexible reservation wages will be more likely to become re-employed. Because new hires will be disproportionately workers with flexible wages, the observed wages of new hires will appear flexible. The unobserved reservation wages of the workers who are not hired, however, may be quite rigid.

This study outlines a theory of social class based on workplace ownership and authority relations, and it investigates the link between social class and growth in personal income inequality since the 1980s. Inequality trends are governed by changes in between-class income differences, changes in the relative size of different classes, and changes in within-class income dispersion. Data from the General Social Survey are used to investigate each of these changes in turn and to evaluate their impact on growth in inequality at the population level. Results indicate that between-class income differences grew by about 60% since the 1980s and that the relative size of different classes remained fairly stable. A formal decomposition analysis indicates that changes in the relative size of different social classes had a small dampening effect and that growth in between-class income differences had a large inflationary effect on trends in personal income inequality.

Demographic changes of the Colombian Pacific and the Caribbean regions are analyzed using eight censuses, six demographic surveys, and vital registra-tions. To some extent, population processes have been similar in these regions; however, salient differences were found in comparison to Bogotá and the rest of the country. Despite a systematic reduction in age dependency ratios, the effec-tive dependency ratio remains higher than in other Colombian regions, being one of the limits to the economic development of the periphery. A retrospective estimation of the under-5 mortality for these regions shows a substantial decline within the past few decades, but the gap with respect to the rest of the country represents the negative penalty of being born and living in the less developed regions of Colombia. Indirect estimates of adult mortality and life expectancy at working ages lead to the same conclusion.

For the first time, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago participated in administering the Kansas City Fed’s low- and moderate-income survey to respondents in the Seventh District. The survey is administered on line twice a year to measure “economic conditions of low- and moderate-income (LMI) populations and the organizations that serve them.”1 A key motivation for the survey is that compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) entails banking institutions subject to CRA to provide credit, investment, and services, consistent with safe and sound banking practices, to LMI populations in their service areas. As a point of reference, LMI is the incomes of individuals below 80 percent of “median income” of an area, as defined by HUD. Median income, which varies by household size, is defined as “metropolitan median income for urban residents and state median income for rural residents.”2

We show that firms located in states where property crime is more prevalent have more uncertain earnings and higher financing costs. Specifically, firms located in states with higher property crime rates have more volatile and less persistent earnings as well as lower quality analysts' earnings forecasts. Firms located in states with higher property crime rates also have a higher cost of equity and debt capital. These results are robust to accounting for econometric and endogeneity concerns in various ways. Overall, our results suggest that a potentially large and overlooked cost of crime is a higher cost of capital.

In this paper the conditional earnings distribution of Cuban immigrants in the U.S. using OLS and Quantile Regression is analyzed. The data used in the study come from the 2011 American Community Survey (ACS) in the U.S. provided by IPUMS (2011). The results show that increments in earnings associated with different socioeconomic characteristics such as: sex, marital status, ethnicity, proficiency in English and education vary across the earnings distribution.

In Pennsylvania and across the United States, we need policies that promote economic security for women and families. Working families need higher livable wages; women need and deserve equal pay for equal work; and parents need to be able to maintain good jobs that allow them to work and raise their children simultaneously. Strong economic security policies will enable Pennsylvania women and families to get ahead - not just get by.

This dissertation consists of three essays in financial and labor economics. It provides empirical evidence for testing the efficient market hypothesis in some financial markets and for analyzing the trends of power couples concentration in large metropolitan areas. The first chapter investigates the Bitcoin markets efficiency by examining the correlation between social media information and Bitcoin future returns. First, I extract Twitter sentiment information from the text analysis of more than 130,000 Bitcoinrelated tweets. Granger causality tests confirm that market sentiment information affects Bitcoin returns in the short run. Moreover, I find that time series models that incorporate sentiment information better forecast Bitcoin future prices. Based on the predicted prices, I also implement an investment strategy that yields a sizeable return for investors. The second chapter examines episodes of exuberance and collapse in the Chinese stock market and the second-board market using a series of extended right-tailed augmented Dickey-Fuller tests. The empirical results suggest that multiple bubbles occurred in the Chinese stock market, although insufficient evidence is found to claim the same for the second-board market. The third chapter analyzes the trends of power couples concentration in large metropolitan areas of the United States between 1940 and 2010. The urbanization of college-educated couples between 1940 and 1990 was primarily due to the growth of dual-career households and the resulting severity of the co-location problem (Costa and Kahn, 2000). However, the concentration of college-educated couples in large metropolitan areas stopped increasing between 1990 and 2010. According to the results of a multinomial logit model and a triple difference-in-difference model, this is because the co-location effect faded away after 1990.

This dissertation contains three chapters on self-employment and business ownership. In the first chapter, I re-examine the earnings differential between self- and wage-employed men. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that the timing and (voluntary or involuntary) nature of mens transitions into self-employment are important determinants of whether they receive wage-gains. I find that when a man transitions from wage-employment to self-employment voluntarily and early in his career, his wage is predicted to increase contemporaneously by 31%. The magnitude of this increase is 2.6 times larger than the predicted wage change associated with a voluntary, early-career transition to a new wage job. Conversely, I find that when a man transitions from wage-employment to self-employment involuntarily and late in his career, his predicted wage decreases contemporaneously by 18%. The magnitude of this decrease is larger than the predicted 13% wage decrease associated with an involuntary, late career transition to a new wage job. In the second chapter, motivated by the finding that partnered men and women are more likely to become business owners than are their single counterparts, I ask whether the observed marriage and cohabitation effects are a result of partner income. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I first show that when partner income is included as a control, the marriage and cohabitation effects decrease substantially for women, while the effects persist for men. Second, I show that the marriage and cohabitation effects vary with partner income for women but not men. For example, a woman whose husbands income is in the fifth quintile is 1.9 times more likely to transition to business ownership than a woman whose husbands income is in the second quintile for men. On the other hand, a married man with a high-income wife is no more or less likely to transition to business ownership than a married man with a low-income wife. In the third chapter, re-examine Lazears (2005) jack-of-all-trades theory. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I ask, what are the wage gains associated with a self-employed workers prior occupational experience? Overall, I find results consistent with Lazears theory, which suggests that the returns to occupational specialization are substantially larger for wage workers than the self-employed. I predict that self-employed workers with ten years of prior occupational experience earn a wage that is only 3.2% greater than do self-employed workers with two years of prior occupational experience. However, for wage workers I predict that the wage gains associated with a ten year increase in prior occupational experience (zero to ten years) is 2.1 times larger than the wage gains associated with a two year increase (zero to two years) in prior occupational experience.

In the summer of 1907, Louise Cuevas listened intently to her attorney's arguments before the Louisiana Supreme Court's presiding judge. The Civil District Court had found in Louise's favor, but this review of her case did not seem to be going well. First one, then a second argument her attorney presented to the court was dismissed as being misguided and irrelevant, making her already maligned case for her children's inheritance rights to their paternal grandmother's estate all the weaker. Her children's father, Joseph Frigerio, could be of no help - he had been dead for more than a decade. Joseph's siblings were now calling into question the legality of Louise's marriage to Joseph. If they prevailed on all points, then Louise's marriage would be adjudged as never having existed. Her two children would by implication be considered illegitimate and would therefore not be entitled to any portion of their grandmother's estate. Despite the lower court's findings in favor of Louise and her children, which preserved recognition of Louise's marriage and confirmed her children's inheritance rights, this court did not read the law in the same way. With the Louisiana Supreme Court's decision, both Louise's marriage and her children's interest in the Gabisso estate disappeared into nothingness, at least according to the law.

The overall theme of this dissertation is social entrepreneurship and economic development policy. Empirical studies show strong evidence of the important role entrepreneurship plays in economic development. Recently, social entrepreneurship has emerged as a distinct field of scholarly study with the potential to increase economic development activities. It has the added benefits of increasing social and human capital and of reducing market failure and government failure by assisting underserved and marginalized populations in improving their standards of living. In spite of this potential, entrepreneurship in general has been neglected as part of a comprehensive economic development policy. Social entrepreneurship in particular receives little mention in economic development policy discussions. While lip service is paid to entrepreneurship as part of a regional economic development strategy, most expenditures are dedicated to the zero-sum game of attracting large existing firms into individual regions. Three essays focused on different aspects of social entrepreneurship and economic development. The first essay focuses on defining social entrepreneurship because the current lack of consensus impedes scholarly development and leaves policymakers without a clear direction regarding its incorporation into economic development policy. Corpus linguistic analysis is used as a structured approach to create a definitional framework of social entrepreneurship as a multidimensional continuum. The second essay is a case study with the purpose of developing a framework for measuring the economic impact of the activities of a social enterprise. The essay uses a social accounting matrix (SAM) as the approach to quantify the impact of the case

Many localities have in recent years limited the use of questions about criminal history in hiring, or "banned the box." We show that these bans increased employment of residents in high-crime neighborhoods by up to 4%. This effect can be seen both across and within census tracts, in employment levels as well as in commuting patterns. The increases are particularly large in the public sector and in lower-wage jobs. We also establish that employers respond to Ban the Box measures by raising experience requirements. On net, black men benefit from the changes.

Are the destinies of children from poor and wealthy families diverging? This paper explains why this is the question to ask if we wish to study equality of opportunity in America today. Drawing on the research behind Robert Putnams (2015) Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, we show that, since the 1970s, children in the top-third and the bottom-third of the socioeconomic hierarchy have sharply diverged on factors predicting life success. This gaping opportunity gap augurs a collapse of social mobility in the decades ahead. Given the causes of the opportunity gap, we explore promising policy options for restoring equality of opportunity in America.

Existing evidence of educational effects on intergenerational mobility is associational. This study employs early compulsory schooling laws to approach a causal estimate of the relationship between education and mobility in the context of a large-scale policy change. Using IPUMS Linked Representative Samples (linked census data), regression discontinuity models exploit state differences in the timing of compulsory schooling laws to estimate an intent-to-treat effect on intergenerational occupational mobility among white males. Despite increasing equality of attendance, results reveal that compulsory laws initially reduced relative mobility for the first few cohorts affected by the laws. Among later cohorts, who were required to attend the maximum years of school, mobility was similar to prelaw levels. School funding and other data suggest that structural lag could explain this nonlinear relationship. It seems, therefore, that educational expansion inadvertently reduced mobility through institutional inertia rather than elite efforts to maintain advantage.

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.

The U.S. economy has long relied on immigrant workers, many of them unauthorized, yet estimates of the inflow of unauthorized workers and the determinants of that inflow are hard to come by. This paper provides estimates of the number of newly arriving unauthorized workers from Mexico, the principal source of unauthorized immigrants to the United States, and examines how the inflow is related to U.S. and Mexico economic conditions. Our estimates suggest that annual inflows of unauthorized workers averaged about 170,000 during 1996-2014 but were much higher before the economic downturn that began in 2007. Labor market conditions in the U.S. and Mexico play key roles in this migrant flow. The models estimated here predict that annual unauthorized inflows from Mexico will be about 100,000 in the future if recent economic conditions persist, and higher if the U.S. economy booms or the Mexican economy weakens.

The differences between black and white household and family structure have been a concern for policy makers for a long time. The last few decades, however, have witnessed an unprecedented retreat from marriage among blacks. In 1970, about 89% of black females between ages 25 and 54 were ever married, in contrast to only 51% today. Wilson (1987) suggests that the lack of marriageable black men due to incarceration and unemployment is behind this decline. In this paper, we take a fresh look at the Wilson Hypothesis. We argue that the current incarceration policies and labor market prospects make black men much riskier spouses than white men. They are not only more likely to be, but also to become, unemployed or incarcerated than their white counterparts. We develop an equilibrium search model of marriage, divorce and labor supply that takes into account the transitions between employment, unemployment and prison for individuals of dierent race, education, and gender. We calibrate this model to be consistent with key statistics for the US economy. We then investigate how much of the racial divide in marriage is due to differences in the riskiness of potential spouses, heterogeneity in the education distribution, and heterogeneity in wages. We find that differences in incarceration and employment dynamics between black and white men can account for about 76% of the existing black-white marriage gap in the data. We also study how "The War on Drugs" in the US might have affected the structure of the black families, and find that it can account for between 13% to 41% of the black-white marriage gap.